Choosing Your North Star Metric
How to decide the guiding metrics for every type of business, based on a survey of employees at over 40 of today's most successful growth-stage companies.
«By maintaining a laser focus on a single metric for too long, teams risk short-term thinking, missing new opportunities, and sacrificing the user experience.»
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Some network effects (when a network gains more value to its users as more people participate in its platform) don’t show up in the usual metrics. Their hidden nature makes them hard to measure – but they can confer significant long-term competitive advantages. In an insightful article for A16Z.com, D’Arcy Coolican – an Andreessen Horowitz partner and a co-founder of the peer-to-peer lending platform Frank – shines a light on hidden networks, giving useful guidelines for identifying when they’re at work.
Kickstarting Network Effects
Network effects can be found powering almost every major technology company, from messaging apps and workplace collaboration tools, like Slack and Zoom, to marketplaces, like Airbnb and Instacart to…
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«As Henry Ford allegedly said, “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.” »
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«This article was informed by exclusive interviews with over a dozen current and former early employees of Qualtrics and SurveyMonkey.»
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«You can't rely on your customers to figure out what to build. They can really only tell you what outcomes they're looking to achieve»
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