Most companies are drowning in data but starving for direction. It's a mess. Marketing is looking at MQLs, engineering is focused on sprint velocity, and the sales team is just trying to hit a quarterly number. Everyone is running in opposite directions. This is exactly where Hacking Growth—often referred to by practitioners simply as The North Star book—enters the room. Written by Sean Ellis and Ethan Brown, it didn't just introduce a catchy phrase; it gave startups a way to stop vibrating with nervous energy and start moving in a straight line.
If you’ve spent any time in Silicon Valley or a tech hub, you've heard the term "North Star Metric." It’s become a bit of a cliché. Honestly, it's often used incorrectly by people who haven't actually read the source material. They think it's just "the goal." It isn't. The North Star is the singular value-based metric that captures the core value your product delivers to customers. If that number goes up, your business is probably healthy. If it’s flat, you’re in trouble, no matter how many "likes" your last LinkedIn post got.
What People Get Wrong About the North Star Metric
A lot of managers think their North Star is "Revenue." It’s not. Revenue is a trailing indicator. It tells you what happened in the past. If you focus solely on revenue, you're looking in the rearview mirror while trying to drive a Ferrari at 100 mph. It's dangerous.
Sean Ellis, who famously coined the term "Growth Hacker," argues that your North Star must represent the moment of "Aha!" for the user. For Airbnb, it isn't "dollars earned"; it’s "Nights Booked." Why? Because that represents a guest finding a home and a host making money. Both sides of the marketplace win. If you focus on nights booked, the revenue follows naturally. It’s a subtle shift in mindset, but it changes everything about how a team operates on a Tuesday morning.
People often mistake "Total Registered Users" for a North Star. That’s a vanity metric. It’s garbage. You can buy ten thousand users with a bad Facebook ad campaign, but if they never open the app again, your business is a ghost town. The North Star book emphasizes that your metric must measure retention and value. If users aren't coming back, you don't have a growth problem; you have a product problem. You’re trying to fill a leaky bucket. Stop doing that.
The Architecture of a Growth Team
Ellis and Brown don't just give you a philosophy; they give you a blueprint. Most companies are siloed. Marketing does the "creative" stuff. Product builds the "features." In The North Star book, those walls are torn down. They advocate for a cross-functional growth team.
This team usually includes a growth lead, a product manager, a software engineer, a marketing specialist, and a data analyst. They sit together. They talk every day. They run experiments at a pace that would make a traditional corporate executive dizzy.
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The process is a loop.
- Analyze.
- Ideate.
- Prioritize.
- Test.
Then you do it again. And again. Forever. It’s about high-tempo testing. If you run one experiment a month, you’ll learn twelve things a year. If you run three a week, you’ll learn over 150 things. Who do you think wins that race? It’s not the person with the biggest budget; it’s the person who learns the fastest.
Choosing Your Metric: It’s Not One-Size-Fits-All
Finding your specific North Star is actually kind of painful. It requires brutal honesty about what your product actually does for people.
- For Facebook: It was "Daily Active Users."
- For WhatsApp: It was "Messages Sent."
- For Quora: It was the "Number of Questions Answered."
Notice a pattern? These are all about engagement. They are about the "Core Human Action" the product facilitates. If you're running a SaaS business, your North Star might be "Monthly Active Subscribers who perform [X] action." That [X] is the secret sauce.
In the early days of Slack, they realized that once a team sent 2,000 messages, they were 93% likely to keep using the tool. That’s a goldmine of information. Suddenly, the whole company isn't just "selling Slack"; they are obsessed with getting teams to that 2,000-message mark as fast as humanly possible. That is the power of the framework laid out in the book.
The "Aha!" Moment and Why It Matters
You ever download an app, use it for thirty seconds, and then delete it? You didn't reach the "Aha!" moment. You didn't see the value.
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The North Star book spends a lot of time on this transition from "curious visitor" to "active user." It’s the friction that kills growth. Every extra click, every long form to fill out, every "verify your email" barrier is a chance for the user to leave and never come back.
Growth hacking isn't about "tricking" people. It’s about removing the obstacles between a human and the value they are seeking. It’s empathy disguised as engineering. If you can shorten the time to "Aha!", your North Star metric will skyrocket. It's basically physics.
Is the North Star Approach Still Relevant in 2026?
Some critics say the growth hacking era is over. They say it was all about cheap ads and "gaming" the system. They’re wrong. While the specific tactics—like "Invite all your friends" loops—might be tired, the underlying logic of the North Star remains the most effective way to scale a business.
In a world of AI-driven products and hyper-competition, the companies that win are the ones that ruthlessly focus on user value. If you don't have a North Star, you're just guessing. And guessing is expensive.
We see this now with the shift toward "Product-Led Growth" (PLG). PLG is basically the North Star philosophy applied to the entire organization. The product is the marketing. The product is the sales pitch. If the North Star is moving, the business is scaling.
How to Implement This Tomorrow
You don't need a million-dollar budget to start. You just need a whiteboard and a few honest teammates.
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First, look at your data. Identify the users who have stayed with you for more than six months. What did they do in their first hour? Their first day? Their first week? Look for the commonalities. Did they upload a profile picture? Did they invite one colleague?
Second, define your North Star. Make it a single number. Not three. Not five. One. It should represent:
- Customer Value.
- Company Revenue (Indirectly).
- Product Progress.
Third, start the high-tempo testing. Pick one part of the funnel—maybe it’s the sign-up page—and run three variations this week. See what happens to your North Star.
Honestly, the biggest hurdle isn't the math. It’s the ego. Leaders have to be okay with their favorite ideas failing. In the North Star framework, the data is the boss. You have to be willing to kill your darlings if the numbers say they aren't helping users reach that "Aha!" moment.
Practical Next Steps
- Audit your current metrics: Stop looking at "Total Hits" or "Page Views." Identify which metric actually correlates with long-term retention.
- Form a "Tiger Team": Pull one person from marketing, one from product, and one from engineering. Give them 20% of their week to focus solely on moving the North Star.
- Map the "User Journey": Literally draw out every step a user takes from seeing an ad to becoming a power user. Find the "friction points" where they drop off.
- Run a "Growth Meeting" every Monday: Review the previous week's tests. What did you learn? What are you testing next? Keep it under 30 minutes.
Focusing on a single North Star isn't about ignoring the rest of your business. It's about giving your team the clarity they need to stop wasting time on things that don't move the needle. Read the book, find your metric, and start testing. Everything else is just noise.