A Look Inside Baremetrics: February 2014

Josh Pigford on March 03, 2014

Since launching our “open demo” a few weeks back, the response has been great. Tons of entrepreneurs have emailed and tweeted about how it’s been so insightful to get a glimpse of the financial side of another early-stage company.

So, goal accomplished.

On top of that, I thought it might be interesting to do a month-in-review post each month to take a look at not only the financial side of things, but to break out what we did, what worked, what didn’t, and so forth.

So here we are.

Money

Let’s cut straight to the goods. In February we made $4,084. Compare that to January ($2,620) and we saw about 56% growth in revenue. Legit.

That puts our current Annual Run Rate around $50k (and growing).

Customers

As of the end of February, we had 87 customers. Compared to just 47 in January, we nearly doubled our customer base.

While the initial signup process is pretty straight forward, most customers end up having quite a few questions about how certain metrics are calculated or if we are able to provide metric XYZ for them. All valid questions, but that ultimately translates to a good bit of support work.

So, this past month I spent a lot of time emailing and talking on the phone with new customers.

We decreased churn by about 0.5%. Not a ton, but in reality we don’t have a huge customer base, so the churn rate at this point is still a little volatile.

The Good

In addition to being a solid month from a revenue/customer-growth perspective, it was also a great month as far as expanding the product goes.

We added a new Failed Charges metric, which makes it much easier to stay on top of revenue that you’re missing out on.

We also added a new Live Stream feature, which keeps you in the loop on all that’s happening with your business.

The Bad

One of the downsides to nearly doubling our customer base is that we’ve also had some scaling issues. Managing so much data and doing our best to keep it as “live” as possible, has been the source of quite a few headaches and late nights putting out fires.

We’ve got a much better handle on things, but there’s still a lot of room for improvement.

Looking Forward

In the coming month, the primary goal is getting a better handle on performance issues.

There’s also a lot to be done to make it clearer what each individual number means and how it was calculated. Doing that would also reduce support load quite a bit.

Hope you enjoyed the review post. If there’s something else you’d be interested in knowing in these posts, let me know. I’m an open book. 🙂

Josh Pigford