Table of Contents
This was originally published on my personal blog, which has descended in to a black hole, so I’m republishing it here as a little historical startup memorabilia.
Being able to build out your ideas is both a blessing and a curse. Generally speaking, I can bring a basic incarnation of pretty much any idea I have to life in a matter of hours, days or weeks.
Most of these ideas are borne out of problems that I personally need solving, so the nice part of that is even if no one else needs it, I still get value out of my time.
Thankfully, one of these spur-of-the-moment ideas that I brought to life in just a couple of weeks, quickly got some traction.
Introducing Baremetrics
A week ago today I launched Baremetrics, which is zero-setup, one-click Stripe analytics.
My problem with other analytics services out there is they all require pretty extensive setup, and I never felt like I’d done it correctly. And even then, ongoing if I didn’t properly get all business metrics added, then it would throw everything off.
After chewing on my problem a bit, I realized…Stripe has just about all of the data I’d actually want to look it. Why not build some software that automatically puts together all metrics I’d want to track? So, I did.
Launch Stats After 7 Days
Here are some random bits that you may find interesting (or mind numbingly boring).
- Idea to launch: 30 days (10 of which I was out of the country and not working on it). Spent a total of probably 8 full working days on it.
- Paying customers: 23
- Revenue: $1,328 (which is recurring)
- Stripe API events processed: ~1 million
Marketing
I did nearly no marketing on this. No pre-launch email collecting, no emails out to friends at other startups, no advertising. I literally just tweeted. That’s it.
Patrick and John from Stripe were kind enough to tweet about it as well, plus lots of friends of mine (many of which have SaaS companies), helped out by sharing it as well.
The number of signups was a comfortable amount for me as it gave me a good balance of not overwhelming me with little bugs/fixes while still validating that there are folks who will happily pay for it.
The Future
The big thing that’s in the works is Email Reports. In the next couple of weeks customers will be able to get a weekly email of how their business is doing. A report that, quickly gives them useful data on the health of their business and how well (or not) they’re doing in a given area).
Also have plans of expanding the metrics we’re offering so it’s even more valuable.
If you use Stripe for a SaaS business, I think you’ll find it really useful. Would love for you to check it out: baremetrics.com running a business in general, please reach out. I’m happy to talk anywhere at any time.
