“That which is measured improves. That which is measured and reported improves exponentially.”
Karl Pearson
One of the cornerstones of digital product development is defining success. Subsequently, your attention and your efforts should be wholly focused on marching toward success.
But how do you define success for your software or web presence?
Many people would simple state, “More revenue.”
But there’s a path to “more revenue” that begins with the ONE metric you should be focusing on. It is the number that proves you are providing value to your customers or users, and ultimately that number which leads to “more revenue.”
Entrepreneur Dan Martell describes this ONE number as a “North Star Metric.” The ONE number your organization should be focusing on to reach your goal. This North Star Metric will be unique to every business, but if you focus all your efforts on improving that number, your chance of success goes up exponentially.
Suddenly, instead of drowning in a sea of measurements, numbers, and stats, you have one goal on which to focus your effort. All of your teams — support, development, marketing, sales — should prioritize their goals around that one number.
So what is your ONE number?
The North Star Metric is unique to every product, and you need to spend a bit of time determining what your ONE number is.
The best way to define your ONE number is to determine what metric brings the most value to your customer or user. If you focus on bringing success to your users, the revenue will follow.
Take our friends at Paddle Ninja, an online subscription coaching service utilizing software developed by CyberScribe Web Solutions. At a glance, you might think their logical ONE number would be the number of subscriptions they sell.
And yes, that’s important. But that’s not the ONE number, because that doesn’t bring success to their subscribers.
So what metric could they use to determine whether they are providing value to their athletes?
Some possibilities are:
- Number of logins per month. If people are logging in, we might assume they are using the application.
- Number of interactions on the forum with the coaches.
- Total number of workouts logged each month.
- Average number of workouts logged per month by each user.
Of these four possibilities, I would lean toward number 4 as a North Star Metric.
If athletes are logging workouts, that’s a good indicator they are using their training plan. If they are using their training plan, they are going to get faster or improve their fitness. There’s the value to the user.
Accordingly, Paddle Ninja can prioritize all their marketing, production and support efforts toward that one number. If that number goes up, the revenue follows.
By taking a few minutes to determine your ONE number, you can suddenly go from drowning in a sea of metrics to focusing all your effort on the success of your software or marketing website.
