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.

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.