Measure what matters

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” While it may seem obvious, many businesses, even large corporates, still overlook the importance of setting up the right measurement systems early on.

📊 Tracking key growth metrics isn’t optional — it’s the foundation of sustainable business growth.

Once you’ve got your MVP, or you’re about to launch in the market, it’s crucial to measure how users interact with your product. This might seem like an upfront investment, but it’s one that will pay off in the long run as you will be saving money on negative ROI marketing channels, ineffective product fixes & operational overload.

⚡⚡⚡ VIDEO ⚡⚡⚡

This newsletter is based on Solid Water co-founder's Maria Tsarkova presentation at Barclays Eagle Labs webinar. Click to see the full video and delve deeper into the world of growth metrics 🔥

Finding the right growth metric ✅

Every marketer is familiar with terms like cost-per-click (CPC), cost-per-install (CPI), and click-through rate (CTR). While these are essential to track, one question remains:

How do you know which metrics truly determine the health of your business in this moment in time?

The answer lies in one core concept: the North Star Metric.

You’ve heard the term a million times. But here’s the thing — it’s often misunderstood. A North Star Metric isn’t just about sales or conversion rates. It’s about identifying the key action that, once a user takes it, indicates they’ve experienced the core value of your product — and are likely to return.

💡 For example:

• Slack’s North Star KPI is a team exchanging 2,000 messages on the platform. Slack found that when teams hit this threshold, they’re fully invested in the platform, and revenue follows naturally.
• Facebook’s early KPI focused on users with seven or more friends because they realized that this level of engagement ensured users would keep coming back to the platform and their time could be monetized.

Maria Tsarkova, co-founder at Solid Water agency:

"I still remember a conversation with an audiobook app. They were about to launch a massive awareness campaign, confident that once they gained market visibility engaged users would instantly follow. But something felt off. Why pour money into awareness if you don’t know your current users' CLV?

In reality, users were signing up but not sticking around. We recommended they focus on the number of books consumed per user in 30 days as their new North Star KPI. This would change their marketing team's focus to retention mechanisms like in-app messages, emails, promos, and product loyalty features. After running some tests, this strategy would help extract maximum value out of any user who lands on the platform."

Mapping the customer journey 🗺️

When we think of the customer journey, most of us boil it down to 3 stages: awareness, consideration, and purchase. But real customer journeys are messier and much more complex.

Customer journey starts before your customers even interact with the brand or the product.

This is the real path your customer goes through.

For instance, if you’re developing a bill-splitting app, the customer journey may begin when a user faces the hassle of managing shared bills in a flat. In the first couple of months, user may rely on their memory, but after some time their pain point appears and it could be a lack of convenient tools for expense tracking.

Marketers' job is to make your product appear in front of that person at the right time and guide them smoothly from recognition of the problem to solving it with your app — and then work on keeping the user engaged of course.

Based on the customer's real journey to the North Star, we select various marketing tools that are more appropriate for a particular stage and the customer's mental state.

Anastasia Dobronravova, Head of Strategic Marketing at Solid Water:

"For example, when someone has a toothache, they seek advice from family or friends, To make sure your clinic is recommended, you should work on incentivized referral and review-sharing. Similarly, an online shopping app might notice a loyal user hasn't logged in for two months and send them a personalized email with a discount code for an item on their wishlist. But your key takeaway is:

Understanding this multi-stage journey helps you target the right channels, optimize your messaging, and remove friction points that might prevent users from progressing 💡"

Speak to your customers (yes, real conversations!) 🎙️

Everyone knows how important it is to talk to your customers, but what often gets overlooked is that these conversations can do more than just help you build a great product — they can also enhance your growth marketing and analytics.

At Solid Water Marketing Agency we conduct interviews to identify what needs to be measured. This forms the foundation of our marketing infrastructure.

Maria Tsarkova, co-founder at Solid Water marketing agency:

"A fintech app was launching a digital marketing campaign targeting a blue-collar segment. Through interviews, it was found that this audience has a cultural mistrust of financial services and it was creating an invisible barrier for users to make the first transaction.

So instead of investing in different channels, the Solid Water team localized messages around trust, transparently showed the platform’s fees, and emphasized user support chat all in the native languages of key customer groups"

Focus on what matters: build a dashboard 📊

Once you’ve identified your North Star KPI and mapped out the customer journey, it’s time to start tracking. You’ll want to focus on the right metrics at every stage — daily, weekly, and monthly — to understand what’s working and where users are getting stuck.

📈 Here’s a quick checklist to get you started:

• Acquisition funnel: Which channels are bringing in high-quality traffic?
• Product engagement: Are users coming back regularly? Are they exploring new features?
• Customer segmentation: Who are your highest-value customers, and how are they interacting with your product?

Having a dashboard that you and your team can refer to every day is crucial to staying aligned and making data-driven decisions.

The wrap-up: the road to growth 🚀

Growth isn’t about chasing immediate results or pouring resources into the flashiest marketing tactics. True, sustainable growth comes from understanding your users at a deeper level, tracking the behaviors that truly matter, and building a marketing strategy that fosters long-term engagement and loyalty. And your best friend here is your data.

In the end, growth is a marathon, not a sprint. By building a strategy rooted in real user insights and data that drives decision-making, you’ll position your business for sustainable success — one that grows with your users, not just your metrics.

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