North Star Metric: Meaning and 59 Real Examples

How to choose your north star metric

1. 1

   Name the game your product plays

   Amplitude sorts products into three games: productivity (how well people get work done), transaction (how many purchases or exchanges happen) and attention (how much time people spend in the product). Pick the one yours plays; trying to win all three gives you no north star. Here is what companies playing each one count:

   ProductivityTransactionAttention

   Work software wins when people get work done, so it counts active or paying teams and the things they make.

   • SlackNumber of paid teams
   • HubSpotWeekly active users (WAU)
   • MiroCollaborative boards
   • LoomVideos with a view
   • AmplitudeWeekly learning users (WLU)
2. 2

   Find the moment customers get value

   Not the sign-up, the payoff. Loom counts “videos with a view”, not videos recorded: a recording only does its job once someone watches it. Ask what a customer has to do to say the product worked for them.

3. 3

   Count how often that moment happens

   Turn the moment into a count that can keep growing: nights booked, boards shared, teams paying. Sean Ellis's rule: make it actionable, not a ratio, and able to scale. Tinder is the exception that proves the rule: it tracks the share of paying users, because its users leave once they find someone.

4. 4

   Check that it leads revenue

   If the metric grows, revenue should follow a few months later. Lenny Rachitsky's test: which metric, if it went up today, would most accelerate your business's flywheel?

5. 5

   Pick the time window

   Match how often the product should be used. Social apps count daily, work tools weekly, streaming monthly. Counting a weekly habit daily makes every weekend look like a crisis.

6. 6

   Break it into input metrics

   The north star is an output no team can move directly. List the three to five inputs that drive it, give each to a team, and set goals on those.

7. 7

   Revisit it when the strategy changes

   Dropbox moved from monthly active users to paying teams when it shifted from consumers to businesses. Keep yours as long as the strategy holds.

North star metric vs KPI, OKR and OMTM

They work together. The north star is the company's most important KPI; OKRs set quarterly goals, usually on its inputs; the OMTM is a team's temporary focus.

Common north star metric mistakes

• Picking revenue. It lags, it moves with prices and exchange rates, and teams can't act on it day to day. Track it, but point the company at what produces it.
• Picking a vanity metric. Sign-ups, registered users and page views grow without anyone getting value. If the number can rise while customers leave, it isn't a north star.
• Picking a ratio. DAU/MAU or conversion rates can improve while the business shrinks. Sean Ellis advises a count that can keep growing.
• Having five north stars. Then there is none. Keep one, and put the rest in its inputs.
• Never revisiting it. A metric that fitted a consumer product can mislead a business one, as Dropbox's switch shows.

Where the idea comes from

• Growth teams. The term is often credited to Sean Ellis, who coined “growth hacking” and co-wrote Hacking Growth, though no first use settles it. On Lenny's Podcast in 2024 he described it as the metric that reflects the core value a product delivers: actionable, not a ratio, and correlated with revenue without being revenue.
• Amplitude's North Star Playbook. The analytics company turned the idea into a framework (a north star, its inputs and a workshop to find them) in a free playbook co-written by John Cutler. Its own north star, “weekly learning users (WLU)”, is on this page.
• Lenny Rachitsky's survey. Choosing Your North Star Metric (a16z, 2021) asked current and past employees of 40+ growth-stage companies what theirs was. About 50% named a revenue metric, 35% customer growth, and 30% each consumption and engagement; many named more than one.
• Lean Analytics. Alistair Croll and Benjamin Yoskovitz's 2013 book named the one metric that matters (OMTM), a startup's focus for its current stage, a close cousin of the north star.

How this list is made

A company is listed only if we can link to where it, or someone who works or worked there, named the metric as its north star: a filing, the company's blog, a talk, a podcast, an interview, or Lenny Rachitsky's survey of employees. Metrics a company only reports, like the active users in an earnings release, don't count, and neither do other sites' lists, which mostly copy one another.

We researched 106 companies and left out 47, including some famous ones: we found no statement by the company or anyone who worked there. Each row shows when the metric was stated; sources were last checked in November 2026.

Know a company that has said its north star in public? Send the link to khrystyna@getleadwave.io and we'll add it.