Earlier this year I failed to sell Baremetrics for $5m . But I learned a heaping pile of things from that and one of the biggest things I learned about was the world of asset sales and stock sales. This is about to get real nerdy but this is crucial if you're trying to sell a company. It could literally save you millions of dollars....
I failed to sell Baremetrics for $5m. While failure is 100% a part of success, it's only useful if you learn something. So, here are some of the things I learned from this little failure. Hopefully these are some things you can apply to your own company (present or future) that can save you a bit of pain.
In the past six years of Baremetrics' existence, I've received dozens upon dozens of emails from folks interested in acquiring Baremetrics. When you're running a transparent company that's growing, it just comes with the territory. Generally these conversations quickly fizzle once they realize I'm not even remotely interested in some quick, 1x revenue sale.
Intros, a product we launched to great fanfare three months ago, is being shutdown, having never made a single penny and costing our team months of work. https://baremetrics.com/blog/sunsetting-intros
Yesterday I wasn't feeling great, mentally. I had a level of anxiety I hadn't felt in a long time that started in the morning and really persisted through the night. I can't pinpoint it to any one specific thing. It was more the sum of a dozen small things. I felt like I hadn't been leading the team well through a big product change, parenting has been taxing lately, I was second guessing all sorts of life decisions, the things that typically bring me joy day in and out have just felt really uni...
As founders, a lot of our identities get wrapped up in our companies. Certainly within our industries, but even to family and friends it’s how people know us. And over time, we sort of become our companies. Most founders or CEOs are the “face” of their businesses and eventually they’re inseparable. Being wholly consumed by your company hurts not only you and the people around you, but even the company itself.
A couple of years ago, we were in a hard spot. I had just realized we were mere weeks away from running out of cash and had asked the whole team to take a pay cut while we figured out how to get profitable. But in addition to cutting costs, we needed to figure out how to speed up growth. One of the things we did to speed up growth was figure out who our “perfect customer” was. We’d spent the first two years making some big assumptions about who our ideal customer was and who we should target, bu...
When you’re just getting started, everything feels like a big deal. Everything. The tinniest things can turn in to huge showstoppers that drain time and, in many cases, money. But the longer you’re in the game, the more you realize how few things actually matter.
Where to publish something has becoming a difficult decision for a lot of businesses. You read so many stories about using various channels to distribute content and grow traffic, it's hard to know what does and doesn't work. Medium, in particular, has become a major player in the world of startup content, but is it really that great? https://baremetrics.com/blog/medium-back-to-blog
When building a startup, so much emphasis is put on “the product” or even “the customers”. Everything else takes a backseat. On some level, and at some points in a company’s lifecycle, this makes sense. Of course you’ll make sacrifices and you’ll have to work really hard and work really weird hours. But eventually, you’ll have to stop. The downsides far outweigh the benefits and the damage done to you and your team can be detrimental. That’s what I’m writing about to day. Managing the long term ...
Last week I hit some sort of boiling point with life and work. July was an incredibly stressful month for me both, personally and with work. Just lots of extremes, and it wore me down. Every single founder is struggling with something . Maybe it's big, maybe it's not. But there's always something . Even the most successful founders deal with this stuff and don't know what to do. Everybody’s winging it. https://baremetrics.com/blog/winging-it
There can be some really exciting days when you’re building a SaaS company, but the large majority are a slog. Just one foot in front of the other, slowly trudging your way up the hill in the muck. The hockey-stick growth you’ve envisioned feels laughably far away. Amazingly, you are growing every month, but it’s just…so…tedious. This, my friends, is the long, slow SaaS ramp of death. It’s perfectly normal and par for the course for the large majority of SaaS companies. Check it out! https://bar...
Founding a company is hard. You’ve got an infinite number of decisions to make while simultaneously trying to catch lightning in a bottle with creating something out of nothing. It’s even harder when you’re doing it alone. Being a solo founder, in many ways, stacks the deck against you. You’re left shouldering the weight of every single decision and don’t really have any one to share it with. However, there are some ways to make it easier and, in many cases, it can actually be a major pro to sta...
https://baremetrics.com/blog/most-startups-are-not-crushing-it Ask any startup founder how things are going and they’ll tell you it’s “going great”. They’ll talk about some new feature they’re rolling out, or a new round of funding. Or maybe they’ll mention how much user growth they’ve had or that they just got covered in TechCrunch. All signs will point to “crushing it”. But, for better or worse, there’s a very high probability that they are, in fact, not crushing it. The exact opposite, actual...
https://blog.baremetrics.com/startups-keep-it-classy-5bba13285cc6 Building a business makes relatively sane humans do some insane things. The past 10 years have been the modern day gold rush for tech. And I mean that in the sense where lots of people risk everything and make nothing while a few hit it big. And that “gold rush” culture makes people do some desperate things in the name of business survival. Every day founders have an infinite number of tiny decisions to make and it’s easy to get d...
https://blog.baremetrics.com/the-startup-echo-chamber-is-making-you-deaf-771eec220181 Being an entrepreneur is a lonely place, especially if you’re the founder/CEO. Sure, you may have co-founders, but the reality is, there’s a lot of weight on your shoulders, a lot of pressure (self-applied or otherwise) to not drop the ball. To combat this, we’re basically permanently in “problem solver” mode. Everything needs a solution. Which is a natural fit because most entrepreneurs are self-taught and lov...
https://blog.baremetrics.com/getting-out-of-the-startup-rat-race-66a5a0ca3055 I’m done. I’m tapping out. I’m bowing out of the startup rat race. No, we’re not shutting down Baremetrics. Very much the opposite. I’m just finished subscribing to and following the traditional startup mentality as we build our company. In June 2016, I realized we had less than two months of runway left. We had an existential crisis on our hands, the kind that you’ve read about hundreds of times. The kind where the bu...
https://baremetrics.com/blog/self-serve-cancellations-saved-our-business There may be no topic in the world of business that spurs such impassioned responses than self-serve versus manual cancellation of a subscription. Let’s just say the word “evil” gets tossed around a lot. There’s a lot that gets overlooked in the conversation about this, so I want to walk through the different sides of the arguments for/against and try to keep things as rational as possible. I sincerely want to have a constr...
https://baremetrics.com/blog/feature-framework “What feature should we build next?” Ain’t that the question of the year? While that next feature won’t save your business , it’s still important to actually improve your product and create more value for your customers. And figuring out what you should tackle next may be one of the hardest decisions you make on a regular basis. Most founders (heck, most people ) are overflowing with ideas. The problem is, most ideas are, you know…terrible. But they...
https://baremetrics.com/blog/marketing-idea-scoring-system What if you could put a system in place that instantly scores and prioritizes any marketing idea you had? You could focus in on exactly the strategies that are most likely bring you a return on your effort while minimizing costs and increasing impact. #synergy amirite?!? Lucky for you, we’ve got a system for doing just that, and I’ll walk you through how to set it up and get going today! The implementation of this is in a Google Spreadsh...
https://baremetrics.com/blog/new-features-will-not-save-your-business As a founder, you ooze optimism. It’s a necessary coping mechanism to deal with the volatile up’s and down’s of creating something out of nothing. But that becomes problematic when you’re still finding product/market fit as it makes you believe that next feature will be the feature that solves all of your product’s problems. It won’t. Andrew Chen calls this the Next Feature Fallacy . Above is a chart of our Monthly Recurring R...
https://baremetrics.com/blog/product-launch-sequence Our 7 day launch sequence for announcing anything If you launch something on the internet and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? I know. Deep. But seriously, how do you launch/release/announce/publish something and make sure people do in fact hear? Here at Baremetrics we have a launch sequence that we use variations of for basically anything we put out: articles, products, features, news…anything. It’s a repeatable set of steps...
When you’re building a business based on recurring revenue, what you want is predictability. The “recurring” part has a pretty strong measure of that, but getting more of that recurring payment upfront reduces churn and improves cashflow, letting you spend more money now to acquire customers faster. Most companies are very low-touch with annual plans. It’s offered as an option on pricing pages, and that’s usually where it’s left. But you can drastically improve conversions to annual plans by hav...
https://baremetrics.com/blog/reflection-business-updates It’s easy to focus on forward momentum. Looking to the future naturally has an optimistic flair and so we spend more time thinking about it and planning it out. But if we don’t stop to reflect on the past, we’ll miss out on things we could learn. Mistakes that we could, inadvertently, be repeating and best practices that we might fail to adopt. I don’t spend a lot of time reflecting on the past, but once a month I sit down and spend a morn...
When I hear the words “company culture” my gut reaction is generally to contort my face in some way that conveys “Ewwwwwwww” . It’s just one of those buzz phrases that gets thrown around without anyone knowing what it actually means . But as our team has grown and my role has changed , I’ve been able to step back and spend more time looking at the big picture. As I began to look at what other companies and founders had to say on the topic, I decided it’d be a healthy exercise to actually try to ...
Today we’re launching the biggest update in Baremetrics history: we’re expanding our platform to support Braintree and Recurly , in addition to the Stripe support we’ve always had (with more data sources on the way!). A chapter I didn’t plan on writing One of the most interesting parts of being an entrepreneur is the constant evolution. So much of my role is just putting things in motion. It’s sort of like pushing a snowball down a hill. Maybe it gets huge. Maybe it crumbles before it gets to th...
It’s a common startup benefit to have a “loose” or “unlimited” vacation policy. “Take all the time off you need!” “We don’t babysit you, take off whenever you need off!” But does anyone actually take off any more time than if they were working somewhere that had a “strict” or “limited” vacation policy? My hunch was that if we said we had unlimited vacation then the lack of limits would prevent anyone from actually taking off enough time. They’d self-impose boundaries and instead end up taking of...
You’ve plastered your job listing on every job board and social network known to man. Now comes the fun part: sifting through the hundreds or even thousands of applications. But how ? How do you narrow down a seemingly endless stream of folks who all want to be a part of your team? Baremetrics is a remote company. We have no main office. We use Earth Class Mail to scan, process and store all of our incoming mail. We all work from a mixture of coffee shops and home offices. Most of us only actual...
There’s a lot of talk about “work/life balance” and figuring out how to find some sort of perfect equilibrium wherein your personal life is completely divided from your work building a startup. This is not about that. In fact, it’s about the opposite. It’s about accepting they can’t possibly be separated, and that perfect equilibrium doesn’t exist. However, it’s not all doom and gloom. There are quite a few ways to help mentally process and sort through running your own business in a way that’s ...
https://baremetrics.com/blog/founder-mistakes Bless our little founder hearts. We’re eternal optimists who have great intentions paired with a propensity to try things that common sense would say is a bad idea. That means we try a lot of things, most of which don’t pan out. But it’s the things that do pan out that keep us motivated. Having talked to and seen the businesses of thousands of entrepreneurs, there are a few mistakes I’ve seen crop up regularly. You should always keep trying things th...
