Baremetrics Blog

https://stripe.com - It's beautiful but conveys all the information that you need quickly. It also has excellent copy. https://canny.io - Very crisp design and it conveys the use case really well. https://baremetrics.com - This has come such a long way and has stunning design.

If you use stripe, https://baremetrics.io/ allows you to automtically create a dashboard. http://hookfeed.com/ is great for notifications and monitoring.

Well, my company Drifty (http://drifty.com/) was largely that (we are 6 people now), though I don't use the term lifestyle business. Not that I don't think it's cool, but it doesn't fit what I want out of the company (I'm addicted to growth). It's not really about just being a lifestyle business though. The point is that there is so much opportunity out there right now that you can just be a few people, with no outside capital and make way more than $20k/mo. I would think followgen was one example of that. I'd be surprised if they weren't doing way more than $20k by the time they shut down the v1 service. Even if you want to go it alone, this guy is going to making way more than $20k a month soon, if I guess right: https://www.baremetrics.io/

Baremetrics (https://baremetrics.com) | 100% Remote | Full-time | Multiple Roles Support & Integrations Engineer (Ruby) -- https://apply.workable.com/baremetrics/j/F977B030C8/ Customer Advocate -- https://apply.workable.com/baremetrics/j/C88A8F9B5D/ Baremetrics is a business analytics & insights company. We provide the tools and data businesses need to make solid business decisions. Founded in 2013, we're working hard to help businesses spend less time crunching numbers and looking at spreadsheets and instead give them instant access to metrics and business insights that they need to run their businesses. We're not some flash-in-the-pan startup...we're five years old, profitable, doing over $1M in revenue and growing. Nearly 1,000 business from all over the world trust us to help them grow their businesses. We're looking for folks who like to solve problems and build a business and product that people genuinely love to interact with. Read about working at Baremetrics: https://baremetrics.com/about Benefits * Work from anywhere (we're 100% remote) * Minimum vacation policy * Competitive salary * Bonus structure * Flexible work hours * Full health, vision & dental insurance for you and your family * Annual company meetups * Kindle Paperwhite + Unlimited Books * Monthly "remote stipend" that you can use for anything

Is there anything from your freelance development projects that jumps out as potentially worthwhile? Many of the best bootstrapped SAAS businesses I've seen have come from problems people encountered while freelancing or working on other things: Tyler Tringas created StoreMapper based upon freelance work he was doing: http://tylertringas.com/storemapper-store-locator-bootstrapped-to-50k/ Andrew Culver created ChurnBuster after repeatedly running into credit card renewal problems for clients: https://www.churnbuster.com I built ExpeditedSSL - https://www.expeditedssl.com - after getting fed up with adding SSL to client sites. Josh Pigford built BareMetrics - https://baremetrics.com after getting frustrated with trying to understand his metrics from other SAAS projects. In general freelancing is a great spot to be in to observe what pains businesses have that are sufficiently difficult that they'll shell out actual amounts of money to deal with.

Per episode with the size audience mentioned, you're looking in the hundreds. Start out with one advertisement to test the waters. I ran one advertisement that had good results (5-10x return). Like an idiot, I assumed I milked the cow dry and should look for other podcasts or advertising mediums in general. That was dumb. I booked a couple of episodes again with Release Notes that produced the same ROI. If you're having success with an advertisement, don't be afraid to double down and spend thousands. Ideally, you should get a bulk discount from the show. I don't have conversion rates based on % listener or cost per listener. Would love to see podcast advertising evolve to this point in the future, but it certainly hasn't yet. The folks at Baremetrics (https://baremetrics.io/) run an awesome service for monthly recurring Saas companies that use Stripe. If you know what your lifetime customer value is, you really have more faith in your advertising dollars.

Love that the top page after homepage is /moveis/horny :D Felix Dennis was so right! Anyway, love everything about this whole open startups(1) thing. Really amazing to see what happens behind the scenes! (1) https://baremetrics.com/open-startups

I really like this idea. How are you different to Flightpath, Baremetrics etc? I've recently spent time following an excellent Google Docs financial model from Baremetrics[1] put online for free. I'd be remiss not to share here as an alternative. I agree, it does take some time to set up, and monthly some work. I believe founders without a finance background would find it fairly daunting (but can follow along with the blog post). I think you're offering the simplicity aspect and that's your main value prop being solved. Where do you see the products going in the future? The base modeling I don't think I'd pay for, but curious to see what network or flywheel effects you think might be there for users? [1] https://baremetrics.com/blog/saas-financial-model#model-template

Salaries? https://baremetrics.com/blog/why-we-spent-250000 > We aren’t spending Silicon Valley-amounts on salaries, but we’re certainly not on the low end. From the perspective wanting my team to love where they work and not have to worry about money, I’m very happy with the salaries everyone gets.

That's great then! BannerBear actually fits into OP's desire to be making $1-1.5k in 13 months! Kidding aside - yes, I get it. SAAS products take a while and are hard. According to BareMetrics, after a year most companies are making $3333 in MRR [0]. But if you're living in a 3rd world country that's usually plenty of cash if you've got decent margins. The spirit of including BannerBear was more like "think about the things people do in Zapier and put together that product". Also, I just like the BannerBear story. [0] https://baremetrics.com/blog/how-fast-saas-companies-hit-arr-milestone…

For subscriptions we use https://baremetrics.com/ There is a way to add one-off invoices as well. Slack bot, forecast charts and they keep adding features.

ConvertKit is an absolute rocketship of a bootstrapped company. What Nathan as done is nothing short of amazing, I'm saying that having followed your story for years. But that amazing MRR curve is the bootstrapped equivalent of a unicorn, which is what allows you to have those nice things. Taking them for granted or lamenting why other companies simply don't do the same is entirely unrealistic. Look at any of the other companies on the Baremetrics open startups page https://baremetrics.com/open-startups (save maybe Buffer). Should Baremetrics itself hire a SF developer, blowing 25%+ of their annual ARR on it? They've been around for years, and are doing pretty well. Of course they should not, that would be crazy, and it has nothing to do with the company being cheap. They should keep hiring for reasonable salaries in anywhere-but-SF.

$25K does seem somewhat pointless when you can wait a month and get that, with no dilution. Their offer was a bit low. However, it's not quite as insulting as you may think. Many bootstrapped SaaS businesses are valued at 3-6x profit (aka "discretionary earnings") [1]. At 3x, your business would be worth $720K, which makes 6% $43,200 At 6x, your business would be worth $1,440,000 which makes 6% equal to $86,400 [1] https://baremetrics.com/academy/how-to-value-a-saas-business

@pc Any thoughts on either acquiring https://baremetrics.com/ or creating similar functionality within Stripe? Seems like a natural extension to Billing to also have Revenue Analytics.

I believe there are already many solutions for this, https://baremetrics.com/ offers a paid service for reporting churn, sign up rates, conversion rates etc, https://clearbanc.com/ offers a free solution for the same metrics. I believe they both support stripe data as well.

A lot of b2b services have adopted that design style. https://www.octobat.com/ - https://baremetrics.com/ - https://www.intercom.com/ More I can't think of right now...

It'd be nice to have that in-house, but for now, Baremetrics gives you that kind of thing: https://baremetrics.com/

https://baremetrics.com/ has a very nice LP and the product UI by itself is awesome too https://demo.baremetrics.com/.

Software Engineer @ Baremetrics // Remote Baremetrics is the leading analytics tool for Stripe. We are a small, tightknit, completely remote team. Learn more about us at https://baremetrics.com/ We are looking for an experienced engineer to help make Baremetrics even better. We are growing quickly and are at the point where we need to adjust the architecture to handle the growth. These are exciting times with interesting challenges. Looking for someone who can communicate effectively and work with a remote team easily (we are in Slack all day). Familiarity with data analysis/statistics is not required, but definitely a bonus. Our stack includes Ruby on Rails, Postgres, Redis, Mongo, AWS, D3, the Stripe API, and more. For details and to apply, visit: https://baremetrics.workable.com/jobs/15463

I agree: right now the biggest competitor to PayPal isn't Apple Pay (or Amazon Payments, or Google Wallet)... it's Stripe. Another advantage Stripe has right now is what the developer community is building. 3rd party tools like http://baremetrics.io make Stripe even more attractive to business owners.

Looks like https://baremetrics.io and http://hookfeed.com combined. What are the main differences?

Thanks! So, we've benefited a lot from word-of-mouth thus far. For example, we've received referrals from friends running Baremetrics (http://baremetrics.io), HookFeed (http://hookfeed.io), and FirstOfficer (https://www.firstofficer.io) because Churn Buster is a logical progression for customers of those products who are now more aware of how much they're losing to failed payments. Our customers themselves also talk about the results they're getting in the subscription product circles they travel in.

https://baremetrics.io/ - Beremetrics if you using stripe as the payment gateway.

Baremetrics (https://www.baremetrics.io) by Josh Pigford is built off of Stripe. There are also a handful of dunning-related services that sit on top of Stripe, also.

> they can’t turn a profit, and for any hope to turn profit they need this continual growth at a loss, and at some point the investors dump the bag on the public getting a return in a bubble they created and let the public fund the losses. Could you provide some data to show that companies which, at IPO, have any cumulative loss or a very large cumulative loss (as a percentage of valuation or offering size), perform worse as investments or as going concerns? From your other comments, it seems like the foundation of your proposed change is that going public with significant losses is an attempt to get less-sophisticated investors to compensate more-sophisticated investors. While there are many arguments against your proposed change, the first step seems to be establishing that the problem you’re trying to solve actually exists. I’m not convinced that it does (but don’t have data either way - that’s just anecdotal), and in fact many - maybe most - institutional investors in private companies continue to hold post-IPO shares long after the lockup (and gradually sell over 1-3 years simply to diversify). As you investigate this, it might be worth reading about the “CAC payback period” and how it can lead to significant upfront losses: https://baremetrics.com/academy/cac-payback-period, https://kellblog.com/2016/03/17/cac-payback-period-the-most-misunderst…

Here's an example: https://jsreport.net/ It may seem like a complicated product, and I'm sure the guys behind it put in a lot of work to polish it, but the guts of the product are 3-4 well-established open-source libraries wrapped together with duct tape. Here's a shameless plug to something I built, as another example: https://smsinbox.net patio11 was kind enough to give me some feedback about that when I was getting started. I successfully charge businesses $75+ per month to use it, and although I'm proud of the programming work involved to build it, it is not substantially more complicated than BCC. EDIT: I noticed your comment on Indie Hackers about not feeling as qualified for B2B since you don't have a lot of experience working for companies. One way to tackle this is to build a product that participates inside a bigger ecosystem (Wordpress plugins are an example, or Shopify plugins or something like https://baremetrics.com/ in the Stripe ecosystem or my thing in the Twilio ecosystem). The awesome side effect of this approach is that it often simplifies distribution, since there are already communities established around those platforms.

SaaS Inspiration @DHH Startup School Talk (2008) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY This is the most inspiring SaaS talk, I still listen to it once a month or so for inspiration. You'll have to find the right idea, one that is interesting to you and still solves a B2B pain point that you'll enjoy solving. Do you have any experience working with businesses where you can build a SaaS to make something easier for them? Basically you're looking to build something for a business that provides them value that they would sign up for and willing to pay you money to use. You can see what others are having success with here: https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses https://baremetrics.com/open I always recommend listening to StartupsForTheRestOfUs.com. You don't need to aim for $1k/mo, almost any niche can grow to $10k/mo or even $100k/mo. So don't limit your dream. There is also https://nugget.one/ that will send you an idea per day and has a community support/discussion to help you execute on the one you choose to pursue. Good luck, let us know how it goes.

Oh I thought it was referencing the SaaS "ramp of death" from https://baremetrics.com/blog/long-slow-saas-ramp-of-death. Shows how much interpretations can change based on what you've already heard of I guess. :)

It's a trend, yes: - https://baremetrics.com/open-startups - https://openstartuplist.com/

I think he means if we are using their "Recover" product which I explained in my email that we absolutely don't use it. https://baremetrics.com/features/recover