Three worked examples

A solo HubSpot consultancy, sales-led

Start with a one-person agency selling HubSpot implementations. Name the game: productivity, you help a client's revenue team run faster. Name the motion: sales-led, the client signs a statement of work before anything is built, so all the value is delivered after the deal. That rules out every pre-contract engagement metric on sight. The value-receipt act is not "client logs into HubSpot"; it is the client's team actually working the system you built. A defensible star is weekly active teams inside delivered portals, the count of client teams genuinely using what you shipped each week. It sits after the contract, it measures whether your work landed, and it leads renewals by months. The borrowed alternative, demo signups or trial logins, would have measured the wrong side of the deal entirely.

A self-serve B2B SaaS tool, product-led

Now a small product-led SaaS, free trial, no sales call. Game: productivity again, but motion is the opposite, value precedes payment. Here the pre-trial-conversion crossing is the whole ballgame, so the star is an activation threshold in the Slack and Facebook mould: trial accounts that reach three active users in week one, the point at which a team has stopped evaluating and started depending. That single metric forecasts conversion far better than total signups, which only ever rises. Past product-market fit the same founder would climb the star to weekly active workspaces performing the core action, an aggregate of delivered value rather than a per-account threshold.

A transaction marketplace

Third, a booking marketplace, the rarer transaction game. The value act is unambiguous, an exchange completed, so the star is nights booked or orders placed, summed across the platform, exactly Airbnb's choice. Time spent browsing would be a trap here; a buyer who browses for an hour and books nothing received no value. The lesson across all three: the same word, value, resolves to three completely different acts, and the only way to find the right one is to name your own game, motion, and stage rather than reach for the metric of a company you admire. The same three lenses also drive choosing the one channel that works; the star and the channel are answers to versions of the same question about where your value actually lives.