OCV follows the mantra that “growth solves (nearly) all problems.” Below are typical target milestones for OCV companies. They’re meant to be ambitious. Also, adaptable, based on each company’s specific situation. If founders propose other goals in place of those outlined below, they cannot be missed without urgent remediation. Accountability is important for us to achieve desired outcomes for every company.
North star: 1 blog post that ranks in the top 30 of on Hacker News (HN) per two weeks
Generating awareness of your company is the highest priority in the earliest stages of building your company. People need to know you exist before you can gain users, recruit team members, and get feedback. OCV advises the founders to focus on content marketing starting on day one because it’s a highly effective and cost-efficient way to gain attention and interest. Publishing interesting content regularly will grow your website traffic, attract talent, and build an audience that can eventually be converted into users.
What you'll probably need to do during this quarter:
North star: 20% growth number of unique contributors from the wider community with merged contributions per two weeks
Building up your community of contributors speeds up product innovation. Focus on eliminating friction in the contribution process and enabling the community to make meaningful improvements to the codebase. An active community of contributors will make improvements like bug fixes and performance issues go faster. Growing your network of contributors will also positively impact product awareness as people tend to share their involvement with their networks. Some of the things you do to make it easy to contribute also make your engineers more effective. If you don't grow the contributions from the wider community early on to a significant part, it is really hard to do so later. Overall, the open source project should be better off.
What you'll probably need to do during this quarter:
North star: Increase active installations by 20% per two weeks
User growth is one of the most important metrics for securing investor funding. Strong user growth shows traction and is an early proof point that there is a need for what you’re creating. For early companies, about [15-30% of free users will convert into paid users](https://userpilot.com/blog/saas-average-conversion-rate/#:~:text=15%25 is considered a good,rate between 50-75%25.). Rapid user growth is the path to revenue.