Codie SanchezFounder @ Contrarian Thinking

Why You Need Two North Stars

12 Jun 2026 · 1 min

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Codie Sanchez argues that content companies need two North Stars, not one. Optimizing only for revenue pushes creators toward sales pitches; optimizing only for followers incentivizes sensationalism. She proposes tracking both metrics simultaneously, with a third guardrail metric to prevent either from cannibalizing the other.

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Everybody will say, what's the North Star of your business? I totally don't believe in that. Could you imagine if all I cared about in my content business was revenue? So if all I care about is revenue, what are you going to see on my content? Buy, buy, buy. What's going to happen to my followers if I only have a North Star of revenue? My followers are going to go down. So if all you cared about was followers and you were just optimizing for followers and you followed that all the way down, what would you do? Porn. Because that's where the most people follow on the internet. That's OnlyFans. So what you actually want on is what we call the two ors. We care about revenue and we care about followers. Those are our two ors. Then you have what's called a caller metric. So your revenue is the thing that gets unleashed, and your followers are the caller to make sure that you don't only care about revenue to the sake of all of your followers.