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Entrepreneurship & Startups vocabulary · Growth & Traction

North star metric

Meaning in entrepreneurship & startups, with examples

nounAdvanced term

In entrepreneurship & startups, north star metric means: The single most important number a company uses to measure the real value customers get from its product, guiding decisions across the whole team.

In Turkish: kuzey yıldızı metriği, ana yön metriği

How it is used

Popular in growth and product teams. Examples are nights booked for a travel platform or messages sent for a chat app. A good north star metric reflects customer value and leads to revenue over time; teams choose it, define it and align around it.

Example sentences

  1. Our north star metric is the number of invoices paid through the platform each week.

  2. Every feature request is judged by one question: will it move our north star metric?

Common collocations

  • define a north star metric
  • align around the north star
  • move the north star metric
  • KPIKey performance indicator: a number a company tracks regularly to see whether it is reaching its most important goals, such as revenue, active users or churn.
  • retentionA company's ability to keep its customers or users over time, usually measured as the percentage who are still active or paying after a certain period.
  • tractionClear evidence that customers want a product, such as growing users, sales, revenue or partnerships, which shows that the startup is moving forward.
  • product-market fitThe stage when a product clearly meets a real need in a large enough market, so customers buy it, keep using it and recommend it without much pushing.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Growth & Traction

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