Pick a North Star metric

To: CEO & Growth Lead From: Head of Product, Simmer Date: October 24, 2023 Subject: Recommendation: Our North Star Metric, Inputs, and Guardrails

Team, a great debate highlights our current tension: the CEO wants revenue (MRR), while the Growth lead wants reach (MAU).

If we choose MRR, we risk ignoring top-of-funnel health. If we choose MAU, we risk celebrating vanity metrics—as proved by last year’s notification test, where a 6% bump in MAU doubled uninstalls because those users didn't actually find value.

My recommendation is to pick a hybrid North Star: Weekly Active Subscribers (WAS), or more specifically, Paid Users Who Cook Weekly.

However, since a single metric rarely satisfies executive reporting, MRR should remain our ultimate business North Star, but Product Value Realization (Weekly Actives who Cook) must be the operational North Star that guides day-to-day product and growth decisions. MRR is the lagging reward; cooking engagement is the leading engine. Here is why, along with our inputs and guardrails.

Why This North Star Works

Our data reveals a stark truth: 68% of our 2.1M MAUs are "browse-only" users with a catastrophic 4-49% retention rate. MAU rewards us for acquiring transient browsers. Meanwhile, users who experience core value—using Cook Mode—exhibit a stellar 61% six-month retention rate, and 82% of our subscribers cook at least three recipes in their first two weeks before paying.

If we optimize for Weekly Active Cookers, we bridge both worlds: we drive the habit loops that naturally convert free users to Simmer Plus, which directly compounds our $840k MRR, while ignoring empty traffic that drains server costs and drives uninstalls.

Three Input Metrics Teams Can Own

To move our North Star, different pods will own specific, actionable input metrics:

1. Activation Velocity (Growth & Onboarding Pod): The percentage of new signups who complete at least one recipe in Cook Mode within their first 7 days. (Tied to the 82% subscriber conversion rule).
2. Core Habit Frequency (Engagement Pod): The average number of Cook Mode completions per active user per week. (Tied to the 61% retention milestone).
3. Feature Expansion (Core Product Pod): The percentage of weekly actives utilizing meal-planning features. (Currently a low 7%, representing massive upside for long-term retention).

Guardrails to Prevent Gaming

Metrics are easily corrupted if incentives misalign. To ensure we don’t repeat the ghost of last year’s push-notification debacle, we will institute three hard guardrails:

• The Uninstall Rate Cap: If marketing or growth initiatives drive MAU/signups up, but the monthly uninstall rate exceeds 2% of our active base, campaigns are automatically paused.
• The "No Empty Calories" Rule for Growth: Growth experiments cannot be measured solely by acquisition or click-through rates. An experiment is deemed a failure if it increases top-of-funnel signups without a corresponding lift in Day-7 Cook Mode completions.
• Subscription Quality (LTV/Churn Check): To prevent the sales team or pricing experiments from pushing low-intent, high-churn subscriptions just to spike short-term MRR, we will track 90-day subscriber retention. If a cohort churns above baseline, the acquisition channel or incentive driving it is depreciated.

By anchoring on users who actually cook, we align the CEO’s revenue goals with the Growth lead's engagement goals, turning casual browsers into loyal, paying home cooks.

Recommendation: make “weekly repeat cooks” Simmer’s North Star

Define it as the number of unique users who complete Cook Mode for at least two recipes in a week. Track the count, alongside its rate within active users.

This measures a user getting real value from Simmer—not merely opening the app or expressing intent. It also connects both of your priorities: repeat Cook Mode users have the strongest observed six-month retention (61%), and 82% of new subscribers had cooked at least three recipes in their first two weeks. These are associations, not proof of causation, but they make repeat cooking a better leading signal than either MRR or MAU alone.

MRR remains the essential business outcome; MAU remains a useful reach measure. Neither should be the North Star: MRR can rise through pricing or paywall changes without improving the free experience, while 68% of actives only browse. The notification test is a warning: it lifted MAU 6%, but doubled uninstalls and did not increase Cook Mode completions.

Team-owned input metrics

1. Activation: Share of new users who complete their first Cook Mode recipe within 14 days.
2. Repeat use: Share of first-time Cook Mode cooks who complete a second recipe within seven days.
3. Planning-to-cooking: Share of users who make a weekly meal plan and then complete at least one planned recipe in Cook Mode. Planning is promising—planners show 54% six-month retention—but only 7% of actives have ever planned a week.
4. Value-to-paid conversion: Plus conversion among users who have completed three Cook Mode recipes. This ties monetization to demonstrated value rather than pushing an upgrade before users experience it.

Guardrails against gaming

• Count genuine cooking, not button presses: Define a completion consistently; exclude duplicate or obviously accidental sessions, and monitor completion quality and user feedback.
• Protect long-term value: Review six-month retention for repeat-cook cohorts, not just weekly counts. Watch uninstalls, notification opt-outs, and complaints—especially when testing re-engagement tactics.
• Keep the business healthy: Track MRR, paid conversion, subscriber churn, and refunds alongside the North Star. Don’t celebrate repeat-cook growth if subscription health materially worsens.
• Avoid narrow optimization: Report the metric by new/returning and free/paid users, and monitor recipe variety and access to useful free content. Don’t manufacture completions with intrusive prompts or undermine the experience that brings people to Simmer.

This gives the company one shared measure of recurring user value, with revenue and reach visible as important outcomes and guardrails—not competing North Stars.

To: CEO & Growth Lead From: Head of Product Subject: Aligning on Our North Star Metric

Choosing between Monthly Active Users (MAU) and Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) is a classic tension between reach and monetization. But choosing either will hurt Simmer.

Here is why neither works as our North Star, what we should measure instead, and how we keep the business honest.

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Why Not MAU or MRR?

• MAU is a vanity metric that invites bad behavior. 68% of our monthly actives are transient visitors who read one recipe from Google and bounce, retaining at a dismal 4% by month six. Last year’s push notification test proved MAU is dangerous: blast notifications spiked MAU by 6%, but Cook Mode usage didn’t budge and uninstalls doubled. Optimizing for MAU encourages low-intent traffic acquisition and spammy retention hacks.
• MRR is a lagging output. MRR tells us if we extracted value last month, not if we created value today. Optimizing directly for MRR leads teams to tighten paywalls, increase discounts, or push annual locks—tactics that burn long-term trust without fixing the core product engine.

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The Proposed North Star: Weekly Active Cooks (WAC)

Definition: The number of unique users who complete at least one recipe in Cook Mode in a rolling 7-day window.

A great North Star sits at the intersection of customer value and enterprise value. For Simmer, that intersection is Cook Mode:

1. It predicts retention: Users who cook $\ge$2 recipes a week retain at 61% at month 6 (compared to 9% for passive recipe savers and 4% for browsers).
2. It fuels monetization: 82% of new subscribers completed at least three Cook Mode sessions in their first two weeks. Cook Mode is the direct gateway to our $6/month Simmer Plus subscription.

If Weekly Active Cooks grows sustainably, MAU becomes higher-intent and MRR growth naturally follows.

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Team Input Metrics

Product, Growth, and Content teams cannot easily move WAC directly; they need operational inputs they can own day-to-day:

1. Browse-to-Cook Activation Rate (New User Experience & Growth): % of first-time visitors who enter Cook Mode within 7 days of their first session. Goal: Move users out of the 68% bounce bucket and into an interactive cooking experience. 2. Multi-Cook Frequency (Core Product): % of active cooks completing $\ge$2 Cook Mode sessions per week. Goal: Deepen habit formation to hit the threshold associated with our 61% 6-month retention rate. 3. Weekly Meal Plan Adoption (Engagement & Feature Hook): % of monthly actives who schedule $\ge$3 recipes into a weekly meal plan. Goal: Only 7% have ever tried meal planning, yet planners show 54% month-6 retention. Meal planning provides the forward-looking intent that drives repeat Cook Mode completions. 4. Qualified Cook-to-Subscriber Conversion (Monetization): Conversion rate to Simmer Plus among users who have completed their 3rd Cook Mode recipe. Goal: Target our paywalls and free-trial prompts precisely when users reach the high-intent threshold (the 82% cohort), rather than hitting casual browsers with hard walls.

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Guardrail Metrics (To Prevent Gaming)

To ensure teams do not inflate WAC artificially, we must establish three non-negotiables:

• Cook Mode Session Integrity: Cook Mode completions are only counted if the user spends at least 5 minutes in the mode with step-progression intervals matching real cooking behavior. This prevents growth teams from auto-completing sessions via deep links.
• Net Churn & Uninstall Rate: Every experiment that touches engagement or notifications must track app uninstalls and notification opt-outs. Any test that increases uninstalls (like the push notification failure) is an automatic rollback, regardless of active-cook uplift.
• Monthly Cohort Renewal Rate: We must monitor 30- and 90-day retention of new Simmer Plus subscribers to ensure we are not driving low-intent conversions through deceptive trial dark-patterns.

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By rallying around Weekly Active Cooks, we bridge the gap between audience growth and revenue: we build a sticky, habitual product first, and harvest the revenue second.