A North Star Metric (NSM) is the single metric a company aligns around — the number that captures both business growth and user-value delivery in one place. Every team, function, and initiative within the company is evaluated against how it moves the NSM. The framework gained popularity through Sean Ellis (growth marketing) and Amplitude's product-analytics frameworks; it's now standard in mobile-first product organizations.
Common North Star Metrics by app type
- Social / messaging: weekly active users (WAU), messages sent per user.
- Streaming / media: weekly engaged users (users who watched ≥X content), content-consumption minutes.
- Marketplace: weekly transacting users (users completing a purchase), gross merchandise value.
- Productivity / SaaS-mobile: weekly engaged users, paid subscriptions, MRR.
- Gaming: daily active users (DAU), in-app purchase revenue, retention rate.
- Subscription content: paid subscriptions, MRR, weekly content-consumption.
- Fitness / wellness: weekly workouts completed, weekly active users, subscriptions.
- Finance / fintech: monthly active users with completed financial actions, total assets under management.
Properties of a good North Star Metric
- Leading, not lagging — predicts future business success rather than just measuring current state. "Weekly engaged users" is more leading than "monthly revenue" (engagement today predicts revenue in 3-6 months).
- Captures user value, not just business value — should reflect users getting value from the product, not just paying. Revenue alone is too narrow; "users who completed a workout in the last 7 days" reflects actual value delivery.
- Actionable — teams can plausibly influence it. "Number of users in the world" isn't actionable; "weekly active users in your target market" is.
- Resists gaming — improving the metric should require real product improvement, not metric manipulation. "Sessions per day" is gameable (force users into more sessions); "weekly engaged users" is harder to game.
- Common language — every team can talk about it without confusion. Marketing, product, engineering, sales should all understand what "moves the NSM".
Common pitfalls
- NSM is purely revenue — captures business but not user value. Teams optimize against user delight.
- NSM is purely engagement — captures user value but not business. Companies that hit engagement targets but miss revenue.
- NSM is too high-level — like "total users". No one knows what to do to move it.
- NSM is too tactical — like "click-through rate on the upsell button". Specific but not strategic.
- NSM changes constantly — undermines alignment. NSM should be stable across 1-2+ years.
- NSM ignores cohort quality — measures volume without accounting for retention / LTV.
Most mature mobile-first companies converge on NSMs that are mid-funnel engagement metrics: weekly engaged users, daily transacting users, weekly minutes-spent-on-core-action. These capture both growth (number of users) and value delivery (the behavior matters), are leading indicators, are actionable, and resist gaming.