Bending Spoons
Bending Spoons is known for its ability to build profitable apps in saturated markets. The KPI framework they use internally is less romantic than many pitch decks — and that is precisely why it works.
Every app in the Bending Spoons portfolio is measured with a primary metric: contribution margin per download. Not number of downloads, not DAU, not churn rate in isolation. A metric that collapses everything: net revenue (after store commission and refunds), cost of acquiring the download, and variable operational costs (support, server costs per user).
If contribution margin per download is positive and stable over time, the product is scalable. If it is negative, no feature optimisation will save it — the economic model is broken.
This has precise operational consequences: Bending Spoons does not optimise for user growth if that value is negative. It has abandoned apps with millions of downloads because contribution margin was not sustainable. It has acquired "small" products from other teams (like Evernote) because applying the framework to those products showed a potentially positive contribution margin after cost optimisation.
The lesson is not to copy this specific metric. It is to understand that every startup should have a north star metric that reflects the economic health of the model, not just growth.
The north star metric must be the one that, if optimised long-term, automatically produces all other positive metrics. If you need to monitor 12 KPIs, your north star is not the right one.