If revenue is your North Star, your company is destined to die.
Revenue-addicted companies become completely fixated on hitting made-up targets at all costs. Best case, putting too much emphasis on funnel optimization. But often, into things like dark UX patterns: ‘Let’s hide the free plan!’ ‘Let’s make the Xs smaller.’ ‘Let’s make the cancellation language really scary.’ That kind of crap.
What’s the alternative? Revenue as an output, not an objective.
At Lovable, we’re figuring this out right now. This year, we swapped our North Star metric to be daily active apps. That’s an even farther step back from revenue compared to our last year’s metric (number of paid users), but it’s for this exact reason: We know that lifting daily active apps ultimately drives revenue (and paid users), but the revenue is the outcome, not the objective.
To go even further on this, we’re also optimizing against a qualitative measure of value - the Lovable Score, which combines:
We’re surveying our users on a regular basis across these points, then standardizing the scores and weighting them for our particular priorities, and then making that a qualitative companion to our North Star, to keep our teams on track.