💡 Heartcore Insights
Hi there,
Welcome to the 102nd edition of Heartcore Consumer Insights. Curated with 🖤 by the Heartcore Team.
If you missed the past newsletters, you can catch up here. Now, let’s dive in!
The second most important metric for every company - Gokul Rajaram
Sean Ellis’s North Star Metric (NSM) concept is defined as the “single metric that best captures the core value that your product delivers to customers.”
Facebook’s NSM is daily active users (DAUs), which captures value delivered to users; Square’s NSM is gross processing volume (GPV), which captures value delivered to sellers; AirBnB’s NSM is nights booked, which captures value delivered to both hosts and guests.
But the NSM is not sufficient. The NSM for an ecommerce company is orders. When the company runs a price promotion, orders get a nice boost. Is this a good way to grow the NSM? The NSM for a photo-sharing utility is DAUs. The marketing team stumbles upon an SEO hack that grows DAUs by 100%, but every user coming through the SEO channel stays on the landing page for exactly 5 seconds before bouncing.
All these are situations where the NSM was solid and well-meaning, but since there were no constraints on how the NSM should be achieved, it led to behaviors that maximize short-term gains over longer-term value creation.
The second most important metric for every company is thus a check metric on the NSM. It’s a metric that constrains the NSM and ensures that the NSM grows in a way that is sustainable and creates long-term value. The check metric goes beyond just outlining a high-level goal to emphasizing a key facet of the goal that critically matters to the company.
Every good company has a NSM. But if you want to build a company where people’s behaviors and actions are aligned with long-term value, don’t stop with the NSM. Put some more thought and add a check metric to your company’s top-level goals.
The Next Wave of Game-Changing Companies Will be Life-Changing Companies - Forerunner
The last few years brought a tsunami of change that heightened new and longstanding adversities - deep flaws exposed within our healthcare system, accelerated social and political polarization, climate change that’s evolved into an ever-present threat, and now soaring inflation and a looming recession.
Investors and builders spend so much time thinking about what new fringe behavior might move mainstream and what new technology is poised to reshape society. But in this tireless search for “what’s next” - we’re missing the most immediate, important billions-dollar opportunities hiding in plain sight: core life fundamentals for an increasingly complicated world.
As humanity becomes more and more complex and diverse, our paths for fulfilling core life needs become less and less obvious and reliable. Many of the longstanding institutions responsible for core life needs were designed for a more monolithic culture - particularly healthcare, government, education, the financial system, and community centers - and are not equipped to serve the ballooning scope of issues and priorities that now fall into these domains.
What does financial security look like amid widening wealth gaps and a shrinking middle class? What does family planning look like for LGBTQ+ couples, and for women everywhere who are stretched too thin and delaying parenting until much later in life? What infrastructure is needed to support a burgeoning class of small business owners, creators, and freelancers - who are increasingly monetizing their talents for supplementary income or full-time work? How do we make sustainability more accessible to businesses and consumers vs. it feeling like a pressure to shoulder the higher costs?
Businesses feverishly built products vying for our attention and wallets, but all the while, society’s underlying foundations grew increasingly brittle. It’s like we were building a city on top of a fault, and the cracks are now starting to split.
Looking ahead, there are massive opportunities in building for the traditional needs of non-traditional consumers, so society can have stronger, more reliable paths for purpose, direction, growth, and well-being.
TAM Mirages
Meaningful metrics: How data sharpened the focus of product teams
Generative AI: The Next Consumer Platform
The European Deep Tech Report - Dealroom
How Duolingo reignited user growth
Who Owns the Generative AI Platform?
What precedes an inflection in growth?
🇪🇺 Notable European early-stage Consumer rounds
Knowunity, a Germany-based P2P learning app for secondary school students, raises $9M with Redalpine/Stride.VC/Project A - link
Quell, a UK-based virtual fitness startup offering intense workouts while gaming, raises $10M with Tencent/Khosla/Heartcore 🖤 - link
Edurino, a Germany-based e-learning platform for children aged 4-8+, raises $10.5M with DN Capital/FJ Labs - link
Zellerfeld, a Germany/US-based 3D-printed shoe-maker, raises $15M with Founders Fund - link
Brigad, a France-based platform that connects self-employed professionals looking for short-term work within hospitality, raises $29M with Balderton/Serena - link
Lunar, a Denmark-based neo bank helping consumers manage their personal finances through a mobile-based banking app, raises $38M with Tencent/Seed Capital - link
🇺🇸 Notable US early-stage Consumer rounds
Frond, a US-based tool for building communities online, raises $3.3M with Cherry Ventures/Icehouse - link
Zarta, a US-based creator platform focused on pay-per-view video content, raises $5.7M with a16z/Dragonfly - link
Tiplink, a US-based wallet allowing to send crypto to anyone, raises $6M with Multicoin/Sequoia - link
Azra, a US-based blockchain-based developer of collectible and combat games, raises $10M with a16z/NFX/Coinbase - link
Marker Learning, a US-based platform making learning disability assessments and personalized action plans, raises $15M with a16z/Primary Venture - link
Jump, a US-based ticketing and fan experience startup, raises $20M with Forerunner/Courtside - link
Towns, a US-based web3 social startup allowing users to fully control their communities and private communications, raises $25.5M with a16z/Benchmark/Framwork - link
🔭 Notable later-stage Consumer rounds
The Believer Company, a US-based global games studio, raises $55M with Lightspeed/a16z/Bitkraft - link
Shef, a US-based homemade food marketplace helping cooks make an income by cooking and selling food to their communities, raises $73.5M with CRV - link
Kindbody, a US-based fertility clinic network and family-building benefits provider for employers, raises $100M with Perceptive Advisors - link
Skydio, a US-based startup using artificial intelligence to create flying drones, raises $230M with Linse Capital/a16z/NVIDIA - link
Abound, a UK-based consumer lending financial firm providing personal loans, raises $601M (debt & equity), with Citi - link
