How Polarsteps Hit $10M ARR by Obsessing Over NPS

Koen Droste lost 90% of Polarsteps' users overnight when COVID hit—yet still matched the prior year's revenue. That resilience wasn't luck. It was the result of a years-long obsession with NPS over revenue, quality over speed, and focus over distraction.

Key Facts

• Users at peak: 10 million users (Koen Droste)
• Annual revenue: Over €10 million per year from printed photo books (Koen Droste)
• Marketing spend (first 8 years): Zero euros (Koen Droste)
• Initial NPS score at launch: +40, grown to 60+ within two years (Koen Droste)
• First external funding: €50,000 from a traveller-investor before launch (Koen Droste)

Why NPS—Not Revenue—Should Be Your North-Star Metric

For consumer apps dependent on word-of-mouth, NPS is the most direct proxy for viral growth. When every user's score reflects how likely they are to recommend your product, improving NPS is literally the same as improving your referral engine—which compounds far more than any short-term revenue metric.

Most early-stage founders are pressured to show revenue traction fast. Koen Droste took the opposite bet. For the first two years after Polarsteps launched in 2015, the team tracked NPS above everything else—including signups, retention, and revenue.

The logic is straightforward. As Droste explains, NPS asks users how likely they are to recommend your product to a friend. If you improve that score, you are by definition making your product more referrable—which is the engine of viral growth. Polarsteps started at an NPS of +40 and pushed it above 60 within two years, a shift Droste says made a 'massive difference in how many other users each of our users would acquire for us.'

Critically, this only works if everyone is aligned. Droste streamed raw NPS qualitative feedback directly into a company-wide Slack channel so every team member—from engineering to design—felt the pain points users described. And he made sure investors bought in before taking their money.

"If you really want to go for viral growth, people should just fall in love with your product. And we've always used Net Promoter Score as the key way to measure our success." — Koen Droste

"We were lucky to find investors who we could convince to be on board with making NPS the metric, which means that if we all agree on that NPS is what's going to get us to success, then let's not talk about revenue anymore." — Koen Droste

Building Before Launching: The Case for Quality Over Speed

Polarsteps spent roughly one year building before launching anything publicly. Their reasoning: in consumer apps, viral growth requires users to love the product, not just use it. A mediocre first impression kills word-of-mouth permanently. Quality is not a luxury—it's the distribution strategy.

The lean startup orthodoxy says ship fast, iterate, and break things. Droste pushed back. His team built for about a year before going live in March 2015, and he says the quality-first philosophy was intentional—not a symptom of slow execution.

The core insight is that consumer growth models depend on delight, not adequacy. As Droste puts it, you want users to be 'flabbergasted' enough to give a 9 or 10 on NPS—and then tell their friends. A product that merely works won't clear that bar.

Importantly, this wasn't blind perfectionism. The team validated continuously using prototypes and designs shown to real travellers. When prospective users responded with 'I would love this—where can I sign up?' that was enough validation to keep building rather than ship something half-finished.

"We've always tried to polish it a little bit more, make it look beautiful, because we found it important to make users happy with the experience and to not disappoint users." — Koen Droste

"People need to be flabbergasted to give that high score and to start promoting this product to their friends." — Koen Droste

• Showed polished design prototypes to travellers before writing a single line of code
• Used a designer as a co-founder from day one—unusual for an early-stage team
• Built only for iOS initially, skipping Android to reduce scope and maintain quality
• Launched the single-player tracking feature first; social sharing came a full year later

Why Partnerships Hurt More Than They Help Early On

Partnerships sound like free distribution but carry a hidden cost: distraction. Polarsteps ran a partnership with a major European travel brand and got 5,000 signups. But the time, product scope creep, and attention diverted from core product work made it a net negative compared to incremental NPS improvements.

Every startup hears the pitch: partner with a big brand, get access to their audience, grow faster. Droste tried it once and concluded the math rarely works in a young startup's favour.

The Polarsteps partnership with a well-known travel company produced around 5,000 signups—not nothing for an early-stage company. But partnerships always pull in product scope: integrations, tracking requirements, UI tweaks to satisfy the partner's needs. That's engineering time that doesn't compound.

Droste's reframe is about opportunity cost. A small product improvement that causes even a fractional daily increase in organic signups compounds indefinitely. A one-time partnership spike does not. For eight years, Polarsteps spent zero euros on marketing and did almost no partnerships—and reached 10 million users.

"I would rather bring, if we can do a small improvement to the product that causes a 0.001% increase in daily signups, then over time, the compound effects of that are worth way more than the 5,000 signups that I would get out of one of these partnerships." — Koen Droste

"Your time and your resources are so scarce in these early days as a startup, but you have to think about the opportunity cost of the time that you spent on that." — Koen Droste

Monetization: Why Polarsteps Waited Two Years to Make Its First Euro

Polarsteps earned its first revenue in 2017—two years after launch—by selling printed photo books to users who had already built their travel memories inside the app. The product validated itself: users were manually copying Polarsteps maps into books ordered elsewhere, signalling an obvious unmet need.

Droste had a monetization hypothesis from the very first pitch deck: if travellers store all their photos, routes, and stories in the app, they'll pay for a beautiful printed version. What gave him conviction was NPS feedback. Users were writing in to say they were already ordering photo books elsewhere and copy-pasting Polarsteps maps into them by hand.

'If you're looking for validation, there you have it,' Droste says. The team launched printed photo books in 2017 and turned them into a $10M-per-year revenue line without ever introducing a subscription.

The broader lesson is sequencing. By spending the first two years maximising product love and word-of-mouth, Polarsteps built an audience with deep engagement before asking for money. Monetisation attached naturally to behaviour users were already exhibiting.

"People in the NPS feedback started asking, 'I'm ordering photo books, but I'm uploading all the same photos and the same stories that I've already created on Polarsteps and I'm even copy-pasting your map into my printed photo book.' Well, if you're looking for validation, there you have it." — Koen Droste

"We're now 10 years down the road and we're making over 10 million euros a year with selling these books." — Koen Droste

Surviving COVID: What Happens When You Lose 90% of Users Overnight

When COVID hit in March 2020, Polarsteps lost 90% of active users in days. They survived because of two things: a $3M Series A raised two months earlier, and an unexpected discovery that lockdowns drove massive photo book orders from people reminiscing about past trips at home.

Few travel companies can say COVID was survivable. Polarsteps nearly wasn't. Droste describes watching 90% of active users disappear within days of the first lockdowns—a gut punch for any founder.

What saved them was balance sheet timing and an accidental business model insight. The team had closed a $3M Series A just two months before the pandemic hit, giving them runway to hold team size steady. Then they discovered that people stuck at home were ordering photo books of trips taken years earlier. Revenue in 2020 nearly matched 2019.

Droste also credits a strategic decision not to pivot. Rather than build COVID-specific features, the team bet that post-pandemic travel behaviour would return to normal. It did—and Polarsteps emerged without having scattered its product roadmap.

"When COVID hit in March 2020, we lost like 90% of our active users within a couple of days." — Koen Droste

"Lockdowns are a great time to order photo books, because if you're sitting on the couch anyway, you might as well order some books for trips that you took 10 years ago." — Koen Droste

The One Piece of Advice Koen Droste Gives Every Founder

Agree with your entire company—co-founders, team, and investors—on one single metric, then protect it from distraction. Merger offers, white-label deals, and partnership pitches will all pull focus. Founders who reach product-market fit almost always have a sharp, shared definition of what success looks like and refuse to deviate.

Droste's final advice distils everything Polarsteps learned into one principle: organisational alignment around a single metric is a competitive advantage, especially when money is running out and distractions multiply.

He's seen it derail other founders—not because they chose the wrong metric, but because investors or team members weren't truly bought in. When the runway gets short, a misaligned investor starts asking for revenue. That pressure breaks focus at exactly the wrong moment.

For Polarsteps, that metric was NPS. Every Monday update asked one question: did NPS improve? Merger conversations, white-label licensing deals, and partnership proposals all got evaluated against the same filter—does this help or hurt our ability to move that number?

"Agree with your investors and your co-founding team and all the people in your company on one metric. Make sure that everybody's on board with that and that you track it well. And don't lose focus because focus is so critical." — Koen Droste

"Especially in early states, if you don't have money, if you're approaching the end of your runway, it's so easy to get distracted." — Koen Droste

• Choose one metric before you raise money—not after pressure mounts
• Get investor sign-off on the metric explicitly, not implicitly
• Route raw user feedback to the whole team, not just product managers
• Evaluate every opportunity (partnerships, M&A, features) against that single metric

Conventional Startup Advice vs. Polarsteps' Approach