Early-stage companies are still figuring out how to build the right product and keep users happy. This is why they should mostly focus on the Retention and Activation stages of the AARRR funnel (in that order).
First, you want to make sure that people stick to your product and come back to it. It's okay if you need to set people up manually at that stage, or if you don't have the best onboarding. It's far more important to know that people are happy with the core product experience first.
Then, you can look at Activation and make sure that it's easy for people to sign up and get started with your product.
Don't waste time optimizing your acquisition channels until your product is sticky enough. You'll end up losing a lot of potential users otherwise.
You'll find below an example built around a fictitious company. Your OKRs should move from quarter to quarter and map to your company's reality – that's why we thought it's best to illustrate things as a case study that you can take inspiration from.
Askawoof is a startup building a platform to help companies run customer satisfaction surveys. They've been working on their beta for 3 months, and decided to set some OKRs to get the product ready for launch.
Some of your objectives will be hard to achieve within a quarter. This is often the case when building core features. So what should you do? The answer is to find leading indicators of success.
You might not be able to charge your customers today, but you can still ask your users if they'd pay for it. In this case, the team at Askawoof decides to send surveys early to measure Product/Market fit while they wait to have true retention scores.
Our platform is a must-have tool for our beta users
Get a 70% Product/Market fit score
Get to 300 weekly survey responses sent back to customers
Pass 150 weekly active users in the beta
Explore more OKR Templates →
Users successfully onboard the product by themselves
Reduce onboarding churn from 50% to 25%
Reduce the time to first survey from 48h to 30mins
Reduce average activation time from 5 days to 48h
Explore more OKR Templates →
A common mistake when tracking OKRs is to use a spreadsheet. They’re flexible, but you’ll lack the ability to see trends and it’ll quickly become hard to manage for your team.
Instead you can use Tability to simplify the tracking of your OKRs–and as a bonus, you’ll find dozens of templates ready to go in the app.
If you’re looking for some inspiration, here are some example of metrics that can be relevant for your Key Results.
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
NPS is seen as a general indicator of happiness for your customers. It measures how likely your users are to recommend your product.
Product/Market Fit score
The Product/Market Fit survey asks your user how disappointed they would be if your service no longer existed.
Daily/Weekly/Monthly Active Users (DAUs, WAUs, MAUs)
How many people are using your product every day/week/month.
Retention rate
What's the percentage of users that come back to your product every day/week/month.
Activation rate
What's the percentage of leads that turn into successful users?
Engagement
How do people interact with your content (it can be anything, from visits to specific sections to conversations in Intercom…)?
Monthly Recurring Revenue
How much revenue is generated every month by existing customers?
Signups
How many users sign up for your product?
Are we solving a real pain for our users?
Is our product sticky?
Do we have enough insights from the user?
How easy is it for people to get started?
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