North Star Metric
One metric that captures customer value and drives organizational focus.
Most companies track dozens of metrics. Revenue, engagement, retention, NPS, conversion rates—all important, none decisive. The North Star Metric cuts through the noise. It's the single number that best represents the value you deliver to customers. When this metric grows, your business grows. When it stagnates, everything else is vanity. It's organizational clarity compressed into one KPI.
A leading indicator that defines customer value delivery and predicts sustainable growth. The metric that matters most.
Measures Value
It reflects the core value customers get from your product. Not activity—actual benefit delivered.
Predicts Growth
It's a leading indicator of revenue and retention. When this metric improves, your business improves.
Cross-Functional
Every team—product, marketing, sales, support—can contribute to moving it. It creates alignment.
Simple & Memorable
Anyone in the company should be able to recite it and explain why it matters. Complexity kills focus.
The North Star isn't revenue. It's not vanity metrics like page views or downloads. It's the metric that captures the "aha" moment—when customers experience the value that makes them stick around. Everything else is a lever to move this number.
The more time users spend listening, the more value they're getting from the service. It drives retention, reduces churn, and justifies premium subscriptions. It's not about signups—it's about engagement that translates into lifetime value.
Successful bookings = value delivered to both guests and hosts. It's not just traffic or listings—it's completed transactions that represent real economic activity on the platform. Growth in nights booked predicts revenue growth.
Teams that actively message are getting value from collaboration. High message volume correlates with stickiness and conversion from free to paid. It's the behavioral indicator of product-market fit.
Active usage by entire teams (not just individuals) signals that HubSpot has become central to how the business operates. It predicts expansion revenue and reduces churn risk.
Amplitude's value is in helping teams make data-driven decisions. When teams regularly discover insights from the platform, they're getting the outcome Amplitude promises—making them more likely to renew and expand.
The North Star Metric concept emerged from the growth marketing community around 2016, popularized by Sean Ellis—the growth hacker who coined the term "growth hacking"—and analytics companies like Amplitude.
Ellis had worked with companies like Dropbox and LogMeIn, helping them identify the single metric that best predicted long-term success. Amplitude formalized this into their product analytics philosophy, teaching teams to align around a metric that captures customer value delivery rather than vanity metrics.
The framework gained traction in SaaS and product-led growth circles, becoming standard practice at companies like Slack, HubSpot, and Airbnb. It represented a shift from tracking everything to focusing on the one thing that matters most.
The Age of Dashboards: By the mid-2010s, companies were drowning in data. Analytics tools made it easy to track everything—page views, clicks, time on site, bounce rates, conversion funnels. But more data didn't mean better decisions. Teams were paralyzed by choice, optimizing for the wrong metrics, or chasing vanity numbers that didn't predict business outcomes.
Product-Led Growth Emerges: SaaS companies like Dropbox, Slack, and Zoom proved you could grow without traditional sales teams—if your product delivered obvious value. The challenge became: how do you measure whether you're actually delivering that value? Revenue is a lagging indicator. The North Star Metric became the leading indicator—the thing that, if improved, would inevitably drive revenue.
Alignment Over Optimization: The framework wasn't just about metrics—it was about organizational clarity. When everyone knows the North Star, product decides what features move it, marketing focuses on attracting users who will achieve it, and support helps customers reach it faster. It's a focusing mechanism.
Why It Endures: The North Star Metric works because it forces you to articulate your value proposition as a measurable behavior. You can't hide behind vague mission statements or vanity metrics. You have to define success as something observable, trackable, and improvable. And when you do, everything gets simpler.