We just rolled out a change to Buffer’s very public revenue dashboard that resulted in a $25,000 increase in MRR. This article provides some backstory in to how we originally calculated metrics and the transition to a greatly improved version of metric calculation we’ve been building over the past year._ Very few things in life are black & white, but we so desperately want them to be. Life’s just easier when the choices are obvious. And that certainly holds true with entrepreneurship. Every ...
Jan 14, 2016•10 min•Ep. 16
When you’re building a business, cash is king. Cash lets you do things like hiring and customer acquisition, and the more of it you’ve got at any given time, the faster (theoretically) you can grow. We recently tried something that got us an extra $14,000 in cash in seven days. Let’s take a look at how we did it. So, what’s great about subscription businesses is the relative stability. You get a steady-ish stream of revenue that slowly increases over time and is much less susceptible to the whim...
Dec 09, 2015•7 min•Ep. 15
Three months ago, we introduced a Free plan…and it nearly brought Baremetrics to its knees. Let’s take a look at what we did, how it affected our business and how it was ultimately a failure. When I first built and launched Baremetrics over two years ago, I charged from day 1. No free plan and no trial. You signed up with a credit card and were charged real actual money. Not happy? No sweat, we had a 60 day money back guarantee. We kept this setup for almost two years and grew the business from ...
Nov 10, 2015•11 min•Ep. 14
While customer feedback is crucial to your startup, it’s also something most founders have a love/hate relationship with. How do you decide if feedback is valuable or not? How do you keep complaints from dragging you down? Where do you draw the line on letting feedback steer your company? We’ll take a look at answers to those questions, along with a story and announcement about how customer feedback is directly changing a core part of Baremetrics. Types of feedback There are two types of feedbac...
Jul 08, 2015•12 min•Ep. 13
I’ve long considered myself a “maker”. Heck, it’s the first word in my Twitter profile , so you know it’s official. I’ve been making things for the web since the late 90’s . When I was splitting my time between building my own products and doing consulting, I’d tout myself as the guy who could do everything. I took pride in my ability to do design, frontend, and backend, selling myself as the quintessential “maker of things”. Then, Baremetrics started taking off. I quickly realized that being th...
Jun 24, 2015•12 min•Ep. 12
As an entrepreneur, one of the biggest sources of stress you have with your startup is likely your competition. It’s easy to become really paranoid about each move they make, each feature they launch and each piece of content they’re publishing. Everything can feel like it’s aimed directly at burning your castle to the ground. So how do you deal with that? Or do you even deal with it at all? A competitive change of mind Back in 2008 I built a hosted ad serving platform. Publishers could sell, ma...
Jun 18, 2015•6 min•Ep. 11
If recurring revenue is a rainbow leading to a pot of gold, then churn is the dirty leprechaun trying to keep it all from you. Okay, so my rainbow leprechaun metaphor is a little weak, but you get the idea. SaaS products are amazing because of how recurring revenue has a compounding affect. That $100/mo customer keeps paying…over and over again. Until they don’t. And that’s where churn comes in and why it’s so vicious to the growth of a company. I’ve written before about how to reduce churn in S...
May 06, 2015•11 min•Ep. 10
When you’re just getting started and you’re strapped for cash, you typically do all sorts of things to pinch pennies. It’s just part of surviving, and it’s a healthy thing to do when you’re not actually making any money. The danger, however, is keeping that mindset after you’ve got a steady stream of cash flowing. It’s a danger that creeps in to a lot of startups and never goes away, causing generally sane people to do insane things in the name of not spending money. How the story goes You’re ju...
Apr 29, 2015•10 min•Ep. 9
As a Founder, you’ve got your hand in everything imaginable, from legal paperwork to hiring to product management to support and everything in between. You’re pulled in every direction from everyone who’s got your contact info and you feel obligated to chase every rabbit you think of. But one of the hardest lessons to learn is that “busy” does not equal “productive.” All of those random things you’ve got your hand in, all of those rabbits you chase in the name of “traction” aren’t necessarily th...
Apr 08, 2015•15 min•Ep. 8
https://baremetrics.com/blog/startup-guide-to-1-on-1 If there’s one thing I’ve found to be true over the past year and half of building this company, it’s that I’m completely winging it. Sure, I’ve read articles and books on how to build a company, but I've never actually done this before and I learn best by doing. So, every time I come across something that works for us, it’s a huge win for me. Doing 1-on-1’s has been one of those huge wins. A few months after I started building our team , I re...
Apr 01, 2015•13 min•Ep. 7
A few weeks back I wrote about our experience going from bootstrapped to funded as we raised a $500,000 round , why it was good for our business and some of the things we’ve learned along the way. Now, I want to give you an in-depth breakdown of why and how we spent $250,000 in the months after receiving our funding. The purpose of this post is to give some insight into the costs of a small team building a startup. Maybe there are places you’ll realize you’re spending too much, or areas where yo...
Feb 11, 2015•13 min•Ep. 6
Most days now I wake up before my alarm goes off (at 5am) and I immediately hop out of bed, excited to get the day started. But that wasn’t always the case, especially when things weren’t going so well. It’s easy to be excited when the skies are blue, but what about when they’re gray? How do you stay motivated then? Or is there even such thing as “motivation”? For 10 years I was on a perpetual journey to kick the consulting habit and just focus on my own products, but minus a few 3-month spans h...
Feb 04, 2015•6 min•Ep. 5
In mid-January we did our first retreat as a team. Since we’re completely remote, this was the first time most of our team had met and worked with each other face-to-face. I’ll take you through how we planned and budgeted for the trip, what we did, what worked and what didn’t. https://baremetrics.io/blog/startup-retreat Why do a retreat at all? Since growing our team from little ol' me to 6 people, with the exception of me meeting a couple of our team members, no one else had ever done more than...
Jan 29, 2015•18 min•Ep. 4
One year after Baremetrics was launched, we hit $25,000 in monthly recurring revenue. I’ve tried a lot of things to grow the company over the past year. A few things have worked well. A lot of things have flopped. We grew quickly, then stagnated for a bit, and are on the upswing now. So, what worked and what didn’t? It’s worth mentioning that I’ve written about our journey to $5,000/mo as well as growing to $14,000/mo , both of which may be worth your time if you’re at those stages of your busin...
Jan 21, 2015•14 min•Ep. 3
Last week I wrote about our experience going from bootstrapped to funded , why it was good for our business and some of the things we’ve learned along the way. I mentioned there were some big shifts for me and one of those shifts was the transition from being a solo entrepreneur to managing a team. I have 10 years of do-it-yourself mentality to undo, or to at least adjust, and that’s been an interesting process. I’ve moved from a pure maker to more of a manager…an enabler. Instead of doing all t...
Jan 15, 2015•9 min•Ep. 2
I’ve been building products and creating businesses for a solid decade. Prior to Baremetrics, I’d started just about every type of business imaginable: consultancy, ecommerce, content, software and more. And while the business models have all been different, the one unifying factor is they were all 100% bootstrapped to the end . So, what’s it like going from a decade of bootstrapping to running a funded business ? And what’s it like transitioning a business that started out bootstrapped to havin...
Jan 07, 2015•12 min•Ep. 1
