tech-company, growth, yc-how-to-start-a-startup, hardwareIn the lecture about Growth of the YC Startup Class, Alex Schultz says
You need someone to set a North star for you about where the company wants to go
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So for operating for growth, what you really need to think about, is what is the North star of your company: What is that one metric, where if everyone in your company is thinking about it and driving their product towards that metric and their actions towards moving that metric up, you know in the long-run your company will be successful.
He also gives a number of example North stars of companies:
You’d see you registered user numbers for MySpace, […]
Mark [Zuckerberg (Facebook)] put out monthly active users, […]
If you’re a messaging application, sends is probably the single most important number. […]
Inside Airbnb, they talk about ‘nights booked’ […]
For eBay, it was gross merchandise volume.
Citations from the transcript, emphasis added by me.
As the whole class is primarily about software startups, these examples are also in this field. But what would be a great North star for a company selling hardware products?
Of course, the number of sold units per time interval suggests itself, but is it actually a good metric? Compared to social networks this is more like a counterpart to registered users and less like monthly active users and thus ignores everything except the fact that the device was sold. So this may be too simple.
Looking at Apple for example, besides the number of sold devices, they also talk about customer satisfaction rates. This addresses the time after the purchase, but is not sufficient to measure growth.
Thus the question: What would be a great North star for a company selling hardware products?
As different types of companies obviously have different North stars, I am particularly interested in the case where a single customer will usually not buy more than one unit over a few years (maybe skateboards or in-line skates or things where the buying pattern is similar).
The idiom North Star as you know, means having a key metric that everyone knows and actively plots towards. That said, unlikely the real North Star, over the growth of a startup, this will change in my opinion.
Core issue with your question is that in the end, in my opinion, that this metric more often than not is also the unique value proposition of the company at a given point in time.
As such, there is no single North Star for any startup of a given type, it’s something they’ve got to find one their own.
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