Net Promoter Score

In Product Led Growth — The End User Era, Net Promoter Score (NPS) is the metric Kyle’s notes are explicitly skeptical of. Leaning on OpenView’s 2018 SaaS benchmarking, the book argues NPS is “not very predictive” of retention: every 10 additional NPS points correlates to only ~0.9% higher logo retention and ~0.55% higher net-dollar retention. The takeaway — “NPS doesn’t have mystical powers and it should not be exalted” — is that NPS measures how many customers say they would refer a product, so a better move is to track what customers actually do: real referrals, referrals per customer, customer health scores, and product stickiness (Net Revenue Retention, retention curves).

The argument ties into the book’s broader retention thesis: most SaaS churn is decided in the first week of use, which makes Onboarding the central lever, and leading indicators (sticky features, integrations) beat lagging ones. NPS isn’t dismissed entirely — “it’s certainly fine to track NPS, but let’s be realistic about what it tells us… and complement NPS with other metrics” — but it’s demoted from a north-star to one weak signal among many.

Context: Net Promoter Score is a widely used customer-loyalty metric (created by Fred Reichheld / Bain) based on a single “how likely are you to recommend…” survey question scored 0–10, with respondents bucketed into promoters, passives, and detractors.

Where this appears

• Product Led Growth — The End User Era — NPS critiqued as a poor predictor of SaaS retention; the book recommends tracking actual referrals, customer health, and stickiness instead