Pick a North Star metric

To: CEO and Growth Lead Recommendation: Make Weekly Repeat Cooks our North Star.

Define it as the number of unique users who complete at least two cooking sessions in Cook Mode in a rolling seven-day period, across free and Plus. A completion currently means reaching the final step. Count separate cooking occasions, including cooking the same recipe again, but exclude duplicate events.

Why this, rather than MRR or MAU?

Simmer’s value is helping people turn recipes into meals—not simply attracting visits or collecting subscriptions. Repeat cooking is our strongest available signal that we deliver that value consistently.

The retention evidence is compelling: users who cook at least twice in a week have 61% month-six retention, versus 54% for weekly planners, 9% for savers who never cook in Cook Mode, and 4% for browse-only users. Cooking also precedes monetization: 82% of new subscribers cooked at least three recipes in their first two weeks.

Those are associations, not proof that inducing more Cook Mode completions causes retention or subscriptions. Nevertheless, repeat cooking is the best-supported hypothesis to organize around and test.

MRR remains our business outcome. Our $840,000 MRR matters, but making it the product North Star could reward price increases or tighter paywalls without improving customer value.

MAU remains a reach metric. With 68% of monthly actives browsing only, it mixes meaningful use with fleeting visits. Last year’s push test illustrates the danger: MAU rose 6%, uninstalls doubled, and cooking completions did not change.

Weekly Repeat Cooks combines breadth with repeated value. Counting people rather than total completions also prevents a small group of power users from masking weak adoption.

Three input metrics teams can own

Report cohort sizes alongside these rates so improvements cannot hide shrinking reach. Meal planning should be a means to repeat cooking, not a forced behavior: only 7% of monthly actives have ever tried it.

Guardrails against gaming

• Protect measurement integrity. Reaching the last step is a proxy for cooking, not proof. Deduplicate sessions, flag implausibly rapid or automated completions, and audit the proxy through sampled “Did you cook this?” feedback. Never reward shortening recipes, auto-advancing steps, or making completion obligatory.
• Protect user experience. Monitor uninstalls, notification opt-outs, and cooking satisfaction. Set experiment stop thresholds before launch; do not repeat the push test’s trade-off.
• Protect business health and access. Track MRR, paid conversion, subscriber churn, and refunds alongside the North Star. Segment results by free versus Plus and acquisition channel so paywall changes or traffic shifts cannot masquerade as better product value.
• Require sustained impact. Validate changes with controlled experiments and follow-up retention—not just a launch-week lift.

First, establish the North Star’s baseline; the supplied MAU and subscriber totals cannot tell us how many Weekly Repeat Cooks we have. Then set a target grounded in cohort performance.

To: CEO, Growth Lead From: Head of Product Re: Simmer's North Star

Recommendation

Make the North Star Weekly Active Cookers (WAC): users who complete Cook Mode on two or more recipes in a week.

Both of your metrics matter, but neither measures the thing that drives the business.

Why not MAU. 68% of our 2.1M monthly actives arrive from search, read one recipe and leave. They retain at 4% at month 6. Last year's push test shows the risk: MAU rose 6%, uninstalls doubled, and Cook Mode completions didn't move. A MAU target rewards exactly that trade.

Why not MRR. MRR ($840K, from 140K subscribers at $6) is the outcome we want, but it lags. It can also be moved by a price change or a paywall tweak without making the product better, and it tells a team nothing about what to do this week.

Why WAC. People who cook twice or more a week retain at 61% at month 6, against 9% for savers who never cook and 4% for browsers. And 82% of new subscribers cooked at least three recipes in Cook Mode in their first two weeks. Cooking sits upstream of both retention and revenue, so growing WAC should grow MRR, and teams can influence it within a sprint.

MRR stays as our top-line business outcome, reported alongside WAC. MAU becomes a funnel-health metric, since it is the pool WAC is converted from.

One caveat: these are correlations, and committed cooks may simply be our best users anyway. In the first quarter we should run a holdout experiment, such as a stronger first-week cooking prompt, to confirm that causing more cooking causes better retention and conversion.

Input metrics teams can own

1. New-user activation (Onboarding): % of new users who complete a Cook Mode recipe within 7 days, with the 3-recipes-in-14-days rate tracked as the subscription-intent signal.
2. Save-to-cook rate (Discovery and Cook Mode): % of savers who cook a saved recipe in Cook Mode within 14 days. Savers who never cook retain at 9%, so this is our biggest leak.
3. Browse-to-return conversion (Growth and SEO): % of search-landing visitors who save a recipe or come back within 7 days. This gives Growth a real lever on the 68%, and on MAU quality.
4. Planning adoption (Planning): % of monthly actives who build a weekly plan. Only 7% have ever done it, yet weekly planners retain at 54%.

Guardrails against gaming

Against cheap cooking events. Completion is logged when someone reaches the last step, so tapping through counts. - Track a "quality completion" (minimum elapsed time relative to recipe length, or timer use) and report WAC on that basis. - Monitor median time per completion for sudden drops. - Add an occasional "Did you cook it?" prompt to calibrate against self-report.

Against the notification trap. - Set a hard cap on push frequency. - Treat uninstall rate and notification opt-outs as blocking metrics: any experiment that worsens either is not shipped, whatever it does to WAC or MAU.

Against short-term lifts. - Judge any WAC gain by its 30- and 90-day cohort retention, so we don't buy a spike with users who disappear.

Against revenue gaming. - Track subscriber churn, refund rate and cancellation-flow completion alongside MRR. - Don't count MRR gains from price changes or paywall aggressiveness as product wins. - Don't gate Cook Mode so tightly that new users can't reach the 3-recipe habit that predicts subscribing.

Against MAU drift. - Keep reporting MAU, but as a watch metric with no team target. If MAU rises while WAC is flat, we treat it as a warning sign rather than a win.

What each of you gets

• CEO: a metric that leads MRR and that teams can act on, with MRR still reported at the top. If WAC grows and conversion holds, MRR follows.
• Growth lead: ownership of the biggest untapped pool, the browse-only majority. Success is measured by how many of them become cookers, not by how many we can get to open the app.

I'd propose we adopt WAC from next quarter, baseline it in the first month, set targets once we see the quality-adjusted number, and review the causal experiment results at the end of the quarter.

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.