Setting only ONE north star metric for each of my products

Hello fellow IndieHackers.

Recently, I have been growing all three my profitable products and came to a realization. It can get overwelming when you think of all aspects of a SaaS product (marketing, sales, website traffic, SEO, conversion rates, features, churn), let alone when you are trying to grow three at the same time.

I listened to the IndieHacker podcast with Jason Cohen, and at some point he mentions how focusing on only one easy key metric, can have similar, or even better results than focusing on all the difficult key metrics at the same time.

eg. focus on website visitors instead of focusing on churn

I put it to the test with my products and concluded to the metrics below:

GitGardener (https://www.indiehackers.com/product/github-gardener)

For Git Gardener, my north star metric is website visitors, I get only about 300 visitors per month but they still convert great and churn is super low

I also doubled prices last month, not only did I stopped getting new customers, I actually got more than before at twice the price! 🤑

Telemonetize (www.telemonetize.com)

For Telemonetize, my north star metric is paying user retention I have good traffic (6K/mo) but churn is high I will try with great support to keep as many customers I can, adding features according to their needs

Epilepsy Blocker (www.epilepsyblocker.com)

For Epilepsy Blocker, I have been working very hard the past few months. I tried pivoting in many directions but with no real success. My north star metric is awareness, get more people to know about the product and me trying to learn the market better

This kind of mentality gives me two things:

1. Clears my mind and let's me focus on what's important
2. Instead of dwelling and trying to improve all other metrics, I can use that time to do other things

Now that I can have more time, I will start building products again!

If I learnt one thing from Git Gardener is that you never know what will be successful and what people will actually pay for

Git Gardener was no24 of my idea list, written down as "Make my github green". I never built it to make money, and I would never imagine it could, that's why I launched it as a free open source product. You can actually see the whole journey, from first line of code, to launch, to first dollar, to $100+ MRR, in a single Twitter thread here (https://twitter.com/alexsideris_/status/993523095708332032)

On the other hand, ideas I thought were the shit and would make serious money, went no where.

Following what I learned from my experience, and with the newly found time I have, I will start building products again.

Today I launched a product I spent two days building, it was another idea from my list, called "Slack bot uptime/health monitor"

I just launched it on Product Hunt, so you might want to have a look at it :)

Can't wait to launch even more products, I will be aiming at two products per month for the rest of the year, so if you want to see me building products in the open, find me on Twitter

I hope this post was of any value, all the best

-Just another indie hacker