What's your north star metric?

Since I'm just starting out, I'm tracking how many days I actually work on the business as opposed to my day job. My current goal is 2 days a week. When I can make that 7, I will have achieved my first big mile stone.

Wow tough question, but been thinking about this a lot for Pod Hunt.

In the ended I decided on ... how many "interested" listeners can I send to each podcast episode.

It's very hard to track, I had to build tooling into the website to try and track it and even then I'm not capturing all the referrals that Pod Hunt is generating based on how people tell me they are using the site.

I think most Indie Hackers worry more about getting to ramen profitable first and foremost. Hopefully getting there, aligns with the NSM, but some short term detours are expected.

% of users that would be very disappointed if they could no longer use our products

Good question! Really got me thinking about what to prioritize when it comes to building StartupLadder. I'd say my north star metric would be the number of jobs that entry-level candidates discover, apply to, and hopefully land through the platform.

I do think it is relevant to Indie Hackers since we're a community based on running a PROFITABLE side business. The more jobs candidates have to apply to on StartupLadder means that the number of companies paying to be on the platform increases as well :)

Our north star metric is: Brands. I'm building the easiest way to grow with branding, so the metric of how many brands are using the product seems right.

I think that the process I used to get to my north star metric will help other indie hackers. I started by developing my brand promise, because I think of the north star metric as the best way to measure how effective I am at delivering on that promise. For 1Brand, the promise is to be the easiest way to grow with branding. To measure how well we're doing at delivering on the promise we measure Brands (the number of brands using our brand guidelines). If that number isn't growing, then we're not delivering on our promise.

So, I think other indie hackers could use my approach:
1 Write your brand promise
2 Extract the one most valuable word from your promise
3 Boom. That's your north star metric

Number of passwords eliminated. This is a reflection of both the number of services we have integrated with, and the number users of those services.

Total Gross Sales. We pay publishers when we run an ad in their newsletter. So we only make a commission, but right now we're just looking at increasing the total amount we make us and publishers combined.

I am following this approach: https://www.whatmatters.com/stories/leading-indicator-product-market-fit-okrs to establish the north star metric. At the moment I don't want to focus on revenue and more on getting users and doing an awesome product

Daily Active Users (DAUs) for Happyfeed - especially since it's a daily habit, it's the best measure of how many people are getting value from the product. (More specifically, users who "complete" at day by uploading 3 moments.)

Other metrics that matter:

• Revenue of course, but this is so directly related to DAUs that I prioritize the activity as a measure of app health. I like to look at the ratio of DAUs to paying subscribers.
• Retention might be just as important but it doesn't tend to change as often. It's important to track this between app updates. A jump is nice but a drop needs to be addressed ASAP

There are a few vanity metrics that are fun to drop with friends but generally not helpful. "Happyfeed users have uploaded X million moments" sounds cool, but that's about it!