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12 Comments

Sharing your metrics publicly

I love projects that share their traffic, revenue and other metrics publicly. If the numbers are small, it just shows that every project starts out small. If they are big, it's even more inspiring. Especially if you can follow their progress over time.

I share the metrics for Watch Routine both here at IndieHackers and on a dedicated page with some more detailed statistics on the website: watchroutine.com/open

Just launched the project so nothing too impressive yet. The only paying customer is, well myself.

My main reasons for sharing the numbers are:

  • It's inspiring to see how other bootstrapped businesses are doing, and I want to contribute by sharing my own data.
  • It gives me a reason to build a nice overview of the metrics, not something I would have spent time on otherwise.
  • Marketing, hopefully it can drive some traffic to the site.

Future plans

  • Add more statistics from the app, such as charts over usage etc.
  • Display anonymous data live, for example when a user adds a new workout.
  • Show correlations between money put into marketing vs. number of new users (customer acquisition cost).
  • Start taking my own time into account for the expenses (currently just displaying the costs of running the server etc, which is a huge underestimate)

Are you sharing your revenue / traffic numbers? Why, or why not?
Do you have a dedicated page for it on your project's website, or do you share it exclusively on your IndieHackers project page?

And which are your favourite open startup pages?

  1. 2

    I love that you do this! I 100% agree it doesn't matter if its new or not, it's still a very nice thing to have implemented. I also believe it increases the trust factor.

    I don't have much to share like you, but I did do it for BeeTrendy as well! 😁

    1. 1

      Thanks! I like your Open-page, and the whole style of the website. Very clean and clear value proposition.

      1. 1

        Thank you so much! Means a lot 😁

  2. 2

    This looks awesome! How did you build your open page? Are you updating the numbers yourself?

    1. 2

      Thanks! The page is build in React with TailwindCSS, charts made with the Recharts library. All numbers (except expenses) are fetched from my backend via simple calls to a Postgres-database.

      The MRR is calculated by number of users with an active subscription multiplied by the amount they are paying each month.

      Traffic numbers are fetched from Plausible (by @ukutaht and @markosaric), they have a great API that makes it easy to get that kind of statistics.

  3. 2

    It's great that you're doing it!

    For a long time we didn't want to share it. We were scared it would lead to competitors snooping on us.

    But then the more I got involved in the community, the more I saw how valuable it is to share openly with folks:

    • it makes us look more trustworthy, like a real business (especially since it's directly from stripe, we can't fake it)
    • it pushes us to improve our numbers month after month
    • it makes us relate with other founders more, feels like we're on a journey together.

    So I made revenue data for Logology public on indie hackers, https://www.indiehackers.com/product/logology/revenue.

    It felt oddly liberating and freeing. As if we were not alone anymore 🔥

    1. 2

      Agree with all your points for why it's a good idea to share the metrics @dagorenouf. Curious why there's a negative data point in April, is that due to some refund?

      Edit: And really impressed by your product website, looks great!

      1. 1

        Thanks so much Andy!

        Yeah it's because we processed a custom logo design order through stripe, and then issued a refund for it.

  4. 2

    We haven't shared stats publicly yet but I like your arguments for doing so. Something to consider and look out for. Thanks for sharing!

  5. 2

    We don't share our metrics publicly, but it's something we're considering doing when we have more revenue. Building something like that ourselves would take a bit of time, but services like Baremetrics let you do it with one click.

    1. 1

      Baremetrics looks like a useful product, a bit expensive now before I have any revenue, but gonna look into it when my project grows 👍

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