I’m Josh Pigford, Founder of Baremetrics. AMA!

First 100: Word of mouth, primarily from Twitter: https://baremetrics.com/blog/first-100-customers

500: Word of mouth between founders still played a major part, but content played a much bigger role as well. By the time we had 500 customers, we'd been producing content regularly for over 2 years. So that machine was firmly in place and had started working really well.

1000: We're not there...yet! Just over 800 customers at the moment. Content and word of mouth are still the primary methods, but SEO is playing a larger role now and we're focusing on optimizing for that as well.

Thanks or the kind words! To your questions...

1. Knowing when to call it quits is really tough. Even when the numbers make it obvious, the emotional component usually drags things out longer than they need to. I wrote about this a few years back with a few things that hint your business isn't in a great spot: https://baremetrics.com/blog/signs-your-business-is-dying.

2. Charging a higher price early on was the result of charging so little on previous products and realizing I didn't want customers at a lower price point. I'd learned my lesson about how low-paying customers tend to be the highest maintenance. Also, as founders we're just generally really bad at understanding the worth/value of our products ("I wouldn't pay that much, so I bet others won't either!"). That's flawed and generally leads to most new startups charging far far farrrrr too little.

Business

I don't read many business books as they're generally 90% fluff and AIN'T NOBODY GOT TIME FOR THAT. But here are a couple that have made an impact on me...

• The War of Art - Steven Pressfield

• Anything You Want - Derek Sivers

• How to Win Friends and Influence People - Dale Carnegie

• Tools of Titans - Tim Ferris

Fun

I could list 1000 books, but I'll...not do that.

• Pandemic - A.G. Riddle

• Dark Matter - Blake Crouch

• Departure - A.G. Riddle

• Wayward Pines Series - Blake Crouch

• The Martian - Andy Weir

• Nomad Series - Matthew Mather

• Anything by Michael Crichton

The channels have morphed a bit over the years, but are still made up largely of these 3...

Word of mouth > Content marketing > SEO

Thanks so much, Dina!

Determining "most important" is tough. At any given time there are literally hundreds of things I could be doing.

As much as possible, I try to start with an end goal ("Grow to $100,000 MRR"), then walk backwards from there, step by step, to figure out the path.

So maybe that looks like...

Grow to $100,000 MRR < Increase expansion revenue < Add features < Talk to customers about problems they're having < Brainstorm feature ideas

Of course there are dozens of paths/forks in that road but really everything I do needs to tie back to that end goal by asking my self "Does this help get me any closer to the goal?"

That's rarely a completely obvious answer, but then again, if it was then business would be easy. :)

Thanks Corey! I just need a bearded pug and I'll be set!

As for our growth...I wouldn't say we've been at the "same level of MRR". We've grown 35% in the past year and 5% just in the past 30 days.

I'm not focusing on 10x-ing anything. If/when we get there...cool. But massive growth isn't the goal, especially in a short period of time.

I want steady, sustainable and predictable growth and as long as we keep doing that profitably, I'll sleep just fine.

I think metrics are becoming a commodity...every product will have them in some form or fashion.

However analytics (specifically the "analysis of data") is a much harder problem to solve. It's the "what does any of the data actually mean" and that's what we're trying to solve.

Who cares if their churn is X%...the number is largely arbitrary. What's exponentially more valuable is the "why"...why is a business's churn X% and how do we fix it?

That's the future we're focusing on.

No. You just need to be an expert in helping your customers be successful. I know a lot more about metrics than I did 4 years ago, but I'm still not an "expert"...and that's fine because "metrics" aren't really why people use Baremetrics. They use Baremetrics to figure out how their business is performing and how to grow, and that's the kind of things we're ultimately trying to solve.

Thanks for the kind words, James!

I shut down the Etsy shop a while back primarily because of those syncing issues you mentioned...was just too much hassle to manage entirely different storefronts and the sales from it weren't enough to justify that hassle.

In addition to that, I'm actually pushing the online stuff a lot less in 2018, focusing instead on doing lots of local markets.

I'm happy with my level of focus in the early days (launched the first version of Baremetrics with just a week of work and kept that same pace for the first few months).

However, I'd tell myself to do more writing earlier. Took me a while to really start writing helpful content on a regular basis and since that type of stuff is a long game, I wish I'd started that machine earlier.

ABTPLYFYLLPoCOtT: Always Be Testing Pricing Lest You Find Yourself Leaving Large Piles of Cash On the Table...as the kids say these days.

So we have a lot of plans but really have only test 2.5 pricing models.

• Customer-based pricing -- Major buckets of pricing based on the # of customers you have

• MRR-based pricing -- Major buckets of pricing based on the amount of MRR you have

• Add-on pricing -- We do this with our Recover product...it's an additional fee on top of your base monthly fee.

We've also tested feature-gating on certain plans and then tested how low we want pricing to go as well as adjusting how many customers/MRR you get at given pricing points.

Pricing is an ongoing process and will always be an ongoing process. What worked a few years ago won't necessarily work today. Markets change, the product itself changes. So you should always run pricing tests.

I spend ~30% of my time on producing content of various types.

At this point, we see a pretty direct correlation between content and growth so I'll keep doing that until it stops being the case!

Landing pages are terrible for gauging interest, assuming you actually want to build a business that makes money. 😛

Anyone can drop their email address in to a random form. Collecting email address implies zero intent...if anything it implies someone wants something for free because they literally gave up $0 when they gave you an email address.

The only validation is money.

Figure out the core problem you're trying to solve, build that absolute most basic solution to that problem and start selling/marketing it.

I built the first version of Baremetrics in a week. If nobody had wanted it, I would have been totally fine with basically no time lost.

However if I'd put a landing page up, spent time trying to get people to go give me their email address, while I poked away at building a product for months, then launched it to hundreds/thousands of people only to find I'd been building the wrong product...everybody loses.

You need to get a functional solution in front of potential paying customers as fast as humanly possible. If they actually pay you (not just say they'll pay you), then and only then have you made steps towards gauging market interest.

I've spoken to hundreds of customers over the years and still keep it up. I speak to probably 3-5 customers/prospects a week. Not nearly as much as I did in the early days, but it's definitely still a regular occurrence.

There are two types of transparency: internal transparency and external transparency.

There are also varying levels of transparency...there's "sharing with customers how we're going to fix a data breach" transparency and there's "sharing with the public at large the salaries of everyone who works at the company" transparency. Very different beasts.

I think internal transparency in the sense of not hiding things from your team is crucial for team trust. At Baremetrics, the only thing I can think of that we don't share internally are salaries. Basically every other data point/metric are available to anyone on the team at any time.

I want everyone our team to not only trust in the direction we're headed but also feel a part of that, and to do that they need to be informed.

As for external transparency, communicating to customers when something goes wrong is an obvious thing to do, so I won't touch on that, however being transparent with "business health" is a fun topic. :)

Back in 2014, just a few months after I'd launched Baremetrics, I decided to make our dashboard public (demo.baremetrics.com) in part just due to laziness. I wanted to show off a demo, but didn't want to generate a ton of fake data. So, I just anonymized the customer info and flipped the switch. 😛

But in addition to that, there was a bit of altruism involved.

I'd been following guys like Alex Turnbull at Groove and Joel Gascoigne at Buffer as they shared so much about their business. It was just immensely helpful to me and I wanted to give back.

So, being transparent with not only our data but also the struggles and wins as we grew just felt like a natural move.

On top of that, if we're being honest, it's good marketing. We're a business tool for other businesses, so transparency not only helps other businesses grow, but it helps ours too.

I don't think external "share all the things!" transparency is right for every business. You need to have a narrative around it that makes sense for your customers. If you can't figure out how to tell a story with the data, it probably isn't worth it.

The first growth tactic that actually had a tangible impact was making our dashboard public (demo.baremetrics.com). That generated a lot of early buzz.

Content! Our blog (https://baremetrics.com/blog) and Academy (https://baremetrics.com/academy) generate most of our traffic from both SEO and folks just sharing the content directly.

I don't really know the answers to any of these as I'm very much not involved in this side of the company any more, but I'll take a few light stabs.

1. Currently on RethinkDB but working as fast as possible to get off of it and on to Postgres. That's oversimplifying it...there are an obscene number of moving parts to scale up TB's of data, but that's the basics.

2. ¯\(ツ)/¯

3. Yes. We've got a mix of dedicated hardware and cloud depending on the part of the app.

Content has been the most consistent acquisition channel for us.

Stop reading and start building. If you've got time to read, you've got time to build.

Starting something isn't an all-or-nothing game. In fact, for most it shouldn't for a while. You're asking for a world of hurt if you do nothing for months while you save up and then go all in just to find out your idea was terrible and nobody wants it. You'll burn through that nest egg really fast.

Don't prepare, just start on the dang thing.

It's quite different. The cycle time on improving physical products is just immense.

If someone hates the size of a concrete planter, it takes weeks (if not months) to make an adjustment.

On software, you could deploy an improvement in hours.

Also, most feedback on physical products is either overwhelmingly, obviously positive (lots of verbal praise) or it's complete silence and they just don't buy the product. Nobody emails to say "Hey, I was going to buy that concrete planter but I don't like it so I'm not".

In the early days retargeting worked well for us: https://baremetrics.com/blog/saas-retargeting

We don't spend any money on ads at the moment, though. It's just too expensive for someone like me with no experience to try to jump in and figure out.

Eventually we'll pay someone else to run some campaigns and optimize that for us.

• Agnostic.

• Beer tastes like fermented death to me, so I'm indifferent. 😬

• Exercise! Running, specifically. It's physical and mental therapy.

It's something that gets requested every few months. Unfortunately the economics of it haven't made a lot of sense.

There are certainly a decent chunk of people who have your set up but still not a lot (relatively speaking). On top of that, the types of business models just vary really widely and so building a tool that works or a large % is pretty difficult.

Wish I had better news for you!

Growing LTV is ultimately a function of churn, so if you can reduce churn, you increase LTV.

We've written quite a bit about reducing churn:

https://baremetrics.com/academy/reduce-churn-retain-customers

https://baremetrics.com/academy/saas-churn

https://baremetrics.com/blog/how-we-reduced-churn

Ultimately comes down to "increase the value you're providing to customers".

CircleCI! And they were a $250/mo customer. 🙂

Our selling process then was basically just word of mouth and then self-serve. Not much of a "process".

We don't use any lead gen tools!

Didn't do any convincing. Almost all of them approached me asking to make their data public.

The only real solution is to actually invest the time and build something.

Money is the only validator. The key is to pinpoint the problem you're solving and build the solution as quickly as possible. Then you start selling it and see what happens.

Employees: 7

Equity: Presently 0% (it's a SAFE, so only gets exercised in the event of an acquisition or major funding round). Functionally ~8%. It was $800k with a $10M cap.

No follow up investment.

As for burn rate feature, could be cool! We don't do anything with expenses at the moment (from a product perspective) and we're trying to stay out of the world of accounting as much as possible. We also are operating profitably now, so our runway is infinite. :)

Hiring way ahead of what our revenue could cover. We nearly ran out of money: https://baremetrics.com/blog/how-we-went-from-weeks-of-cash-left-in-the-bank-to-profitable-in-8-months

But we made up the difference and are profitable now.

Thanks for the kind words and for following along!

Biggest tips on staying emotionally healthy...

1. Exercise. Seriously, this is huge and absolutely crucial. Running is my exercise method of choice, but anything that makes you push yourself.

2. Have friends that are not in the world of startups/business. You need external influences that get your mind off of building a business.

3. Take a week off every few months at least to give your brain a break. It needs a hard rest regularly so you can come back with fresh perspective.

It's a hard call. For me, random emails trying to propose random solutions to problems the person isn't even sure I've got just doesn't work.

I don't have that many business problems I need solved at this point and if I do, I'll go ask another founder for recommendations or Google it.

For me, email just isn't the right channel for cold sales.

At the time we closed our round we were doing ~$20k in MRR. However, I wasn't looking for funding. I was perfectly happy bootstrapping.

Stripe approached us initially offering the investment and the initial terms were too good to pass up ($500k at a $10M cap).

Building a company is one constant stream of "struggle". 😛

Every day there's something different and each of those requires a different solution.

Thanks for the kind words! Just answered a question about how I stay emotionally sane: https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/64316a423d?commentId=-L9GXbXNWStfELCr4Adt

I don't think we've figured out pricing...we're still regularly testing that and will be testing it forever. :) Every pricing method has problems...it'll work for some customer but not others. So you just have to keep testing it until you find it works for more customers than the previous method.

As for not letting customers dictate what you build...a lot of that is gut instinct. But generally I felt strongly from the start that building any singular feature for a customer was a bad move. There were already too many things I knew we needed to build for lots of customers and so taking time away form that to keep one customer never made sense to me.