2: Josh Pigford, Founder of Baremetrics, a powerful subscription analytics software for SaaS companies

[00:00] Welcome to First Customers, a hyper-tribal podcast. I'm your host, Paris Vega. Let's get started. Our guest today is Josh Pigford, the founder of Baremetrics. His company has grown steadily every year since launching in 2013, and it currently generates 1.4 million a year in recurring revenue. Baremetrics customers are made up of over 800 SaaS and subscription businesses. Josh is a maker who makes things happen. He's launched over 50 projects since 2003, and he's just getting started. Enjoy the show. All right, Josh, thanks again for coming on the show. [00:41] Today, we're going to talk about how you got your very first customers for Baremetrics. I know you've been involved with a ton of projects. I've got your list on my screen here of 57 different projects you've started over the years. So I'd love to hear just your general strategy about how you approach getting customers and then maybe go deeper into Baremetrics. Sure, absolutely. Well, thanks for having me. So the first customer thing is kind of interesting in that I find that it's not terribly repeatable. Like, you know, something that I did to get customers on some like B2C product is not the same as some B2B. And then there's things like timing and like, so with Baremetrics, like at the time, so the landscape, well, okay, so a little groundwork here. So Baremetrics is essentially like a SaaS analytics product. [01:48] So you need SaaS analytics like MRR, lifetime value, churn, things like that. There's ways to calculate that stuff. And back in 2014, is that when I started Baremetrics? Yes. No, 13. 2013, getting that stuff was very difficult. You were either manually doing it in spreadsheets, or you were sort of hacking together these like internal tools that didn't really give you much insight, or you were paying some like massive data company to like build you these in their own data warehouse, these like dashboards and stuff for all that. So relatively inaccessible. Right. And where, what Baremetrics did was, this is the same time when Stripe, the payment processor, was also starting to take off. [02:41] So I figured I could use Stripe's developer stuff to easily pull in the data and just calculate it automatically for you. And so then you basically have to do zero setup to get going. And that was the case that worked, but nobody else had done it. And so getting customers at the time was, was a matter of me like tweeting, like the first handful of customers came from me just talking about building this thing. And it wasn't that I had some huge Twitter following or anything. It was just, I knew some other founders and they use Stripe and Hey, here's the thing that you can instantly get sort of data insights that you otherwise were having a really hard time doing. And you just click a button and that's it. And so that was sort of the extent of like getting customers. [03:34] And that seems to be like a theme with Baremetrics and your personal projects on the side. You're really transparent. You share a lot about the behind the scenes process. Has it always been that way? Was that like a conscious decision to go that direction with the way you run your businesses or? Yeah. So I've always been relatively open, not necessarily with the, here's how much money the thing is making. Um, that tends to be the case now, but I mean, you know, previously it was, um, I certainly was relatively open with like, Hey, here's the things I'm building. And, and like pre Twitter, it was, I was very active in, in, you know, forums and message boards, things like that, where like internet community for me, for, you know, I've, I've been building stuff on the web since the nineties. [04:19] So, um, I relatively entrenched in the various incarnations of internet community that have existed over the past 20 years. So, um, I've always been very involved where like, Hey, I'm, I'm trying to build this thing. Can somebody help out? And that might be a post on a message board back in, you know, 2001. And I would find somebody and we'd build something together. Like, so that's always been a very sort of, I don't know, not necessarily like this like community based like way of building things, but it's just, that's, I've always been pretty open with the things that I'm working on. Um, so it's, I've had lots of connections. So from your organic audience, your relationships that you'd build the communities, you just put out a few tweets and your first customers came in from that. Uh, yes, totally. [05:07] I mean, that was completely it, um, was, you know, Hey, here's a dozen founders who I'm friends with and we follow each other on Twitter. They need this thing for their business and they click a button to do it and that's it, you know? And, uh, and so then it spreads from there because, you know, founders talk to other founders and they all have relatively similar needs. And so that's a pretty organically group of that. Yeah. That's so interesting because like, for example, the last, uh, founder I talked to was, is relatively silent on social media, but he ended up, you know, attaching what he was doing to somebody who was like an influencer and kind of had to piggyback, but you're like a built-in marketing department because of being that open and transparent. [05:51] Did, so at what point did you switch or have you even gone about more intentional marketing and kind of growth the traditional ways? Um, so the way that our, our sort of trajectory with the way that we've done or handled or approached growth of their metrics, um, was, you know, early 2013, it's just me doing all the things and then sort of hiring people, um, to handle mainly product roles. So I was in this sort of marketing role myself. I mean, really up until about a year ago. And, uh, and I was pretty much all in on the content side of marketing. Um, not because I felt like I was particularly good at it, but it was just what sort of came naturally just producing these. I would write an article every single week on, you know, basically from one founder to another kind of thing. [06:52] Like that was the angle I took. And, uh, and that worked really well until really probably about two years ago. Um, it became difficult for me to sustain that sort of every week having to pump out an article. I mean, it was taking up at least a full day every week. Um, so, you know, 20% of my time focused on producing a blog article. Isn't a great use of my time really. Um, and so, so then about a year ago, finally just bit the bullet and hired, um, Corey, who's our head of growth now. Um, so he's now doing sort of, I wouldn't say, I mean, not traditional marketing, but sort of more traditional growth stuff where it's like, let's explore all these different channels and figure out what works for us. [07:39] And so that's what we're in right now is this sort of period of feeling things out, figuring, trying lots of things, seeing what sticks, seeing what doesn't. So you started out, did you have a business partner or anything? Was it just you? It was legit just me for the first probably six months doing a hundred percent of all the things. And so for that first six months at first you tweeted and then. And then I kept, I kept tweeting. It was, it was, I was like tweeting and writing articles. And I started the article writing stuff pretty early on. I mean, within the first month I was writing a good bit. And then that sort of parlayed into maybe, let's see, probably three or four months in when I made our, uh, dashboard public. [08:22] So you could, you can, you know, if you go to demo.bearmetrics.com, you can see our numbers and that, that sort of kicked off a little bit of this, you know, that ultimately is content and it's also my content marketing. Um, but you know, it's a thing that people share and look at a lot. So, uh, so is that you guys, you're the ones who started that transparent startup movement where everybody's sharing their company's revenue and statistics, things like that? No. Well, so prior to us, there's like buffer is probably the biggest one people think of. And there's a company called groove that does like help desk software. They were, they were most known for like their blog, which was like, I think they initially called it like journey to a hundred thousand dollars or something like that. Now it's like journey to 500,000 or something. [09:06] I don't know. Um, but those two guys, their companies were probably the most well-known as far as like operating transparently, um, and, and sort of actively trying to publish this stuff. Um, and then I would say we sort of, we made it easy for lots of companies to start doing, to have this sort of dashboard. Like, so buffer back in 2014 made their stuff public and via Baremetrics. And, uh, and so that's the sort of, I think, I don't want to say that we're like responsible for any of that stuff, but I do think that we've probably at least given like this, like graphical, you know, UI to people sharing that stuff really easily. Um, isn't there like an option in Baremetrics where you can make some of the data public or is that something else? [09:52] Well, not, there's not, there's not any sort of like you click a button that as a customer that you can do that. Like you reach out to us and we, there's a process that we go through. So you can't like accidentally like, Oh gosh, we have to go and like set DNS records and a bunch of manual stuff to make it happen. But, but anyone certainly is welcome to do it. That's cool. All right. So did you have a blog before? Was that part of like, you're like being in the community? Pre-Baremetrics? Yes. [10:26] No, I have, I have yes, but not anything that anybody ever read. Gotcha. I, like extent of my sort of following, I guess would be, has always essentially just been Twitter. Okay. So during that first six months, did you try anything else to get new customers other than tweeting and blogging? I mean, I, it would have been smart for me to try some other stuff, but I didn't. Yeah. That was it really. And it was a lot of it was word of mouth stuff, you know, and like at the time, um, you know, I mentioned that was sort of when Stripe was really starting to take off as a payment processor. Um, and no one else had, as far as like something being built on Stripe, there lots of people had done integrations so that you could like pull some stuff or like connect your Stripe account to X, Y, or Z. [11:14] But like no one had built this like entire platform, uh, on top of Stripe's API. And so that, you know, that's one of those things where, you know, I've met with Stripe multiple times talking through like how they can best promote Baremetrics. And so like in the early days, if you reached out to Stripe saying like, Hey, how do I get these sort of like, I want some SAS analytics that they would point you to Baremetrics. So, you know, there was, there was that kind of stuff early on where I sort of rode that wave early on before, you know, this is like back Stripe when I, when I built bare metric Stripe was like a 90 person company and now they're like 900. So, uh, we were able to sort of ride that. That's why I mentioned earlier, this sort of timing thing. [11:57] Like it's important to recognize that like the way the stuff that I did five, six years ago would not work today. Like there's just exactly the landscape is different. All right. So how fast did it grow? Like, so you put out the tweet initially, how do you remember how many signups you had? Like right off the bat, maybe the first 24 hours, something like that. Oh, first 24 hours. I mean, that was probably, I don't know. I think my actual very first customer was this $250 a month customer, uh, who stuck around for like four or five years or something. Um, I think we surprised, like, did you have any expectations or a feeling that this was going to blow up or talk about, you know, kind of mindset around that. [12:42] Right. I had zero expectations of it to do anything at all. Like the reality was I had built Baremetrics for myself because I, at the time I was running, um, so I had like a survey software essentially and I needed these sort of SAS analytics and was having a really hard time doing it. Um, and the whole like spreadsheet kind of thing that I mentioned. Bare metric started as this thing for myself and I really had no intention of, of, uh, making it even public, but then started, you know, chatting with other people like, Hey, I would love that too. Okay, cool. I'll throw it out there. So I, I didn't have, um, a lot riding on it or that I, I didn't really care if it works out or not. And so I certainly didn't have expectations about it. Um, I, so the fact that anybody ever signed up was cool. [13:25] Um, I'm looking back at our $50 a month signup. That would be pretty huge. I was like, hot dog. Okay. It's working. Um, I'm pulling up our metrics now. Like, uh, I can tell you how much we made. Um, so Baremetrics uses Baremetrics. That's right. So in the first, let's see, what is this day one looks like $444 in MRR. [13:51] So I don't know how many customers that would have been, but, um, you know, a handful of customers. Um, actually that's, yeah, that's probably three, four, five, six customers. Um, so this is awesome that you can see exactly how much it grew. Yeah. So that was, you know, getting 400 something dollars in MRR on the first day, not a bad deal for something that I wasn't sure anybody would sign up for. Um, right. And you launched it what year? 2013. So it was like November, 2013. So, and that, that's sort of like, I did that same thing again, the next two days after that. [14:38] So in like the first three days, after three days, I was up to about $1,200 in MRR. Um, so, you know, and then it kind of like, after that, it was just sort of like the usual, like, okay, how do we get the trickle in a couple of signups here, a couple of signups there? Like after the initial sort of like, Hey, this Stripe analytics thing is available sort of buzz past. Then it was, you know, off to like go get in the trenches and get one new customer a day kind of thing. So how far along were you until you made that deal with Striped where they would actually recommend you? Oh, that was within the first, I mean that, that in and of itself, it wasn't like all of a sudden some switch was flipped and I'm getting a lot of customers. [15:24] It was, um, you know, I, I think within the first month I had like, they had like flown me out to San Francisco to chat with them about this kind of stuff. And then first month of you launching Baremetrics. Yeah. And, um, and so that like that, but that was sort of an ongoing, like, you know, we get a couple of new customers here, a couple of new customers there kind of thing from it. Um, yeah, but again, there's, there's no, there was nobody else doing it. I guess. Yeah. Yeah. Because, but I mean, that was the, again, at the time, no one else had built anything like, um, that on Stripe. So like they were super interested in it because, Hey, that's cool that somebody is building this big thing on, uh, on our API. [16:12] Um, but again, they're like, they're relatively a small, like startup. They're not anywhere near what they were or what they are now back then. So, um, it was less of this, like, wow kind of thing. Yeah. It's almost like you built a whole set of analytics that could, they could have made as part of Stripe. Like they talk about bringing you in or trying to acquire you anything at that point. Yeah. But I mean, it's like there, the, I, at the time didn't really even care. Like I wasn't interested in, um, and I'm still like, I would, if I would have done anything with them, I would have come on board as some sort of engineer or something. But the thing is like, I'm not good at anything in particular. [16:52] Like I'm just, I'm good at, I'm, you know, it's the whole like Jack of all trades, master of none thing. Like, yeah, that's me to a T, right? Like I can do a thousand different things. Right. I can make something happen, but I've ultimately like, if you want it done with this like superior quality thing, like you need to hire somebody who's very good at one specific thing. And that wasn't me. And yeah. And so I'm not, uh, I ultimately like I would make a terrible employee because I don't know, like, I don't have a very specific skill that someone could hire for a very specific role. Yeah. I totally feel that. [17:28] Okay. We've got more with Josh Pigford. in just a minute. So a couple of tweets gets a few dollars in a little blogging. It sounds like you might, might not even have started blogging until after you met with Stripe. Was that in that within that first month? Yeah. I mean, so within a few months, I started the pretty, like at least monthly and probably like every couple of weeks sort of like writing articles. Um, but I mean, there's really the, I, the, the like meeting with Stripe thing is like a non, uh, it's not really an interesting thing. Like, I don't think it's certainly in no way, like added some major revenues concern or something. [18:23] Right. It was not a specifically or a notable event. Right. But if you're just starting something from scratch and I didn't know if, I don't know if you've had any relationship with them before, but that would be like a huge signal to a founder. You know what I mean? Like to be noticed. Sure. Yeah. I mean, I, I, I didn't have any sort of connections with them or anything. I mean, it was just, I don't know, you know, you build something, uh, on somebody else's platform. [18:52] They think it's interesting. Okay, cool. All right. So you said you just got maybe some trickled in recommendations from Stripe after that meeting and blogging, and then just kind of going through the grind and gradually growing to the point where you are now, or were there any other significant bumps in people signing up or noticeable? Yeah. So I, um, there, when we, when we made our, so we made our dashboard public in, um, February, 2014. Um, that had a little bit of a uptick, but then when buffer made theirs public and which I think was like end of April, 2014, we, we definitely had a bump, um, in signups there. Cause you know, they're a big, they're a big company and they, uh, so that brought a lot of new attention to barometrics as a product. [19:56] Wait, which company was it? Buffer. Buffer. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So that was, I mean, early on was a nice, gave us a nice kick. Um, past that, I mean, it's just, you know, like there was a, so middle of 2014, um, our relationship with Stripe ultimately manifested itself in us getting some investment. So they created this Stripe platform fund thing and put in $500,000 and the, from that we were able to, that, that got us some publicity. Um, so that's like traditional PR stuff that that's like, you know, some write up on tech crunch or they're like startup kind of publications. [20:44] I mean, the reality is like doing things like podcasts or even being written up in some article or whatever is ultimately like, those are long plays because it's like stuff that people will visit over time, but none of those on an individual level will do anything in particular. Um, unless you get on Rogan or something. Right. But I mean, like it's just like the, it's the sum of all these things and like people being like, man, I keep seeing that Baremetrics everywhere, you know, like the, like that's sort of more of the feeling of like, let's keep throwing stuff out there so that it feels like everywhere you look in the SAS world, Baremetrics is there. Um, so early on that was sort of, maybe, I don't know that that was, I was intentionally trying to do that, but that I was certainly all in on being involved with the community. [21:31] So, um, I think that was sort of the by-product past that. It's been very sort of product focus for us. So, you know, like adding new features that, you know, maybe, um, increase growth, but also decrease churn. So things that just ultimately help with retention that make it easier for us to grow. So like that kind of stuff, you know, if I'm looking at like an annotated version of our graphs here, like I can look back and say like, oh, this little uptick, well, we launched this feature or, you know, this little uptick, like we launched a whole series of features or whatever. So, um, that happens, you know, that might be like a once a year kind of thing where we get like back in May, 2000, no, March, March or April, 2017, we, um, launched this feature called recover, which is like collecting on failing charges. [22:30] And that like double or tripled our growth rate for a couple of months. Um, and, and that was like, you know, because we made it an add on, like, you know, you would pay an extra 50, a hundred, 200, 300, whatever a month to add on to that or to add that onto your current. So that doubled your revenue growth, right? Your MRR, the growth for didn't double our revenue. It just doubled the, like sort of the growth rate essentially for a couple of months. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Um, didn't necessarily bring on new customers. You're just kind of maximizing the customer. [23:01] Yeah. So that would be expansion revenue. So that's, um, growing from the existing customer base, which is great. Like it's, we'd much rather, uh, our current customers get more value out of it than have to like constantly go finding, go find new customers. Um, so like that kind of thing, you know, that happens maybe once a year, we'll put out some, some major new add on that like helps give us a big bump for a few months or something like that. But for the most part, like if you look at our MRR graph, like it dry, it's smashed my head against the wall consistent. Like it's just this like straight line. Like, I mean, obviously if you look at it on a day-to-day basis, it goes all over the place, but, but you know, just day in, day out, weekend, we out, week out. [23:42] It's, it's just almost this like very, it's a, very, um, uh, straight line, like, you know, a little hill from one point to the next and, uh, our little incline and it's fine. Like it's right. Right. It's a, if anything though, like the positive of that, well, me as sort of the CEO role, like constantly trying to figure out why can't we make this thing grow faster? That's annoying. But at the same time I can look back on five years, six years of data and be like, this is the most stable thing imaginable, you know, like, like at no point have we had this like massive drop in revenue or anything. Like it's just so consistent, which is very comforting. [24:20] You know, like when you think of like the, the rate at which businesses just fail and just completely implode and fall off the face of the earth, uh, having a really stable business, uh, is, you know, fantastic. So I really can't complain about it. When it comes to things like Facebook advertising and Google search ads and those things that will just completely eat up your entire marketing budget. If you go that route, uh, carelessly, uh, have you got into any of that now that the company's more mature, like tested that for, for growing customers? You speak to that a little bit. No, we've stayed far away from it. Um, it's just, I mean, like we've, I like very lightly dabbled, um, once or twice over the past six years, but it's just so expensive. [25:04] And, um, and for the kind of product that we have where there are, there are so many caveats for you to, to become an actual paying customer, like you have to be using one of X payment processors. Not only do you have to be using that payment processor, you have to be properly using their API. And then like, you need to have X amount of revenue for it to even be really all that useful. And so there's just all these different things where it's like, okay, top of the funnel. So you've got 500 trials. Well, like 20 of them or something, I don't know. I don't know the actual ratio there, but I mean, a relatively small percentage of them actually would be a good fit for us. Though anybody who's like, has any sort of software company is like, Oh, I would love to use something like barometrics. [25:51] But I mean, like there's so many caveats to you being able to use it properly that us paying to acquire customers or paying for someone to click on an ad. Like we would just spend so much money to acquire customers and there are cheaper ways for us to do it. Wow. So you're not doing any of that kind of like marketing spend. We don't, we don't, we don't spend any, any dollars on, on advertising. So let's kind of spin it a little bit. If you were giving advice to somebody starting something now, like you were saying, the exact really specific tactics you use wouldn't necessarily translate to all companies, but maybe some, some patterns or some mindsets or something that you would advise a new startup to try. I mean, I think the key there is just, is to try stuff. [26:39] I think a lot of times people are, and I'm guilty of this too, the looking for sort of like quick wins. The reality is like, there are very few, if any quick wins on the growth side of things. But if there are some, they're almost certainly very unique to you and your business. And if anybody else gives you advice on like, do this thing to get, you know, 20 new customers by tomorrow or whatever, like it probably won't work because these really high level things are just usually aren't repeatable. Like the things like, uh, like barometrics making our dashboard public. Like, how am I going to, you can't repeat that. You don't have a dashboard to make public. Like, um, yeah, but that came out of like me trying stuff and you know, eventually, like, Ooh, what if we did this? What if we did that? [27:25] And you just keep trying stuff until like something kind of sticks. And, uh, and to me, that's the kicker is, um, is like having an idea and trying it and see what happens and then move on to the next thing. You know, um, that's more important than sort of trying anything traditional. When did it become a full-time thing for you? What like barometrics as a company? Yeah. Um, I was probably, I mean, the reality was I've been self-employed for like 15 years. So, um, but I mean like when it became my sole focus was probably, I don't know, four or five months in maybe. Okay. But I mean, that's cause it's like, it's, it's paying for me. [28:08] Like I don't, I, you know, I, I was also like, I mentioned having like survey, uh, the survey software that I was building and trying to grow and like, but it was, I was doing that. Okay. I remember seeing that. Plus like consulting. So I was doing like design and development consulting at the same time. So I was like splitting my income essentially between this like survey app thing that was making some money and then consulting stuff. And then eventually relatively quickly within, you know, four or five, six months, barometrics essentially replaced all of that. And so that's when I was like, okay, well I'll just do this one thing. That's a pretty successful kind of a startup story there. Three or four months after launching something, it replaces your income. [28:47] Right. All right. So for anybody starting something, you just got to go deep into it and, uh, try a bunch of stuff, make stuff and see what happens. That's right. That's my, that's my suggestion. That's just like how my brain functions. So is to just do lots of things and keep trying stuff and then see what happens. So that's naturally sort of how I built the company too. Um, I don't know. Some days that's a good thing. [29:13] Others it's a terrible thing. And looking on your, uh, list of all the products, apps, websites, and businesses that you made, I think it's hilarious. You sold a link directory of flash games for $4,500. Yeah, man. That's amazing. In 2003, you've just been hustling forever. That's right. That's right. A link directory, man. That's, that was wild west, man. [29:38] You could do anything on the internet. Yeah. Back in the day. Yeah. That's, that's a great example of, you can't just patting yourself exactly after what other people have used to make, uh, you know, I don't know. I think at the height of it, um, when you can make money from ads online, this was probably 2005, 2006, 2007. I mean, I was probably making, I don't know, four to $6,000 a month off of just like running banner ads on random websites and not even like particularly popular websites or yeah. Or like, there's lots of different ad networks that you can do and you chain them together when like, when one didn't have enough inventory to fill it, you would, it would automatically show from this other ad network. I mean, there's this whole system in place and you know, you could make thousands and thousands of dollars very easily. [30:28] Um, but you know, you just can't, you cannot do that. Um, so it's just different. And you have to like be, that's the whole reason why I think, uh, trying lots of things has worked okay for me is that, uh, the landscape changes relatively quickly. And if you think that you can keep doing the same thing over and over again for a decade, like you will just, it will stop work. Um, and you have to be able and willing to try new things and, and have the sort of capacity to, to know how to try different things and to not just like stick to one set of skills or whatever, forever. Like it has to sort of evolve or you have to sort of mold yourself into all these different roles. Real quick, give everybody a rundown of the other things they can look into, follow you on social media, all that. Hold on. [31:19] I need to look it up cause I can't keep up with all of it. Um, let's see. Okay. So I've got, uh, I got Baremetrics. That's like, that's, you know, 90% of my jam, uh, is that that's largely what I'm doing. Um, then I've got cedar and sail, which is like, um, handmade sort of home goods kind of stuff. So that's like planters and coasters and sort of just home decor kind of stuff. Um, I've got laser tweets, which is just, you know, you get a tweet action to a piece of wood. It's real fancy and people love them. Um, then I've got drop tune, which is like new music notifications, stuff for like Spotify and Apple music and stuff. [31:57] Um, then I've got a thing called playlist, which is like a smart playlist thing for Spotify. It's just like random building and then rock Berg, which is this like music industry simulation game that I've been working on for years. What I need to check that out. Yeah. So it's, I mean, I've probably got a bunch of other random stuff that I don't know. So are you, you're designing and developing these things on the side of these projects? Are you getting your team to work on some? No, no, no. Nobody from Baremetrics works on any of the other stuff. Um, the others are like essentially a hundred percent me. [32:35] There's some of the software stuff. I'm like they're open source and other people can, you know, commit some code or build a feature or something, but past that it's, you know, it's just me. So you in like music industry at all other than making apps for it, other than making an ass for it? Not, not no longer. I have previously been involved. Okay. In a band. Yeah. So I've like recorded a few albums and then like done work in the music industry. Like I used to do build websites for Warner brothers and, um, no way. [33:05] And some other like record labels and things like that. But okay. What instruments were you? Uh, guitar was mine. Guitar. Yeah. Okay. But I haven't, I haven't, I haven't played in ages, but this was like back in like the early two thousands. It's just been a really long time when everybody was in a band. That's right. [33:28] Well, Josh, it's been good talking to you. I appreciate it. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me on. It was fun. Thank you.