Collection of Some of the Best SaaS North Star Metrics

List of some of the most used NSM by B2B SaaS in 2019–20

What’s a North Star Metric?
The North Star Metric is the single metric that captures the core value that the product delivers to customers. It’s a metric where any team can rally behind to create aliment along with value with customers.

Since handfull of the Product Managers out there are trying to figure out their NSM, I thought out I would be helpful to compile it

Intercom

This messaging platform is one of my favorite lists of B2B products, Intercom has allowed 30,000+ businesses to communicate with prospective and existing customers within their app, on their website, through social media, or via email.

Their vision is to build a suite of products which makes easy communication with the users of your business

Intercom’s NSM is Number chat interactions for their customers with their customers since intercom is B2B2C product

Shopify

Shopify offers online retailers a suite of services including payments, marketing, shipping and customer engagement tools to simplify the process of running an online store for small merchants. So far it has 1,000,000 customers using Shopify.

Source: https://medium.com/women-in-product/3-ways-product-managers-can-leverage-data-aaa8127190dc

Hubspot

HubSpot CRM is quite famous and has Sales, Marketing& Service Products attached into a single suite hub and so far it has got 68,800 customers across the globe.

The success of any CRM products depends on the entire customers’ team

Amplitude

Amplitude is an Analytics product for web and mobile. Their mission is to help product teams rapidly build digital products that work better for the customer and grow their business.

They have 30,000 companies from 180+ countries around the world use Amplitude.

Now are tracking 7 trillion user actions every year to help digital product and growth teams instantly understand user behavior, build engaging experiences, and grow their business.

Slack

Slack helps in-office collaboration, Its mission is to build a better employee experience and helps teams organized. Its vision is to replace emails.

Currently, it’s north star metric is Messages sent within the organization as more the engagement more the initial customers get converted

Salesforce

This is one of pioneer and biggest in B2B category, they still seem to be following strong KPI metrics

Box

The box is a storage content management, workflow & collaboration. It’s predominantly catering to the enterprise segment.

Clearslide

ClearSlide is a platform for Sales Enablement + Engagement that integrates content, communications, and actionable insights. Its vision is to help its customers in engagement for sales, marketing & services teams that make every customer interaction more successful

The salesperson send their pitches to their prospects and

Greenhouse

Hires Made WAU/ MAU is greenhouse’s north star metric

Greenhouse.io headquartered in New York City that provides recruiting software as a service. It was founded in 2012 by Daniel Chait and Jon Stross

OneLogin

It’s a saas platform for Identity & Access Management (IAM) and a Unified Access Management system (UAM) for Enterprise customers. More than 2,500 customers use this platform

number of apps integrated into a Daily active users account

Netskope

Netskope is a data security platform for cloud apps

Zoom

Online Conferencing and Video Webinars hosting tool

Weekly hosted meetings

Front App

The front app has 5000 + customers servicing as a collaboration and communication tool

Transpoco:

Transpoco is a fleet management solution provider using vehicle tracking

some of the core features of the app are Live tracking, fuel management, driver behavior monitoring

Sprout

Sprout is a Philippines-based HR platform which offers HR, Payroll and recruitment solutions with their saas Platform

Logmein

Founded in Boston in 2003, its cloud-based remote connectivity services for collaboration, IT management

Initially, they focussed on new Registrations later they changed to retention

Teachable

Ability to create Online Course with Unlimited Students with Advanced Reporting

The team at Teachable documented, for example, how and why they switched their North Star Metric from weekly active users (WAU) to monthly recurring revenue (MRR). Co-founder Conrad Wadowski freely admits that he objected to the switch because he felt the existing product was too buggy. But the team relied on the data, not on Wadowski’s gut, and the decision led them to nearly $3M in annual recurring revenues (ARR)

Grovo

SaaS learning platform to improve and advance employee and organizational performance

Lessons COmpleted per monthly active users helped gorvo set a stable number target each month

Typeform

Typeform is an online form building and online surveys tool

Twilio

Twilio focused on “messages sent” in its early years.

DocuSign

https://www.bvp.com/atlas/10-laws-of-cloud/

Outreach

Sales Engagement Platform helps efficiently and effectively engage prospects

Source :
https://blog.getlatka.com/outreach-saas-revenue-sales-customers/

There are still arguments about why ARR or MAU should not be included in North Star Metric Norms, we shall look at why a product or a team should have an NSM

NSM bring in a focus and organization clarity on Vision what each member of the team are running towards

1. Improving decision making
2. Most importantly, it holds the product accountable to an outcome.
3. It help kick start any meeting right from organizational AMA or investor meeting or even internal review meeting start more meaning full

But all being said what makes a north star metric successful is a Team that carries it. When your developers are building something or on the discussion about a feature or even Customer support talks to a customer, they ask themselves or their peers if their current action is value adding to the NSM which say

Every PM has to be able to communicate what’s the value of the product. Every employee of the company has to be able to know how the company is doing without sifting through pages of the dashboard.

Hope you liked the article, Let’s strive to achieve that one metric & make our organization organized under a single vision and follow it rigorously