I work for a seed-funded startup (online marketplace, 2 years in, 8-10 staff). We're having robust conversations internally about what our "North Star" metric is, and should be, for the coming months/year.

We're finding that trying to pin the North star on a simplistic metric has inherent issues - for example in our case, a concentration on monthly actives (who actually transact, not visitors / tyre-kickers) might cause the team to wantonly attract "the wrong type" of new user, cause short term transaction spikes, and bring on major churn. A concentration on #transactions might possibly cause the team to overtly facilitate low-value transactions. A focus on $transactions/$ATV might bring on a rush to push the higher-value users, possibly annoying them and causing disengagement/churn.

Without giving up any sensitive details, how did the startup you work(ed) at tackle pinning down a North Star metric for the whole team to push towards?

Interested in any & all constructive feedback. Thanks.