What's up, everybody? This is Courtland from the Andy Hackers Podcast, and today I'm going
to be talking to Josh Pigford, the founder of Bear Metrics. In October of 2013, Josh
came up with the idea for Bear Metrics, built the initial version of the product, and sold
it to his first paying customer in the span of eight days. Something like six months later,
he had $14,000 a month in revenue coming in, and today it's somewhere closer to $70,000
a month. But you don't actually have to take my word for it. You can actually go to bearmetrics.com,
click on the demo, and Josh has revealed all of his company's metrics in a Bear Metrics dashboard.
So for those of you who don't know, Bear Metrics provides a dashboard that gives you all sorts of
analytics and insights into your company's subscription data. So you can see the lifetime
value of your customers, your total monthly recurring revenue, how often customers churn,
and even a live feed showing you every single time a new customer signs up and gets charged. So Bear
Metrics is a super cool product. Josh himself is a very clear thinker who spent years writing about,
transparently writing about the behind the scenes of Bear Metrics and what it was like for him to
start the company and how he found his first users. So he's got a lot of great insights in
this interview, and I think it's really going to help you guys learn how to get your businesses off
the ground in a reasonable amount of time and hopefully grow to some degree of a success that
Josh has had. This episode is brought to you by Sparkpost, the world's fastest growing email
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features that come with paid accounts. Go to pages.sparkpost.com slash Andy hackers to learn
more. Sparkpost start fast, deliver more guaranteed. Welcome to the show, Josh. I'm excited to have you
on. Cool. Thanks for having me, Courtland. So I want to start by just having you describing your
own words, what is Bear Metrics and who uses it? What's kind of like, you know, the origin
story behind Bear Metrics? Sure. So in a nutshell, Bear Metrics gives you insights into your revenue.
So there's a lot of different aspects of that. You know, there's the metrics component, we do some
help businesses forecast future things. We help them make more money by collecting on failed
charges. There's kind of a whole suite of tools around basically helping businesses make more
money. Now, the origin of that is a couple of years ago, well, few years ago, so 2013,
I was running a couple of other SaaS products in the survey space and I needed these numbers.
So month of recurring revenue, lifetime value, term, sort of these core metrics for any kind
of subscription company or subscription revenue company. And at the time, this just wasn't really
anything great that existed. I mean, you could either do something, a bunch of stuff in an Excel
spreadsheet, which was kind of ripe for screwing up or just not taking the time to manually input
stuff. Or you could use like a generic analytics platform where you have to do a bunch of engineering
work to get it up and running. And that also is kind of ripe for getting screwed up because you
just, maybe you can't get historical data in there or you get data in there, but you didn't
format the data correctly and it kind of screws things up. So I mean, there were all these factors
that really made it difficult to get access to these sort of core metrics. And so I was using
Stripe on those two companies of Stripe's payment processor. And I figured, well, Stripe's actually
got most, if not all of the data that I need for this. Let me just see, let me build this little
internal tool for this and see what happens. And it actually turned out the first iteration was
pretty easy to do. Took me maybe about a week of my time. And I realized at that point that
there's actually was a pretty big need for it from other SaaS friends who were building companies
like that they need this stuff too. And they've been doing things in spreadsheets and all this
stuff for a long time as well and it's a pain. So that was sort of the origin was I launched that
in 2013, really sort of to scratch my own itch and wasn't planning on turning it into any kind
of company, but the demand kind of made it clear that I should do that.
Yeah, I remember using Stripe back then when I was working on my SaaS product task force. And I
built out this entire admin control panel for task force with all sorts of graphs and data that I
was pulling in for Stripe. And I think back in those days, as you were saying, everybody had to do
it completely on their own. There was no bare metrics. So it's really awesome that you ended
up scratching your own itch. And that's a pattern that I've seen throughout probably like at least
half of the interviews I've done for ND hackers. People need something really badly and they end
up building their own product to solve their own problem. I think it's really cool that you
didn't initially think that other people are going to use it. What changed your mind?
People saying like me asking some people, some friends about it, just being like,
hey, through conversations about asking what they use. So I didn't want to build the thing. I had
better things to do in my head at least. So the last thing I wanted to do was build some new app.
Typically, it's a pretty bad use of your time to build internal tools that aren't specific to what
your core offering. But they're talking with them and be like, hey, they don't have anything great
either. And then saying, hey, would you use this if I built something that other people could use?
It was sort of a unanimous, yeah, definitely. So that was what sort of encouraged it.
And at the time you were working on, you said two different other SaaS products, right? Because
you were kind of scratching your own itch and you had, I presume, a whole heap of work to do for
these other SaaS products. When did you decide, you know, screw those, I'm going with bare
metrics all the way. A few months after I launched bare metrics, so I think it was probably, so I
launched the first version of bare metrics in November of 2013. And by I think maybe January
or February, the growth of bare metrics was making it pretty clear that there's a lot of much larger
opportunity here than the survey products that I was working on. So at that point, it was, I was a
one man show at the start. And it quickly turned into covering anything I needed. So I could just
focus on bare metrics, 100%. And at that point, it's like, well, it makes sense to focus on this
one thing that's growing really fast instead of three things.
Exactly. Yeah, I had a kind of a similar situation this summer. When I started ND Hackers, I was
working on kind of reviving my own, my old SaaS app task force. And I decided, you know,
it's not going that well. I have this great idea for another product. Let me put, you know,
a few weeks of work into this and see how it goes. And the growth has been so fast that it's just
like, there's no point in working on this old thing anymore. Yep. Yep. I mean, it feels like
you hate kind of throwing out the stuff that you may have spent a ton of time. I spent a couple
of years working on those survey apps, while also like balancing consulting work at the same time
to ultimately pay the bills. But it's like, you know, you hate to throw out that work. But at
the same time, it's all sort of this journey. And so at that point, it made sense to jump ship and
focus on one thing. Yeah, exactly. It's a sunk cost. So at some point, you know, you got to go
with whatever's growing the fastest, whatever has the most potential in the future. Speaking of
building the product, like, I usually ask questions about the tech behind it, because the
indie actors are sense is primarily made up of developers. So how did you build bare metrics?
Did you use a framework like rails or Django? What you want? Where did you host it?
Yeah, so initially, it was a pretty vanilla rails app. So I, I mean, I do very, very little
development work now. I mean, it's better that I don't at this point. So but I but I knew enough,
especially a few years ago, when I was, you know, doing tons of engineering work, I had enough of
a skill set to build the initial feature set. So but I mean, I've been doing rail stuff for a few
years. So what with that, it was hosted on Heroku. I mean, super, super vanilla rails app, like,
nothing fancy, just one big monolithic app hosted on Heroku. I mean, spending an arm and a leg on
really on background jobs. I mean, that was an obscene amount of money. So for given the given
the scale of the app. So but it got things out the door, right? I mean, I wouldn't have to spend
any time on infrastructure.
Did you have some sort of overriding philosophy like the lean startup movement or fail fast that
was driving your initial strategy when you built the product?
I don't know. I guess there's some things that maybe would have coincidentally fallen in line
with those things. But I mean, I had not read any of those books or followed any of those
frameworks or anything. I mean, I, my mindset sort of always been, I mean, for 15 years been that I
just want to like throw something out there and see what happens. And so I'll throw lots of things
out there. I mean, bare metrics is, you know, I mentioned there were two SaaS products before
this, but bare metrics wasn't like my third thing to ever build. I mean, it's probably like my
hundredth thing to build. So there's been so many things before that all ultimately, you know, one
stepping stone leads to the next and kind of you end up at bare metrics and I've sort of formulated
or have ways of doing things that have come up over those years of just trying things and shutting
things down. And but I mean, I guess I would subscribe to the sort of lean startup philosophy,
but I mean, I wasn't like intentionally doing that. A lot of people fall into this category of
starting things and getting maybe, you know, two or three weeks into development and then just
completely losing their passion for it. It's like, I'm just tired of it. Because it got hard.
Right. Building a hundred products is crazy. That's way more than anyone I've ever heard of. What
is your strategy to make sure that you can push through what advice would you have for people who
tend to quit when it gets hard? Yeah, so I think the biggest thing is to not bite off more than you
can chew, right? So early on, especially when you're in this sort of idea phase, like when you're like
sitting in your car, driving down the road, or like in the shower, or you're like mowing the grass or
something, where your brain is just sort of mindlessly wondering and thinking up random stuff.
It's easy when you're in that phase, to believe that you've got the greatest idea on the face of the
earth. And so you kind of get caught up in your own height of, yeah, this is great. And yeah,
people certainly want this. And I can probably make a lot of money about on this. And then I can be
rich and famous and whatever you romanticize the thing really quickly. And so it's easy to get
started on something because you're mentally thinking it's the best thing anyone has ever heard
of. But then you jump into it. And at that point, you realize that, okay, this is a little more
complicated than I thought. And then the way that you get past that is to just scale back on what it
is that you're trying to get out the door, and understand that you can't build the greatest thing
right off the bat. And that's actually kind of a dangerous thing to do to try to build sort of the
final product, like you need to get something out the door just to prove that there's even a need for
it. But that's actually a very basic thing because you should just be solving a really just one
fundamental problem. And that should not be a really complex thing to prove that you've got a
solution to that problem, it won't be the best solution, the very first thing that you do, but
you need to prove that you have a potential solution there. And that's a that's a really
basic thing to solve. And that's the only thing that you should be focused on getting out the
door. And then that's a relatively easy thing to push through. I mean, like I said, I built the
first version of barometrics with in about like seven or eight days of my time, like that wasn't
enough time for me to throw my hands in the air and say, I give up this is too much work, you know,
it's a week like so. And from that, I mean, like my very first customer was like a $250 a month
customer, which was great. Fantastic. That was pretty good proof for me. At that point, you've
then if you've actually started solving a problem, the sort of momentum is kept up and you get this
extra encouragement from the validation from like actually having paying customers. And at that point,
it's easy to push through some of the harder stuff because you've you've got real sort of
tangible evidence that there's something there. Yes, the best validation having someone pay for
your product right out of the gate. I think it's fascinating how much of startups and business
comes down to psychology because a lot of times people do kind of follow their gut and do the
intuitive thing, which is often the wrong thing. The intuitive thing is, man, this product really
sucks right now and I don't want to get it out the door because every other product I see that's
successful looks great. And people don't necessarily have a window into like how these products looked
when they first launched. Like I bet you bare mattress looked absolutely nothing like it does
today. And so they spend their wheels spending weeks and months to get a perfect end by that
point in time that built the wrong thing and they didn't even know it.
Yeah, because the dangerous part is that you're making assumptions up until you've
got paying customers. And with assumptions, you run a pretty decent risk of being wrong.
And the longer you sit there and assume things, the more wrong you have potential of being. So
you need to get away from assuming things as quickly as possible. And that just means
shipping something as quickly as possible. So your first customer paid you $250 a month,
assume right out of the gate. How did you find your earliest customers? Twitter. I mean,
I didn't like it wasn't like Twitter ads or anything, but I mean, I just posted on Twitter
that I've got this SaaS analytics for Stripe thing. So I had a very specific niche, which was
not all subscription companies, not even all companies on Stripe, but SaaS companies on Stripe.
So that was a very specific thing to jump out of the gate with. And that's a community that
easily and readily shares with one another. So I know a few people said that I would mention on
Twitter and those people would share it on Twitter and all these people. It was a really easy sell
because again, there was nothing that existed at the time that would do this. So the ability to
click on the link in Twitter, takes you to bear metrics, and then click a button that connects
your Stripe account, and then you're done. I mean, you could be up and running in seconds.
So it was a really easy sell to a market that was ripe for it. Because this was also when Stripe
was really starting to get popular. It had been around for, I don't know, a year or two at that
point, but it was really starting to gain some steam. But the ecosystem around Stripe
was still really, really new. So the timing on that just worked out well.
The product sounds like the ease of use, as you mentioned, for people going from clicking a link
to actually having a working, I don't know, analytics platform for their Stripe metrics
seems like it's killer. In the past, I tried launching some stuff on Twitter. And for me,
it was kind of like firing off these tweets into this empty void of nothingness where no one heard
me. I'm not sure how many followers you had. Not many. It was probably under a thousand.
I think the takeaway isn't launch stuff on Twitter. It's the takeaway is finding where your
potential customers are and then making it a really easy sell for them. So I mean,
I didn't have a big, there was zero pre-launch. There was no landing page where you could drop
in an email address. There was no private beta. It was just, I just flipped the switch and then
started kind of reaching out to random people I knew, and then they shared it. So I think the
problem is people, you think of a beta testing phase or building up this email list ahead of
time. The problem is you can get stuck in that forever. And it sort of buys you time that it
does not need to buy you, right? So you don't need having a landing page where somebody could
drop an email address. You feel like you're doing something productive by having that there
and that you're building a business sort of. And it lets you just sit there and
like tweak random things on your product that nobody's seen yet forever. I mean, you could do
that for months and months and months, or some people do it for years. But your email list is
going up and you think that you're being productive and you're not, right? So you need to just have
someone start using it and then try to get them to give you some money for it. Then repeat and
just do that over and over and over again. Yeah. And I think a lot of software developers that I've
talked to are so biased towards whatever strategy will allow them to write the most code and talk
to the fewest people. Sure, right? Human interaction is so scary. Yeah. Yeah. It's just like
deprioritize any sort of human interaction. And I understand it. Like I, for my last product,
I spent so much time coding and I just didn't really want to do the marketing thing. And then
for indie hackers, it's like all marketing all the time. I write almost no code. It's nothing but
talking to people. And it's like the difference is stunning. Like if you just break through that
barrier and get over the hump and just force yourself to do it, force yourself to try to sell,
then I find the wall kind of comes down. At least it did for me. Oh, for sure. I mean,
some of our earliest bumps and growth came not from feature additions, but from marketing efforts.
So I mean, one of the biggest sort of increases or changes in our growth rate
came from doing, so baremetrics data is public. So you can go to demo.bearmetrics.com and see all
of our numbers. And we had done that a few months prior, but then Buffer was pretty popular as far
as open startup kind of stuff goes. Also uses Stripe. And then we worked out a deal where
they would make their baremetrics account public as well, which you can go see at buffer.bearmetrics.com.
And they're super, I mean, they've got tens of thousands of customers and way more than that,
if you include free customers, and they just have a really significant reach in the startup space.
So when they made their baremetrics dashboard public, that was something all arranged via
email and required basically zero code on my part, but had a huge impact on our long-term growth.
And it's like, that's the kind of stuff that will have bigger impacts than adding some feature or
even adding polish to some feature. I noticed another big part of your marketing strategy
is content marketing, because I was on the baremetrics site earlier this week,
and you guys have a ton of awesome, useful content on your blog. A lot of which I recognized from
having seen it in my email or in Hacker News or people sharing it on Twitter earlier. So for
example, you've got the Baremetrics Business Academy, where you publish articles on teaching
developers and entrepreneurs how to start, build, and grow their businesses. How has your content
marketing strategy worked out? And how did you get started with it?
So it, I mean, it's really the only type of marketing that we actively do. And it's us
playing the long game. Usually one piece of content doesn't instantly lead to lots of new
customers, but it's the sum of all the content that we put out that ultimately drives lots of
traffic and lots of really targeted traffic, because we're targeting founders and entrepreneurs,
and so that's our customer. So we put out stuff that's useful to them, and then they eventually
find their way to the app. I don't know that I initially set out to do like, okay,
content marketing, that's our shtick. That just seemed like the thing to do. So for me, writing,
and I write most of our content still, that's not, that won't scale forever, but the writing
about the stuff that we're doing at Baremetrics is somewhat therapeutic for me. So in a way,
in the way that it lets me work out my thoughts on a given topic, and it helps me sort of reflect
on things that we've been doing or testing or trying, what doesn't work. And so writing is a
way for me to sort of process all that stuff. So selfishly, I think it helps me be a better
founder, but at the same time, it also happens to work really well as a driver of growth,
because it's going right after the people who are our customers. So I think early on,
I just started writing because it helped me figure out how to run the business,
and so it just kind of happened to work out that that worked as a marketing strategy as well.
It's interesting that you listed some of the ancillary benefits of writing, especially that
it helps you organize your thoughts, because I found the exact same thing. Every month I look
back at what happened with Indie Hackers, for example, and I write a month in review blog post,
where I just analyze, you know, my traffic and revenue growth and my plans for the next month.
And without fail, it always helps me organize my thinking. I initially did it just to be
transparent and keep people updated and hope that they would see things that I didn't see.
And maybe we could bounce ideas back and forth, which brings me to the topic of transparency,
because I know you've done similar things with barometrics pretty much from the beginning.
You've always given interviews and talked to people about what you're doing.
You've opened up your revenue for the world to cease ever since the day that you made your demo.
And today you've got the open startups initiative where other people can also open up their revenue
and share it on their own barometrics dashboard, which has been super helpful for me and Indie
Hackers, because if I want to find someone to interview, I just have to go to your dashboard
and pick a company from the list. But it's also been helpful to other people in the community who
want to be inspired by or see what's possible. And so they go look at these metrics and these
dashboards. And I think in a large way, Indie Hackers can probably not exist without the
transparency movement that companies like you and Buffer and others started years ago.
So what got you into transparency? And why did you take up the mantle of
being open about everything that was going on at barometrics?
For us, it would be generous to say that I intentionally set out to either start or even
try to be a part of any kind of transparency movement. I mean, I think us making the dashboard
public was initially born out of laziness really on my part, because I wanted to have a demo
available of what barometrics is and how it works instead of just screenshots.
And instead of generating a ton of just dummy data, it made more sense to just make our stuff
public. At that point, I mean, we're still making relatively small amounts of money,
less than a couple thousand dollars a month, and there was no real risk to do that.
So it was sort of an easy, hey, cool, let's throw it out there and see what happens.
And I just saved myself a bunch of development work for having to build a demo page.
But then I think the tangential benefit of that was that we were able to help other businesses,
right? And I mean, that's always been something that I enjoy doing is some people have poured
into me an answer to all the questions that I've had and obscure emails to people I really didn't
know, but they still took the time to answer questions for me. And I wanted to repay that in
some way. So having the public dashboard, which I think distills the sort of high growth myths
that exist in the startup world, especially in startup tech media kind of stuff that celebrates
these unicorn stories instead of just showing how it really is. So to me, that made sense
to do that. And that was a nice benefit that came from that. But like you said,
you mentioned the stuff where you post about something and then all of a sudden you get all
this feedback from people. That was the case for us as well, where you put the stuff out there and
then all of a sudden you start having all these interactions with other founders and other people
in similar situations. And I think there's this community aspect that comes out of it that is
really beneficial to everybody. So that's sort of where we decided to keep doing the transparency
stuff. And that's when a lot of the blog posts started getting a little more transparent and
really specific and mentioning numbers and all sorts of stuff and not trying to hide behind
anything, was because I found it really useful. Again, from that personal reflection standpoint
and not having to hold anything back, but it also was really useful because you'd get the feedback
from lots of people and kind of also learn what other founders are going through, which also,
again, we can work that back into the app and how we're solving problems for businesses.
So it works out really well for us. I mean, I think the danger is thinking that transparency
for transparency's sake is just sort of somehow right or that it defaults to something you should
do. Everybody should be transparent. I don't think that's the case. I think transparency
is only useful for the story that it tells, right? So Buffer, for instance, is super open.
Well, I mean, there's no direct business benefit to customers knowing what their revenue is.
I mean, there's no particular reason that that should matter. But what they're able to do is
to tell this sort of story or have this narrative around openness that brings a ton of attention
to them and their company and what it is that they do. And so by helping lots of other businesses,
those businesses also then sort of learn about what Buffer offers as a product. And I think when
you're able to use that transparency as a way to tell a story, then it becomes really useful.
I think just making your numbers public and posting, say, a monthly revenue blog post and
then leave it at that in and of itself isn't terribly useful. Nobody's really gained anything.
So I think it's important to figure out why it matters to you and your potential customers.
I mean, yes, there's some trade offs. So I think two, probably the biggest trade offs are one,
even though all of our numbers are public, the people that are able to see those numbers aren't
privy to the decisions that we're making in the company based around those numbers. And so it
might be easy to look and say, oh, well, turns up. So something must be wrong with Bearmetrics.
No, we're fully aware of what our turn rate is. And there's X, Y, and Z are in the pipeline to
address that. But it can appear as though something's terribly wrong and things are doomed
just because you're looking at a given number. I think it can also be from a competition standpoint,
which isn't something that I don't really pay attention to any of our competition.
And, um, but I think it's, it spawned a whole slew of copycats. So, you know, somebody who
hasn't ever built anything before, has had any kind of like real success with anything,
sees Bearmetrics and then says like, okay, I mean, so Bearmetrics is making $60,000 a month
right now. Like if I made $6,000 a month, that'd be cool. And so then they say, okay,
I'll just do what Bearmetrics is doing and I'll just have fewer customers and that's fine.
And so then you end up, I mean, just dozens of direct copycats. I mean, down to the pixel
that all sort of cropping up after we made the dashboard public, because then you're able to
see a number and then you kind of, you get, you kind of get with money bags in your eyes and you
start thinking that, Hey, I can do that too. And realizing that like, that's not just the product
that makes this something that's successful, right? It's the whole thing. It's the customer
experience and the support and X, Y, and Z. There's so many different factors there,
but having public numbers makes people think that like, that it's an easy thing that they
also can do and kind of rip off and copy you and that they've somehow done something successful.
I've never accepted the fact that people will do a pixel by pixel copy of somebody else's website.
It used to drive me crazy, but now it like, it just makes me feel sad for them.
There's too many of them to like, it's just nuts. What are they thinking?
I know. And you've been there and almost all of them disappear within a few months.
Another thing that's related that I think is super interesting is very often when
an indie hackers interview becomes pretty popular, if it goes on Hacker News or if it spreads on
Twitter, there will be this class of people that will take some very specific point from the
interview, maybe an advantage that the founder had or a problem that they overcame. And they will
conclude that that problem is 99.9% of why the business was successful. Like they will obsess
over the surface level detail and ignore all the stuff that goes on under the surface, all the
customer support, all the cold emails that people are sending, all the difficult things that are
happening. And I'm wondering if there is anything like that at bare metrics, some sort of
behind the scenes going on that most people aren't really aware of, but that are really
key to your success. Hmm. I don't know. We really do write about pretty much everything.
Okay. Well, what do you think is something that you do write about? That's one of the
most crucial aspects of bare metrics. So I think that people underestimate
the benefit of talking to customers. I mean, I spend not as much as I used to, but I still
spend an inordinate amount of time on the phone with customers. So that's new customers. That's
new potential customers. That's customers that have been with us for a year, two years,
spending a ton of time talking to customers. And that's not exchanging emails. That's not
in-app messages. That's on the phone. The big benefit of that is you're able to get real
feedback from that. And that's something that like a little form field somewhere on a site
does not give you insight to or a little survey does not give you insight to. And I think a lot
of our success can be attributed to conversations with customers and understanding where our
customers are coming from and like what pain points they actually have. That's the thing
with a phone call is that you're able to like get their surface level feedback on something,
but then dig in deeper to really figure out what's going on and not, it's not about, you know,
like, oh, they answered. They picked A out of A, B, C, and D and this multiple choice thing.
So here's what they need. Like, no, there's more to it, but you have to have a, you know,
a human conversation to figure that out. And that just takes spending a ton of time on the phone.
How did you get started with the phone calls? Is this something that you were doing from the
early days with the product or did you kind of grow into it?
I started doing it within the first year, I mean, maybe in the first like six months.
It just started making sense. Like, to me, it was the easiest way to get fast feedback.
And I found people I hate responding to. Okay, so like, if you had wanted to do an interview
for me with me for this, and it was all text, like he was like, I'll email you like 20 questions,
and you can email me back whenever you want. I would just never ever respond. Like, it's just
too much work for me to type all that out. It's way easier for me just to sort of stream of
conscious spout out what's in my head instead of trying to just sit there and type out these
long answers to things. And that's the case for a lot of people too. So it's, you know,
if I sent them questions in an email, asking for feedback, well, they may have great feedback,
but they're taking the time to sit there and write it all out. Just seems like for me and
for other people, it seems like a lot more work than just hopping on a phone call and
having a quick conversation. So that's sort of really where it came from was like,
it's just easier to have a phone call.
Yeah, it's funny that you mentioned that because for indie hackers, I do a lot of
text based interviews, and I'll send people these questions that take at least an hour or two to
answer. And unsurprisingly, about 50% of the people I send the questions to never get back to me.
So maybe I should switch to your system of talking to customers bare metrics. What kinds of things
have you learned by talking to customers on the phone that you didn't necessarily know before you
got started with bare metrics? Yeah. So early on, I mean, the first version of bare metrics lasted
two months, and then I scrapped the entire code base and started over. That came from customer
feedback and realizing, you know, I had, because it started as a thing where I'm scratching my own
itch, it was just that first version was just the things that I wanted, which were really high
level. Like, what's my current MRR? What's my current churn? There was no real sort of insight
into the historical stuff at all, and found out really quick that not only do people want that,
but it's genuinely useful to look back over time and see the trends of metrics. And so,
I mean, that was one of the earliest things that I learned right out of the gate was, you know,
people giving people more information is a good starting point. And then also, you know, something
that we're spending a ton of time on now is helping people figure out why that information or why
those numbers, why that data is useful and what to do with it. So that's a really big problem in
the analytic space is that knowing what to do with the numbers is super hard to figure out.
Yeah, I used a mixed panel in the past, and I basically just tracked anything that I could
think of. And after a while, I just never looked at it because there was no obvious way that it
can inform my decision making. It's analysis paralysis, right? So it's like, you end up
looking at the numbers, you're like, okay, cool, this number is 37. Like, so what? Who cares?
What do I do with that, right? So, yes, that's a big problem.
So education, you would say, is a big part of Bear Metrics' business. Is that what the
Business Academy section of your website is for? Do you direct your customers to articles in that
section to help them figure out their metrics? Or is it more for people who aren't customers yet?
The public facing content is more about marketing. We try to do any kind of like,
hey, what's my churn mean? And we try to do as much in-app sort of guidance as possible. Sometimes
that means, hey, go read these few articles to really dig in deeper. But I think there's a lot
from just a UI and a UX standpoint that can be done to help surface that kind of stuff.
Okay, so I've got some questions now that are a little bit less specific. And the first is,
what have the biggest challenges been for you at Bear Metrics? Has there ever been
any obstacle that you were worried that you wouldn't be able to get over? Or has it been
pretty much smooth sailing for you guys from the start?
So this past summer was probably the roughest patch for Bear Metrics. So we raised about
$800,000 over the past couple years. And we ended up spending all of that. And so we were really
close to running out of money this past summer. So that was for us, I mean, everybody had to take
a pay cut. So this is rough. So we're just like on the tail end of that, like coming out of that
and giving everybody back up to full salary now, you know, six, seven months later. So we're fine
at this point. But I mean, there was a couple months there where it was a little rocky.
What's the story behind your fundraising? Because I know you started off bootstrapped.
Yep. So started in November and then through, let's see, July or August of the next year. So
I guess it'd be like eight, no, like nine or 10 months, totally bootstrapped. I think got up to
15, $20,000 or something like that, just bootstrapped. So initially we were built just for
Stripe. So early on, I mean, like a week after launching the first version of Bearmetrics,
the guys at Stripe reached out and were super supportive. Because I mean, really, Bearmetrics
was probably the most significant thing at that point ever built on Stripe. Nobody had really
tried to tackle any sort of add-on or thing that was like powered almost completely by Stripe.
So there was a relationship that was started there that led to, yeah, eight, nine, 10 months later,
we'd had a couple of conversations. I'd flown out there a couple of times. And then that summer,
2014, went out there for a meeting with them and they decided to start this thing, what do they
call it? Like the Stripe platform fund or something? I don't know what it's called, but
they've started it so that they could basically invest in companies that were building stuff
on Stripe to sort of encourage this developer ecosystem. So that was the initial 500,000 came
from that. And then a year and a half later, we were at a point where, and this is super typical,
and this is why companies end up raising multiple rounds because you hire people and then you run
out of money. So we needed to raise a little bit more money. So then we raised an additional 300,000
on top of that first 500. So that was 800,000 over the course of a year and a half, I guess.
That's a lot of money. And of course, the pressure after raising money from investors is always to
spend. Well, right. And I think most investors aren't like, there's no like, hey, you should
be spending lots of money. That's not the sort of thing that investors say. There are some
expectations around that, but again, it's not in like, I think it depends on the investor.
So we had two different investors that ultimately put in that money and it was pretty helpful
relationships to have there. They've been healthy and not this weird. I feel like anybody's
looking over my shoulder telling me what to do or anything like that. But it was like the money
itself, they were the source of the money and the money in and of itself isn't a bad thing. It was
just my not being wise with the money, which is, again, that's the case. That's why most startups
that fail, it's because they ran out of money because they weren't spending it wisely. They
were overestimating growth. I mean, you talk of even like the guys at Buffer, where about the
exact same time that we were having all this trouble, they wrote this really long article
about how they had to lay off some people and cut back on expenses because they did the same
thing. They overestimated growth and then it takes a while to course correct that kind of stuff
because the large majority of your expenses come from payroll. So those are knobs that are not
easily twiddled. You can't just be like, oh, hey, you know what? I'm going to not pay you next
month. It doesn't work like that. So it's like there's people's lives that are affected by this
stuff. So as soon as you realize there's a problem, you have to sometimes take some drastic measures
to save the business. So that's how it goes. Besides that, if you could go back in time,
is there anything in particular that you would do differently knowing what you know today?
I think there's some barometric specific things that I would have done differently. I wish we
had expanded outside of Stripe earlier. I wish that I had been a lot more frugal early on,
not hired as quickly. You ended up hiring before you raised money, right?
I had hired one full-time and two part-time who eventually became full-time after the fundraising.
But no, I had enough bootstrapped because I think it was $20,000 by the time the
funds were in the bank account. So at that point, yeah, there was enough to cover a couple full-time
salaries anyways. So you mentioned earlier that it might not scale, but you're writing most of the
blog posts and the content on the site and you're talking to customers on the phone and I'm sure
you're also immensely busy with your other founder responsibilities. So what's your day-to-day like?
Yeah, so it's a mix of... Because I sort of also play product manager. So we've got all these
features in the works and so it's sort of my job to spec that stuff out and then reviewing
design comps and then making sure those... We've automated a lot of the process and got a little
bit... A pretty solid system in place where things can move forward pretty good bit without
needing my intervention, but they're still... Especially in the design phase and just figuring
out how this will affect the app and the customers and the experience and all that stuff.
I spent a lot of time on that. Yeah, customer... Not customer support so much as just sort of like
just talking to customers and figuring out what their needs are and not... But not so much like
trying to solve like, hey, this thing doesn't work inside the app. I don't really spend any
time on that, but... And then yeah, writing content. I mean, I wrote a 2000 word article
this morning and a 1000 word article yesterday. I have a couple more articles this week. So
I spent a lot of time with that too. That's huge. Have you found that the way you spend your time
has changed a lot as Baremetrics has grown? Because I know at the beginning as a founder,
you have to wear a lot of hats. Sure. Yeah. I mean, I think I don't do... I'm not doing like
really any design work or any development work, but I mean, and not a lot of direct customer
support work. I mean, I'm almost more like a chief marketing officer slash product manager
more than anything right now. And that's been the case for a while. I mean, I've hired out
basically all the other major positions besides that.
Is it your goal to eventually replace your marketing job or your product management job?
I mean, yes, from just optimizing the company. Yes, I mean, I think that makes sense to do that.
There's a ton of stuff that we still sort of want to do that it would make sense to hire other
people for differing positions than like a marketing or product manager. But eventually,
I assume we'll get there. On that note, it's pretty early in 2017.
Do you guys set yearly goals? And what do you see as Baremetrics' future?
Yeah. So the big thing, and this should happen here in the next like two or three months,
is getting to profitability, which, you know, if you're like in the bootstrap world,
this is laughable. But I mean, like, here we are, like, over three years in and we're like,
yeah, we hope to be profitable soon. But I mean, like, for a company that's raised some money,
that ends up, that's a big deal. So hope to be completely profitable here by like,
it'll probably like March or April. And then revenue goals, you know, million dollar run rate,
preferably more than that. But that's sort of like the realistic goal that we should be able to hit
fine. Then we've got some really big product stuff that is in the pipeline. So I think the
Baremetrics as a product itself will become super mature this year and become like this
really powerful analytics platform. So that's sort of the goals. Yeah.
It's exciting stuff. And on a final note, I'd love to know,
if you could give one piece of advice to aspiring indie hackers who want to create a business of
their own, what advice would you give? What mistakes do you see other people making to
which the solutions might not be so obvious? To start, it's easy to research building startups.
It's easy to read stuff on Hacker News or even, you know, look at stuff on Product Hunt or like
just spend a lot of time like looking at other things instead of actually producing something.
And I think that's the biggest, you know, most people, it's not that they can't find a market
for something. It's not that they're charging the wrong prices. It's not that their design looks
like crap. It's like it's just not ever doing anything. Like just sitting there and talking
about, you know, hey, I'm going to do a startup one day. Like don't do a startup. Just build
something that solves a problem. You know, you don't do a startup, you solve problems, right?
And so I think most people don't, they just don't ever actually start anything. It's substantial.
They sit there and stay in research phase for years on end.
Agreed. And that is a perfect spot to end the interview. If you're listening,
get out there and start something. Build something bare bones in the next week or
two and try to sell it to a customer. Josh, where can we go to learn more about you and
what you're doing at Baremetrics? Yeah. So Baremetrics is at baremetrics.com.
I'm on Twitter at Shpigver. That's S-H-P-I-G-F-O-R-D. Or you can shoot me an email,
josh at joshpigver.com. And I think that's all the major places.
If you enjoyed listening to this conversation, you should join me and a whole bunch of other
ND hackers and entrepreneurs on the ndhackers.com forum, where we talk about things like how to
come up with a good idea and how to find your first paying customers. Also, if you're working
on a business or a product of your own, it's a great place to come and get feedback from
the community on what you're working on. Again, that's www.ndhackers.com slash forum.
Thanks and I'll see you guys next time.