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LATEST POSTS 📚

If you’re new, not yet a subscriber, or just plain missed it, here are some of our recent editions.

💣 Neumannomics: A Deep Dive. Co-Founder & Ex-CEO at WeWork. How to build a cult, burn it the ground and buy it back again. 
🐝 The Acquisition Mechanics: beehiiv + Swapstack. How Swapstack found an acquirer in beehiiv.
🍿 CrossFit & The UFC: A Case Study. Comparing how leadership led to one meteoric rise, and one precipitous fall.

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HOUSEKEEPING 📨

Although you wouldn’t think so from this image, today was a good day. I finished this newsletter in the morning, snatched 102kgs for the first time in a decade around lunch time, and the caught a little bit of a doggy play date / early UFC event with my mate Tom.

_{*While we are on the catchup, Tom and I were talking about founder sales for his agency, Lento, and that and he hates doing it—so I’ll do some for him. If you are looking for premium brand work done, check them out.}

COLLECTION 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦

Collection: What Is Your North Star Metric?

North Star Metrics. We all have them. Whether it’s GMV, customer love, or the amount of emojis on an internal Slack update, these are the metrics that move the needle for your company. Today we are taking a walk down memory, collating the North Star Metrics of a handful of executives from high growth startups, to enterprises, to leading VC funds. This is what makes the engines of these companies run. Enjoy!

Immad Akhund, Co-Founder & CEO at Mercury

I have a particular perspective on metrics. In my view, anything other than net revenue can be categorized as a vanity metric. Some might argue these are lagging indicators and irrelevant to startups. However, I believe startups often mislead themselves by focusing on vanity metrics like user count as a key performance indicator (KPI).

Ultimately, if net revenue isn't your primary KPI, you're likely not optimizing for the most critical factor – a sustainable business model. Net revenue is the core metric we prioritize, with external costs being a key expense we constantly monitor.

_{*To see our full interview with Immad, head over here.}

Alexa Grabell, Co-Founder & CEO at Pocus

The first half of 2023 our North Star was to have a 'Cult Following.' We define this as ‘so much customer love that the words customer love don't do it justice.’ Some companies we used as examples of having cult following are Notion, Figma, Superhuman, Linear, Canva, and Slack. We translated what this meant for each of our teams.

_{*To see our full interview with Alexa, head over here.}

Elicia McDonald, Partner at Airtree

We have two key stakeholders in our business; the founders we invest in and the investors who trust us to deliver great returns on their capital. Delivering best in class returns to our investors is ultimately how we're measured as a fund manager. We achieve that North Star by winning the right to partner with the most ambitious Aussie and Kiwi founders and helping them build iconic technology companies. The ultimate success for us means building a generational investment company that outlasts us all, creates fun and fulfilling careers for exceptional talent and, along the way, helps to make our world a better place. 

_{*To see our full interview with Elicia, head over here.}

Lexy Franklin, CEO at Sidebar

Ultimately, we want to help members reach their ambitious goals with the help of peer-based groups, facilitators, and social accountability. Every day we see members supporting each other to achieve their career goals and solve challenges. As one example, one member founded his own company with encouragement from his group, another took on the role of CEO, and another pivoted his career from tech to author.

The impact of Sidebar isn’t just on an individual. Better leaders positively impact their team, family, and friends. There is a multiplicative effect.

We are a very data-informed company. There are metrics we look at across retention, engagement, and growth. From a North Star though—it is happy customers, where customers are defined as members who say Sidebar made a significant improvement in their career trajectory.

_{*To see our full interview with Lexy, head over here.}

Michael Batko, CEO at Startmate

Our North Star is the percentage of companies that raise post-Accelerator. Everything at Startmate supports the North Star, some initiatives directly, others might seem further removed but are just as important to cement our position and long term success.

Our Fellowship programs—women, students, climate—bring thousands of ambitious individuals into the Startmate fold. Over 65% of which join or start a startup. We’re unearthing the truly hungry founders that nobody else is looking at, whilst playing the long game with those not ready to start a company straight away. We bring them into the Startmate community to immerse them in ambition.

When founder pairs are ready we help them get their companies off the ground in our pre-accelerator Launch Club. They get to validate the problem and talk to their first customers. Rapid feedback saves them months if not years of going down the wrong path.

The pathways all end up in the Accelerator selection process, where out of thousands of applications, we get to invest in the top 3%. This is an incredibly impressive bunch of founders with wild ideas and rapid execution. Because of the tight funnel it directly affects our confidence of being able to work towards our North Star metric.

The Accelerator counter-intuitively does not directly start with our North Star though. For the first 10 weeks we tell our founders not to talk to investors—only customers. Customer conversations are really the foundation of whether you have a solid business and will determine whether you can fundraise. Towards the end of the program the North Star comes to a head, as we prepare the founders in an intense, two-week fundraising sprint. We surround them with hundreds of angels and our First Believers program at an exclusive investor demo day, then the big community demo day.

Our work on the North Star starts all the way at the beginning; unearthing, seeing, picking and investing in the most ambitious founders. That’s the majority of our work. And it can be so easily overshadowed with the final much more tangible part of fundraising support.

_{*To see our full interview with Michael, head over here.}

Jennifer Phan, Co-Founder & CEO at Passionfroot

Currently, our North Star metric is GMV (Gross Merchandise Value) that is processed through Passionfroot. This gives us a good idea of the overall health of the platform in terms of number of transactions, AOV, number of users and overall growth.

_{*To see our full interview with Jennifer, head over here.}

Tyler Denk, Co-Founder & CEO at Beehiiv

We track and monitor quite a few KPIs regularly, but to simplify, MRR is the obvious answer. It encapsulates so many different core objectives we're focused on like acquiring new users, converting those users into paying customers, bringing in larger accounts that contribute more significantly to our revenue, and providing continuous value to reduce churn.

Ensuring our features work as expected and offering best-in-class support are also critical for minimizing churn. Moreover, helping our customers grow and succeed, so they're encouraged to upgrade further, plays a vital role in our strategy.

_{*To see our full interview with Tyler, head over here.}

Dan Westgarth, COO at Deel

Customer retention, we aren’t anything without our customers. Right now we are investing more into customer experience by improving our support and success functions, and optimizing SLAs across the product and operations.

_{*To see our full interview with Dan, head over here.}

Ananda Aisola, COO & Co-Founder of Composer

Unlike the majority of trading and investment platforms, Composer is a freemium monthly subscription service. You have the ability to create and test investment strategies for free, but if you want to trade them we charge a subscription. The North Star metric that we measure against is customer growth.

At a personal level I know if it’s been a good day or a bad one based on; the feeling in my gut that I’ve come to trust it over time, and self-reflection. Self-reflection is a trick I learnt from a former exec coach of mine. The idea was to put aside some time at the end of the day to go through the ‘It-We-I framework.’

_{*To see our full interview with Ananda, head over here.}

Mac Reddin, Co-Founder & CEO at Commsor

I think there’s an obvious North Star for any business—building a successful company that’s profitable and sticks around for the long haul. That’s just the standard stuff every business has to do. For us, I think we actually have two North Stars: one is more general, and the other is a long-term goal that really guides how I think about building the business.

The first one isn’t measurable, but it’s about having fun with it. A lot of people have given us feedback that they can see it in our marketing and our team’s online presence—they can tell we’re genuinely having fun with what we’re doing. And sure, you can’t put a number on ‘vibe,’ but you can feel it. It works. So for us, it’s about always finding ways to inject fun into what we’re doing, internally and externally. If you’re not having fun, then what’s the point?

The second, more serious North Star for me, is building a $100 million ARR business with a team of 100 people or less. Whether we get there or not, who knows—there are so many factors involved. But the way it shows up in the day-to-day is through the mindset of efficiency. You see these stories about companies with 6,000 engineers, and you just think, 'Why?’ We’re not trying to build just any company; we’re trying to build an efficient one. And now, more than ever, I think it’s possible to do that.

_{*To see our full interview with Mac, head over here.}

Bill Kerr (me), Founder & CEO at Athyna

Our North Star is NRR—or Net Revenue Retention. I think if you are in the subscription revenue business and this is not your North Star you are not thinking clearly. In order to improve our NRR, we are trying to move upstream. We have just started landing some really large enterprise accounts which is amazing. Enterprise accounts have a much more stable business, are always going to open more roles and are generally just a smoother more mature organisation.

Aside from moving upstream, I guess the other thing we are really always testing is which talent vertical, industry, funding stage etc. suits us best. We are in the positon now where we can really start to pull apart parts of the data to make informed decisions here—which is awesome. To churn is to die and all.

_{*To see our full interview with me, head over here.}

🌐 Hiring offshore devs and product people? If so, my company Athyna can help. Woop!

And that’s it! You can also find all of our original interviews with all the founders and leaders above here.

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

Just checked out an episode from Greg Isenberg's podcast where he gets this guy Chris to show his audience how to use ChatGPT Operator to build a $500/day business in 30 minutes. Spoiler alert, it works and looks easy.

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

ASK ME ANYTHING 🗣

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Ask in the comments or reply to this email and I will do my best to answer it in a future edition. 🙌🏼

TOOLS WE USE 🛠️

Every week we highlight tools we actually use inside of our business and give them an honest review. Today we are highlighting Paddle—a merchant of record, managing payments, tax and compliance needs—we use their ProfitWell tool.

See the full set of tools we use inside of Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

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