What do Indie Hackers use to track sales?
MRR, ARR, weekly goals, and progress
How is everyone tracking these metrics? I know not everyone is a developer, and not every situation has a database persisting all the sales data. So how are people tracking it? How do you know if you're making your goals?
About 3 times in previous jobs, I've had small companies want to have some level of business insight into how we are doing with our sales and business/startup. I've built in house tools (I'm a developer) and the entire company lost their minds in excitement. They haven't been super difficult, and the ROI has been huge.
What I've observed is that the huge business analytics tools (Tableau, Looker, SAP, etc etc). And also there are some dashboards in the distribution app (like gum road).
All of those options are incomplete and also require a tech person, a database person to manage, etc. That costs money, and odds are most small business don't even have someone that does that. Also, these are all tools for big customers, big enterprise clients. So like, upwards to thousands a dollars a month.
I want to build a clean version that any small business can use to track and record their process. Something that is going for the smaller clients. Something that a gardener that sells her plants at a farmers market can use. They log in. Record their wins for the week or day. Get a clean dashboard to motivate and enjoy.
I don't have the energy or care right now for getting those big clients, and I'm just aiming to have a product that has a handful of people willing to pay $20/month and dream-case is to have a simple lifestyle business.
Let me know your thoughts, team!
You're probably asking the wrong place – as online sellers, every one of us will say Stripe, PayPal, Paddle or Gumroad. It gives you the MRR easily, cause transactions are logged and online. No setup needed at all. Then, ProfitWell gives you deep subscription insights for free with one click.
You should probably ask "a gardener that sells her plants at a farmers market". They get transactions through whatever PoS sale they are using, then some cash on top, a sale they settle via Venmo in the parking lot, some weirdo paying with crypto, if you're in a place in Eastern Europe, they will most likely also get multiple currencies.
So – why ask here?
I ask here because I feel like some of the market is in this group of people. Also, people could have multiple streams of income: Stripe, Gumroad, etc, and they want to know how everything lands together in one place.
Although I know each 3rd party payment system probably has metrics that it knows about, I want to build something that also acts as a company motivator, and definitely the option to build in public. Something that anyone in the company can see, set goals, and celebrate wins.
I know it's not like a billion dollar idea, but I think it would be fun and has some level of potential.
I was just thinking too that the "Creator Market" is all over the place and I want to corner them too. Creators could be taking sales from Shopify, Youtube ads, Gumroad, Stripe, and Venmo/Paypal. This group diversifies their income and having it all collected into one dashboard would be pretty sweet.
Also man, I ask here because I want to do this and think the journey will be fun. I don't want to build in a vacuum and IndieHackers is a great place.
Love the enthusiasm. Just two thoughts:
If you'd like this to be a business of some sort, I'd ditch the idea for now and go deeper into the problem. How many creators have more than 3 independent income platforms? How do they put those numbers together? Do businesses have the same issue? As a creator tool, is a motivation factor needed? Or is it straight up an accounting issue? What about creators on upcoming platforms that are underserved? E.g. Twitch streamers and OnlyFans creators?
Ideally, I want to do both. I know at some level this can be used by companies and teams, I just am trying to sort that out (who is my audience). The app/tools I've built for previous jobs have been tracking the companies sales progress. The whole company wanted to know how we are doing but never wanted to spend money on Looker and Tableau dashboards to solve the problem. I boiled the solution down to simple inputs and launched with a lot of fan fare. Since I have validated that at least 3 companies would have bought this sort of cheap tool, I'm now trying to sort out how it will look like more customizable and/or what target market would it do best in. I think it would be a super fun project (scratch my itch) and this post is just the first step to me understanding if there is a market for it. And yeah, I completely agree with you that I need to understand who I'm coding for, and what problems I'm solving. The product I eventually build will morph along side the research, or may even pivot.
Thank you so much for exposing me to profit well, chartmogel and bare metrics. These are the tools I was thinking of doing without the integrations and it sounds like they are super amazing. The best I could do is undercut them on price.
Maybe the idea morphs into more of a Goal-setting app. Where you can track your progress on units sold, or amount sold, etc. Leaning more on the business side of things, and not necessarily the money streams, because that market seems to be on lock down from those three apps you mentioned. The idea I have in mind is targeted to company and sales teams - Which projects closed, how close are we to hitting our $xx,xxx monthly sales goals?
Before I forget, thank you for all your feedback, this has been extremely helpful.
We just use the Stripe dashboard.
One tool to build charts without much hassle is
Amplitudewe use that extensively and they have a generous free plan (10 million events) but pricing is quite steep after that.Automating reports is on the list but not a top priority rn at the stage we're at.
Very interesting! I jotted it down to research.
I think my angle is going to be even simpler. No integrations right away, no automatic data ingress. You know your business, you know your sales, you type those sales into the app, and there you go. Anyone that can log into a website is qualified to use the app and update the sales data.
Sounds simple enough, not sure if it's too much manual labor but it's probably fine to get started
Stripe does things automatically for us because we do the payment through it so we don't have any extra setup work there
Oh nice, good to know.
Yeah, I think my audience might be those with multiple revenue streams. Maybe those who don't have stripe set up. Maybe those who have Stripe AND Gumroad sales. Still trying to sort it out.
🤙
Google Data Studio is a good free alternative to Tableau, Looking, and SAP.
Very cool, thanks for that!
I have a free and paid yearly subscription model. It takes many DB queries to create conversion, churns, renewal reports, and more data processing to create charts for comparison. I would be interested in an affordable service that will generate these reports easily.
Yeah, i've found bigger companies have this problem. The fact that they need a data engineer or some SQL savvy business analyst in order to get anything done.
I may not fix your problem, but I want to make it dirt simple on the other side of that data crunching. The entry point is just simple data entry and the dashboard will beautifully display that data. I want to appeal to the companies that don't have the engineer or know the SQL and they can just do simple data entry. Even in bigger companies, people are discouraged from generating something like this because the people who are doing all the tableau and Looker dashboards are busy with something else.
We use our app www.maxcalling.com check it out if it helps.
Nice! I like what you have there. It doesn't exactly fit what I'm looking for, but that's cool