KEY TAKEAWAYS
- ✓Build for yourself first. Josh needed SaaS metrics tracking and couldn't find a good tool, so he built one. The best products come from genuine personal frustration.
- ✓Radical transparency can be your marketing strategy. Sharing real revenue numbers publicly built trust and attracted customers.
- ✓Know when to let go. After 7 years, Josh sold Baremetrics because he recognized he was no longer the right person to take it to the next level.
Hello! Who are you and what are you working on?
Josh Pigford has started over 50 projects in his career. Most of them went nowhere. But in late 2013, he built something in 8 days that would define the next 7 years of his life and eventually sell for $4 million.
Josh was running two small SaaS products on Stripe and was frustrated by how hard it was to track basic business metrics. Monthly recurring revenue, churn rate, customer lifetime value, average revenue per user: these are the numbers every SaaS founder needs to monitor, but calculating them from raw Stripe data was tedious and error-prone. The existing analytics platforms required complex integrations that took days or weeks to set up. Josh wanted something that worked instantly.
Over 8 days in November 2013, Josh built the first version of Baremetrics. The concept was elegantly simple: connect your Stripe account, and Baremetrics would automatically calculate and display all your key SaaS metrics in a clean dashboard. No configuration, no complex setup, no manual data entry. One click to connect Stripe, and within minutes you'd have real-time visibility into your MRR, churn, lifetime value, and dozens of other metrics.
Josh launched with no landing page, no blog, no email capture. He simply shared the product on Twitter and posted it on Hacker News. The response was immediate. On the first day, five or six people signed up for paid plans. One stranger paid $249 per month for the top-tier plan, which Josh hadn't expected anyone to choose. The product clearly filled a gap that thousands of SaaS founders had been dealing with silently.
What set Baremetrics apart from the beginning was Josh's commitment to radical transparency. He made Baremetrics' own dashboard publicly accessible, showing the company's real-time revenue, churn, customer count, and other metrics for anyone to see. This was nearly unheard of in 2013. The public dashboard became Baremetrics' most effective marketing tool. Founders would visit the page to see how a real SaaS company performed, and many of them would sign up for the product so they could have the same visibility into their own businesses.
Growth was steady but not explosive. Josh grew Baremetrics to $30,000 in monthly recurring revenue within the first year, primarily through organic word of mouth, the transparency dashboard, and content marketing. He blogged regularly about building Baremetrics, sharing detailed posts about revenue milestones, product decisions, and the challenges of running a bootstrapped SaaS. Each blog post reinforced the brand and drove traffic to the product.
After bootstrapping for about a year and hitting 350 paying customers, Josh raised a $500,000 investment from Stripe. This wasn't a traditional VC round. Stripe invested because Baremetrics was built on their platform and was helping their customers succeed. The investment gave Josh the capital to hire faster and build features that had been on the backlog for months.
Over the next several years, Baremetrics expanded beyond Stripe to support other payment processors, added features like cancellation insights, revenue forecasting, and dunning (failed payment recovery), and grew the team to about 8 people. Revenue stabilized around $30K MRR, with the product serving hundreds of SaaS companies who relied on it for their daily metrics monitoring.
But Josh was also honest about the struggles. Competition intensified as companies like ChartMogul and ProfitWell entered the market. ProfitWell in particular disrupted the space by offering core metrics for free, funded by premium add-on products. This put pricing pressure on Baremetrics and made customer acquisition more challenging. Josh wrote openly about these competitive pressures, and the honest accounts of both wins and struggles became some of his most widely read content.
After 7 years of building Baremetrics, Josh made the decision to sell. He was burned out, the competitive landscape had shifted, and he recognized that the company needed a different kind of leadership to reach its next phase of growth. In 2020, Baremetrics was acquired for $4 million by Xenon Partners. Josh pocketed approximately $3.7 million from the sale after paying off the Stripe investment and other obligations.
Josh's biggest mistake was trying to do too much. Throughout Baremetrics' life, he launched side projects, explored new product ideas, and spread his attention across multiple initiatives. The lack of singular focus on Baremetrics meant that product development sometimes lagged behind competitors who were fully dedicated to the metrics space. If he had channeled all of his considerable creative energy into Baremetrics alone, the outcome might have been even larger.
After selling Baremetrics, Josh started Maybe Finance, a personal finance platform, continuing his pattern of building products that solve his own problems. His career arc, from serial project launcher to successful exit to new venture, illustrates a truth about entrepreneurship: most things you try won't work, but the ones that do can change your life.
The Baremetrics story matters because it demonstrates that a useful product, built quickly from genuine frustration, can become a meaningful business. Josh didn't spend months on market research or competitive analysis. He scratched his own itch in 8 days, put it in front of people, and let the market tell him whether it was valuable. The answer was a resounding yes, and 7 years later, it was worth $4 million.