ISSUE #48

Welcome to the Forward Obsessed Founder, my newsletter with insights, awesome tools, and real-world advice to grow your business and career.

GO FORWARD THOUGHT OF THE WEEK ➡️

What’s Your North Star Metric? 🌟

Metrics and incentives are the things that make or break your business.

Let’s talk about NSM (North Star Metrics) for a second.

As you might guess from its name, it involves identifying the core KPI that signifies your desired business success.

But before we talk about your work, let’s get personal.

Do you know what your North Star is?

I didn’t… until I realized that without it, I was lost.

I couldn’t articulate what I was missing, but I knew I was off course.

I wrote about this about six months ago in this newsletter in a Go Forward Thought entitled, “The #1 Mistake NOT to Make as a Founder.”

I’ve been digging in since then to truly understand my North Star. I like how sociologist and best-selling author Martha Beck puts it:

Back in March, I told you my North Star is helping brands become better versions of themselves.

That’s a vague metric that doesn’t feel quite measurable.

So, I leaned in and thought more about what’s in my “Genius Zone,” or what I call the “Green Zone.”

In your Green Zone, you’re highly engaged and working in an inspired flow state, producing innovative, unique, and next-level work. You’ve got all cylinders firing so you can put the pedal to the metal on game-changing, money-making, empire-building creativity.

I made a list of actions and behaviors that characterize my Green Zone:

• Partnering with entrepreneurs to aid them in discovering problems that need novel solutions.
• Helping founders start and scale businesses that convert prospects into progress with creative capital and creative obsession.
• Studying the state of the art and bringing my own experience into the equation to create tools, hacks, and frameworks that make it understandable and usable for others.
• Moving fast and connecting things: people, platforms, and possibilities.

In other words, I am happiest when learning, experimenting, and exploring — free from the mundane. I'm also generating generational wealth for myself and the companies I partner with in this space.

That’s business bliss for me.

This leads me to define my North Star:

My NSM is the percentage of time I spend in my Green Zone.

My goal is to direct 80% of my energy into my Green Zone.

Business isn't all rainbows and sunshine, but striving for 80/20 in the right direction is.

This is all quantifiable (read the Green Zone article), which makes it actionable, starting with an energy audit.

And sure enough, things started to shift once I started moving toward my North Star and measuring my daily progress against it.

Here are the new projects I’ve launched lately, thanks to ensuring my energy isn’t zapped by low-value/low-return work and that I maximize my time in the Green Zone:

• Invested in and co-founded EasyGen, the $2-a-day ghostwriter that helps you build your brand on LinkedIn. It was a small investment and a bit of love, and we recently broke $250,000 in ARR just three months post-launch.
• Took The Resonance (my venture studio) out of stealth mode.
• Rebranded a deep-tech energy company named Equilibrium Energy. They are helping leading global companies tackle climate change responsibly.
• Launched a gaming company’s new studio.
• Invested in and raised capital for a disruptive new relationship intelligence platform.
• Built an AI learning tool that Sam Parr thought was pretty rad. I wrote every line of code myself (well, with some help from my AI friends). It’s had thousands of users and submissions (zero dollars on paid marketing spent).
• Designing a new category with an engineering-led ML startup in the Machine Learning Ops/R&D space.

I'm sharing all these details to illustrate how defining your North Star can guide you toward greater satisfaction and prosperity.

Follow my lead and take a deep dive into your Green Zone to prioritize your personal and professional growth.

Reimagining KPIs

Likewise, your business' North Star isn’t just a metric; it’s the core KPI. And KPIs aren’t what you think they are, either.

Tracking for the sake of tracking is a worthless indication of “business progress.” (Or personal progress, for that matter.)

What we need today is a more human-centered approach to KPIs. Instead of dry, generic metrics, think of KPIs as tools to Keep People Interested, Informed, Involved, and Inspired.
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Here’s what that means:

• “Interested” means you pique people’s curiosity and earn their attention. Indicators include the length of time engaging with your content (i.e., reading your blogs to the end, responding to your newsletter, and watching your videos to the end).
• “Informed” is about offering them something of educational value. You can see if your teaching is getting through by tracking feedback and knowledge gained through surveys, quizzes, and content that tests their info retention.
• “Involved” shows you’re connecting — it’s all about participation. Are your people commenting, active in your community, or contributing to your forums or social media pages? Do they tune in when you go live online or host a webinar?
• “Inspired” is at the heart of your strategy. Are you making an emotional connection? Sentiment analysis will help you understand if what you’re sharing is moving, motivating, or otherwise inspiring people to act.
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Your Company's North Star Metric

As you define your business' NSM, remember that this metric should reflect the essential value you provide to your customers. After all, it's the big kahuna that everything else ladders up to.

For example, here are some NSMs for iconic customer-focused brands:

• Airbnb: Nights Booked
• Amazon: Number of Purchases Per Month
• Facebook: Monthly Active Users (MAU)
• Medium: Total Time Spent Reading
• Netflix: Hours Watched
• Peloton: Workouts Per Month Per Member
• Plaid: Bank Accounts Linked
• Quora: Number of Questions Answered
• Robinhood: Funded Accounts
• Shopify: Revenue Per Merchant
• Spotify: Total Listening Hours
• Uber: Number of Rides
• Zoom: Weekly Hosted Meetings

What do they all have in common? A relentless focus on all of the “Is” in the redefined KPIs. Plus, one more: how Invested in your brand your customer is — and vice versa.

Once you work out your North Star Metrics — personally and professionally — you’ll have something invaluable in business and life: an infallible compass.

It’s what will keep you on track and ever forward obsessed.

I love to hear about people's North Star Metrics, so reply and tell me about your NSM. I respond to every email. (It's one of the few things I don't have AI do for me 😉.) And if you're stuck, let me know, too. I can help point you in the right direction.

Always here to help 🙌
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​Pete Sena​

My Obsession of the Week 🖤:

Learning How to Learn

I started tinkering with a new way to learn things. Inspired by Sam Parr’s Anti-MBA, I created a new tool. Take it for a spin, and lemme know what you make with it.

Bottom line: You don’t need an MBA to experiment. The most successful people I know learn by doing.

Thanks so much for reading this edition of The Forward Obsessed Founder — you can also check out this issue on the web [Link].
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​Spread the word and grow my mission together

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