The full story of "the one important thing" for startups

It seems like you first need to decide an even more important thing: Is profitability the ultimate metric for your business?

From the Ludicorp (Flickr) corporate philosophy:

Likewise, a business develops an identity by providing a product or a service to people. To do that it needs capital, and it needs to make a profit, but no more than it needs to have competent employees or customers or any other thing that enables production to take place. None of this is the goal of the activity.

It seems like your original metric led to a focus on quality, and Noah's suggested metric encourages a focus on growth and/or profitability. If you really can focus on only "one important thing" than I'd be worried that your quality will suffer as a result of this change in focus.

Source: http://www.ludicorp.com/about.php

It seems to me that the reason he went with Noah is because Noah suggested a double or triple of previous value of a metric. While he compared it to a 16% improvement in another.

What if he could reduce his cancellation rate from 3% to 1% and triple his Life Time Revenue? Wouldn't it be as important?

And what if he first reduced the cancellation rate from 3% to 1% and then increased the sign-up number threefold? Oh, but then he'd be almost 9 times as profitable because the same times-3 customers will stay longer.

Interesting post. I would, however, be interested to learn more about the insight that would go into the decision of which metric to focus on. Obviously this is highly contingent on your own business and your own desires, but I wonder if there's any real way to know what's best short of arbitrarily picking out what you feel is best. Another thing that I missed was the timeline for the chosen focus. Is this meant to be one week, two weeks, 3 months, 6 months? Save for the question at the bottom of the post, I'm not sure if this was addressed. Did I miss something? Really curious to see the evolution of this idea, though.

In a strange unexpected way, this post made me question the validity of Jason's advice in general. After all these years of writing, did he really not know how fast he wanted his business to grow? Or does it just make for an interesting blog post?