Akeel Jabbar, an investor at Horizon Capital, argues startups should pick one evolving metric, a North Star, to drive the business forward. He uses Facebook's focus on monthly active users as an example, then walks through a four-step framework: diagnose your biggest problem, pick the metric that addresses it, align your team, and run weekly experiments. Your metric must fit your stage and product, not copy competitors.
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Whether you're just starting out or you're well established into running your company, as an entrepreneur, you always have a million things you can be focusing your time on and working towards. But you, as the CEO, as the boss, you get to set your own schedule, your own time, and you get to decide what you want to focus on every single day. Should I be worrying about getting more leads? Should I be posting on social media? If so, what platform should I be using? Should I be working on hiring more people on my, on my team, or should I be talking to my clients today? That's up to you to decide. But the truth is, guess what? It doesn't really matter. What you need to know first and foremost before you do anything else and continue working on your business is this one thing. What is the one metric that matters? And that's exactly what we're going to cover on today's video, how to find it, what to look for, and what that is. Stay tuned. Hey guys, welcome back to SaaS District. My name is Akeel Jabbar, GP and Investment Director at Horizon Capital, where we help SaaS companies take their business to the next level in their growth. Now, before I get into talking about the one metric that matters, I want to talk to you guys about Mr. Mark Zuckerberg when he was building Facebook. In the early days of when he was building Facebook, he focused on only one metric, and that metric was active users or monthly active users. So all he cared about is what is my active users today? And he tracked that every single day. He had a big board, a big screen that he looked at every single day, and everybody looked at it and seeing if that number was increasing. That was used as his North Star of how he built his company, and every single decision was driven around that single number. So when team members would approach him and say, hey Mark, I've got this new idea, I want to build out this new feature. I want to test out this new marketing plan. I want to try out this new strategy. He would go back to them and say, hey, does this improve this number right here? If the answer wasn't a clear yes or it was a no, it was simple. It would get rejected. It was that simple, guys. And that was the key to their success. And that comes down to one keyword that I want you guys to understand, and that is focus. Keep in mind that when you set up this one key metric, it's actually going to change over time even though In the early stages, you might have that key metric of what you need to focus on right now for maybe the next 3 months, the next 6 months, maybe the next year. That actually evolves as your company evolves. You might be asking yourself, how do I find what that key metric is? What is that for my business? So I want you to ask yourself this one question. What is the main problem that my business is facing today that if I don't solve it, it won't help me reach my goals? Is it more leads? Is it more revenue? Is it more sales? Maybe you need more booked calls, maybe you need more users, maybe it's more traffic, more team members. If you're a SaaS company, is it reducing churn? Is it improving my NPS score? Is it improving my LTV? Or maybe it's decreasing my cost per acquisition. Okay, what is that main one single problem? Just, that's it, just one problem that if you make that difference, it's gonna improve your company to help you reach the goal that you're aiming for. So that's for you to really dig deep into your business and really understand, and then only pick one. By picking one, it'll force you to have clear goals. It'll give you focus that you need on how to drive your business forward. So once you have that one key metric, your next step is to then communicate that to your team to make sure they're aligned on how they can support you and to help you get there and improve that one metric. So make that clear to your team. Let them know that this is The one goal we're going to be focusing on, and I need you guys to focus all your efforts. Whatever you're doing needs to make sure that it helps drive this number up or down. So once you're committed, once your team is committed to all being focused and driven towards improving that one metric that matters for you and your business, what I suggest to you guys is, is actually working on sprints or building a culture of experimentation. You may have heard about the Lean Startup model where the model is quite simple. So you build, You then measure, you learn, and then you iterate. Okay, so let's say you and your team decide on 10 things this week that you guys are going to focus on to help improve that one number. Okay, then you're going to go at the end of the week, you're going to measure the results of those 10 activities. You're going to learn what happened, which of those actually had an impact on that one number, and then you're going to iterate for the next week and see which ones actually worked and which ones didn't. And that's how you're going to continue to apply that Week over week until you start seeing that number and seeing what actually makes the biggest impact to that one number. Just one reminder, guys, you might be thinking, hey, maybe it's my competitor is focused on one metric and maybe I should copy what they're doing. Let me tell you, every business is at different stages of where they're at. They have different teams, they have different dynamics, different cultures, different products. Every business is unique. So your number is unique to you. You don't need to go out and copy it. Look inside. Look at all the data, look at, you know, what is lacking, what needs to really drive the needle forward and what's going to grow your business today and set that for yourself. So simple as that, guys. I hope you guys enjoyed this video. I hope that was helpful to you and you can start implementing that today in your business. And I want you guys to really think this through today and before continuing on your entrepreneurship journey. If you guys enjoyed this video, like it, share it, uh, make sure you subscribe. And the ball is in your court, guys. Now you guys have to decide. Let me know, comments below, what is the one key metric that you guys will be focusing on for your business?
