Challenge: MetricFire is a small but mighty team. In order to run efficiently, they needed the right tool to analyze data from Stripe and segment their customers.
Solution: They signed up for Baremetrics. Right away, its analytics tools made it easy to calculate key SaaS metrics and segment customers based on customizable attributes.
Result: Baremetrics saves the MetricFire team approximately 8 hours a month on spreadsheet maintenance and takes the headache out of transforming data into graphs. This allows their team to focus on product, sales, and customer success while staying lean.
MetricFire is a full-scale platform that offers infrastructure, system, and application monitoring using a suite of open-source monitoring tools. MetricFire allows you to use Graphite-as-a-service to have your metrics displayed on user-friendly and aesthetically-pleasing Grafana dashboards.
MetricFire offers five subscription tiers according to the needs of different organization types. Each plan can be run using Graphite with Grafana Dashboards.
SaaS companies like SalesForce, Xfinity, Accenture and more rely on MetricFire to visualize their data in real-time and stay on top of their systems.
Baremetrics spoke to MetricFire’s Business Operations Manager Elliot Langston to learn more about how they use Baremetrics to analyze Stripe data and segment customers.
MetricFire is an international team with employees in Japan and the United States. At one point, the company was larger and had a teammate devoted primarily to billing and financial reporting. But when the team reorganized two years ago, billing and financial reporting were delegated to Langston, who also oversees business development and customer success.
To accomplish these tasks, Langston turned to MetricFire’s Stripe account.
Stripe is the leading payment processing service for SaaS and subscription businesses. Its platform handles recurring payments from customers all over the world, supports different pricing models, and has developer-friendly features that allow for limitless customization.
Stripe’s in-app metrics feature, however, is limited to just 16 metrics. And in MetricFire’s experience, the reporting gave misleading Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) figures for two reasons:
As a workaround, Langston would create dummy accounts in Stripe and link those to the incorrectly recorded payments. Doing this repeatedly, however, was not sustainable. Since Stripe is a payment processor, there’s always a chance that human error would result in a billing mistake such as a customer being charged incorrectly.
On top of that, there’s no ability to customize the date views in Stripe, so users can only look at their data in fixed time periods like four weeks, one year, and two year periods.
Finally, in addition to limited and inaccurate analytics, Stripe’s platform doesn’t include the ability to segment customer data. This made it hard for Langston to efficiently organize customers by geographic location.
In order for MetricFire to grow their business, their team needed a tool to:
Baremetrics’ robust toolset simplified MetricFire’s billing and reporting processes, allowing them to keep their team size optimized and focused on revenue-generating tasks.
Stripe provides basic analytics for SaaS metrics, but growing SaaS & subscription companies upgrade to Baremetrics for efficient, accurate, and in-depth reporting.
The MetricFire team checks the Baremetrics Control Center at least once a day to keep a pulse on financial activity. Here they can view MRR (recurring revenue only), Net Revenue, Average Revenue Per User, MRR growth rate, and 17 other metrics- all in one place.
Below is Baremetrics’ actual control center. You can see it in real-time here!
MetricFire integrated their Baremetrics account with Slack to get notifications about upgrades, downgrades, and failed charges in real time. When Langston sees a notification, he goes into Pipedrive and takes the appropriate course of action.
Here’s an example of a Slack notification in the Baremetrics team channel.
Customer segmentation is essential for understanding your customer base: who they are, where they are, what they do, how long they’ve been your customer, and more. SaaS companies might segment customers according to MRR, whether they’re B2B or B2C, or in MetricFire's case, geographic location.
Here’s what the customer segmentation tool looks like when Baremetrics segments customers by geographic location, or in other words, where the active credit card on file is located:
Before using Baremetrics, Langston would copy and paste tons of data into spreadsheets. Then, he would write formulas to organize the information. This tedious process would take up to one whole business day to complete.
Now, using the Segmentation tool, Langston organizes customers in seconds. His team then compares segments by size and growth rate, and uses the information to inform expansion opportunities.
To hit growth goals, MetricFire is focusing on improving their Hosted Graphite offering and building an Azure Microsoft platform for data collection. These improvements will continue to provide a robust Hosted Graphite service for any customer use case.
To learn more about MetricFire, check out their blog. They cover everything you need to know about cloud monitoring for SaaS businesses of all sizes.
MetricFire is one of 900+ subscription-based companies using Baremetrics to understand key metrics and accelerate growth. To see how Baremetrics can make a difference for your business, start a free trial today.