14 customisable OKR examples for Startups
What are Startups OKRs?
The Objective and Key Results (OKR) framework is a simple goal-setting methodology that was introduced at Intel by Andy Grove in the 70s. It became popular after John Doerr introduced it to Google in the 90s, and it's now used by teams of all sizes to set and track ambitious goals at scale.
Crafting effective OKRs can be challenging, particularly for beginners. Emphasizing outcomes rather than projects should be the core of your planning.
We have a collection of OKRs examples for Startups to give you some inspiration. You can use any of the templates below as a starting point for your OKRs.
If you want to learn more about the framework, you can read our OKR guide online.
Building your own Startups OKRs with AI
While we have some examples available, it's likely that you'll have specific scenarios that aren't covered here. You can use our free AI generator below or our more complete goal-setting system to generate your own OKRs.
Feel free to explore our tools:
- Use our free OKR generator
- Use Tability, a complete platform to set and track OKRs and initiatives, including a GPT-4 powered goal generator
Our customisable Startups OKRs examples
We've added many examples of Startups Objectives and Key Results, but we did not stop there. Understanding the difference between OKRs and projects is important, so we also added examples of strategic initiatives that relate to the OKRs.
Hope you'll find this helpful!
1. OKRs to increase online community subscriptions for startups
Increase online community subscriptions for startups
Achieve a 20% increase in the overall number of startups subscribed
Offer incentives or discounts to existing customers for referring new startups to subscribe- Improve and optimize the onboarding process to increase conversion rates for new subscriptions
- Develop and implement targeted marketing campaigns to attract new startup subscribers
- Conduct market research to identify potential target audience for startup subscriptions
- Increase user engagement by 15% to encourage startups to stay subscribed
- Improve onboarding experience with a guided tutorial showcasing key features
- Provide regular surveys or feedback forms to gather insights on user needs and preferences
- Send personalized emails with helpful tips and success stories to inspire startups
- Create an online community for startups to share experiences and network with peers
- Generate 50% more leads through targeted marketing campaigns
- Implement lead nurturing campaigns using email marketing automation to engage and convert leads
- Optimize landing pages with clear call-to-actions and forms to capture leads effectively
- Identify target audience demographics and develop personalized marketing messages for each segment
- Analyze campaign performance data regularly to identify areas of improvement and adjust strategies
- Improve website conversion rate by 10% to attract more startups
- Utilize remarketing strategies to re-engage with potential startup customers and drive conversions
- Implement A/B testing for different call-to-action buttons and optimize based on performance
- Optimize landing page design and content to increase user engagement and conversion
- Enhance website loading speed to reduce bounce rate and improve user experience
2. OKRs to improve customer satisfaction
- Achieve next level customer love ❤️
- Get 15 new 5-star ratings on G2 Crowd
- Reach out to users high NPS feedback asking for review
- Reduce the number of weekly support tickets by 50%
- Create a self serve documentation portal
- Improve the NPS score from 12 to 20
- Create a list of 15 highly requested features to implement
3. OKRs to secure Seed funding
- Be on track for Seed funding
- Reach $200k ARR
- Show a 3x year-on-year revenue growth
4. OKRs to drastically improve onboarding and activation
- Get amazing improvements in our onboarding process
- Increase the number of trials/week from 20 to 35
- Display clear CTAs to help non-admins request upgrades
- Add 5 clear upgrade paths for users
- Increase week-1 activation rate from 55% to 65%
- Identify drop-offs
- Instrument activation funnel in Amplitude
- Tackle top 5 low-hanging fruits to improve onboarding
- Reduce trials churn from 46% to 30%
- Implement fixes following feedback
- Talk to 20 churned customers to understand what went wrong
5. OKRs to get a solid growth engine
- Create a solid growth engine
- Increase weekly leads by 30%
- We're getting 0.1 leads/active customer/week
- 30% of new leads start a trial
6. OKRs to build an amazing user experience
- Build an amazing user experience
- Increase the number of weekly active users from 8k to 10k
- Implement the equivalent of 100 votes in features
- Identify top voted feature requests
- Improve our NPS from 50 to 75
- Reach out to 10 low NPS scores to understand their frustrations
7. OKRs to identify high-potential startups for potential investment
- Identify high-potential startups for potential investment
- Attend or participate in a minimum of 3 startup pitch events to expand network and discover new opportunities
- Register and RSVP for the chosen startup pitch events
- Engage with fellow entrepreneurs and exchange contact information for future collaboration
- Prepare a concise pitch to present at the startup pitch events
- Research upcoming startup pitch events in the local area
- Research and evaluate a minimum of 20 startups with innovative and scalable business models
- Conduct thorough research on each startup's business model and scalability
- Create a report summarizing the findings and key insights from the research
- Compile a list of 20 startups with innovative business models
- Evaluate the potential of each startup based on identified criteria
- Conduct thorough due diligence on at least 10 startups, assessing financials, market potential, and team
- Investigate the background and expertise of the team members in 10 startups
- Summarize the findings of due diligence in concise reports for each startup assessed
- Research and analyze the financial statements of 10 startups for detailed assessment
- Evaluate the market potential of 10 startups through market analysis and potential growth opportunities
- Establish partnerships with at least 2 trusted venture capitalists or angel investors for knowledge-sharing and potential co-investment opportunities
- Reach out to the selected venture capitalists or angel investors to express interest in collaboration
- Research and identify potential venture capitalists or angel investors with established credibility
- Set up meetings or calls with the identified partners to discuss knowledge-sharing and co-investment opportunities
- Establish formal agreements and partnerships with the selected venture capitalists or angel investors
8. OKRs to develop a new in-product referrals program
- Develop a new in-product referrals program
- Improve onboarding of referred users to keep conversion above 40%
- Get 3 referrals per customers on average across all accounts
- Identify opportunities for network effects
- Get 60% of new customer accounts to refer at least one other customer
- Add referral step in the onboarding drip feed
- Create incentive to reward customers for referring users
9. OKRs to improve consulting services
- Deliver an amazing experience to customers
- Reduce time-to-completion of documentation projects by 30%
- Reduce the number of documentation defects by 25%
- Increase NPS from 0 to 30
- Create an incredible growth funnel
- Build a pipeline of $200K
- Increase average contract value by 20%
- Increase win/rate percentage by 30%
10. OKRs to help customers expand usage faster
- Help customers expand faster
- 25% of new customers expand to 5+ users in their first week.
- Include step to invite team in the onboarding process
- Add domain sharing marketing email to the drip feed
- 60% of customers have turned on the team domain sharing
- Publish post explaining the benefits of using the platform with a team
- Run special marketing campaign to increase activation
11. OKRs to create a successful MVP
- Create a successful MVP
- Our NPS is above 40 with early adopters
- Identify and solve top 5 improvement requests
- Sign up for Wootric to get NPS feedback
- Our 8-week retention rate is above 30%
- 60% of users complete their onboarding process
12. OKRs to encourage user referrals
- Accelerate momentum with user referrals
- Increase weekly in-app referrals from 1.5 to 2.5/week
- Add referral link in footer of weekly customer comms
- Improve visibility of referral actions
- Publish 5 case studies from top customers
- Identify top 10 customers for case studies
- Secure 5 interviews
- Secure 20 new G2 reviews score 4+ stars
- Contact 40 users scoring us NPS 9+ and ask for a review
13. OKRs to launch a successful MVP
- Launch a successful MVP
- Achieve a NPS score above 40
- Fix core issues mentioned in surveys
- Send NPS surveys to all users
- Convert 5 existing customers to paid
- Launch pricing plans
- Integrate with Stripe
- We have 100 weekly active users
- Implement core features
- Onboard users
- Build a landing page to recruit beta users
14. OKRs to secure Series A funding
- Be on track for Series A funding
- Show a 3x year-on-year revenue growth
- Reach $1.5M ARR
Startups OKR best practices to boost success
Generally speaking, your objectives should be ambitious yet achievable, and your key results should be measurable and time-bound (using the SMART framework can be helpful). It is also recommended to list strategic initiatives under your key results, as it'll help you avoid the common mistake of listing projects in your KRs.
Here are a couple of best practices extracted from our OKR implementation guide 👇
Tip #1: Limit the number of key results
The #1 role of OKRs is to help you and your team focus on what really matters. Business-as-usual activities will still be happening, but you do not need to track your entire roadmap in the OKRs.
We recommend having 3-4 objectives, and 3-4 key results per objective. A platform like Tability can run audits on your data to help you identify the plans that have too many goals.
Tability's audit dashboard will highlight opportunities to improve OKRsTip #2: Commit to weekly OKR check-ins
Don't fall into the set-and-forget trap. It is important to adopt a weekly check-in process to get the full value of your OKRs and make your strategy agile – otherwise this is nothing more than a reporting exercise.
Being able to see trends for your key results will also keep yourself honest.
Tability's check-ins will save you hours and increase transparencyTip #3: No more than 2 yellow statuses in a row
Yes, this is another tip for goal-tracking instead of goal-setting (but you'll get plenty of OKR examples above). But, once you have your goals defined, it will be your ability to keep the right sense of urgency that will make the difference.
As a rule of thumb, it's best to avoid having more than 2 yellow/at risk statuses in a row.
Make a call on the 3rd update. You should be either back on track, or off track. This sounds harsh but it's the best way to signal risks early enough to fix things.
How to turn your Startups OKRs in a strategy map
OKRs without regular progress updates are just KPIs. You'll need to update progress on your OKRs every week to get the full benefits from the framework. Reviewing progress periodically has several advantages:
- It brings the goals back to the top of the mind
- It will highlight poorly set OKRs
- It will surface execution risks
- It improves transparency and accountability
Spreadsheets are enough to get started. Then, once you need to scale you can use a proper OKR platform to make things easier.
Tability's Strategy Map makes it easy to see all your org's OKRsIf you're not yet set on a tool, you can check out the 5 best OKR tracking templates guide to find the best way to monitor progress during the quarter.
More Startups OKR templates
We have more templates to help you draft your team goals and OKRs.
- OKRs to increase revenue from upgrades/downgrades to 400€
- OKRs to increase transaction volume
- OKRs to enhance product-market fit by conducting customer research and implementing user feedback
- OKRs to improve IT Service Management process efficiency and efficacy
- OKRs to centralize prospecting features within a singular client intelligence hub
- OKRs to increase the count of SQLs
OKRs resources
Here are a list of resources to help you adopt the Objectives and Key Results framework.
- To learn: What is the meaning of OKRs
- Blog posts: ODT Blog
- Success metrics: KPIs examples
Create more examples in our app
You can use Tability to create OKRs with AI – and keep yourself accountable 👀
Tability is a unique goal-tracking platform built to save hours at work and help teams stay on top of their goals.
1 Create your workspace
2 Build plans in seconds with AI
3Track your progress