Founder’s Journey: Building a Startup from the Ground Up
46 episodes - English - Latest episode: over 4 years ago - ★★★★★ - 28 ratingsA weekly podcast by Josh Pigford, founder of Baremetrics, on his journey growing a startup.
Homepage Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Episodes
Saving you millions of dollars: asset sale vs stock sale
December 03, 2019 12:04 - 6 minutes - 6.18 MBEarlier this year I failed to sell Baremetrics for $5m. But I learned a heaping pile of things from that and one of the biggest things I learned about was the world of asset sales and stock sales. This is about to get real nerdy but this is crucial if you're trying to sell a company. It could literally save you millions of dollars.
5 things I learned failing to sell Baremetrics for $5m
December 03, 2019 12:04 - 5 minutes - 5.1 MBI failed to sell Baremetrics for $5m. While failure is 100% a part of success, it's only useful if you learn something. So, here are some of the things I learned from this little failure. Hopefully these are some things you can apply to your own company (present or future) that can save you a bit of pain.
I almost sold Baremetrics for $5m
December 03, 2019 12:04 - 8 minutes - 8.16 MBIn the past six years of Baremetrics' existence, I've received dozens upon dozens of emails from folks interested in acquiring Baremetrics. When you're running a transparent company that's growing, it just comes with the territory. Generally these conversations quickly fizzle once they realize I'm not even remotely interested in some quick, 1x revenue sale.
Sunsetting Intros: A post-mortem on shutting down a product we just launched
February 28, 2019 14:00 - 11 minutes - 10.3 MBIntros, a product we launched to great fanfare three months ago, is being shutdown, having never made a single penny and costing our team months of work. https://baremetrics.com/blog/sunsetting-intros
Staying mentally healthy as a founder
February 14, 2019 11:00 - 8 minutes - 7.73 MBYesterday I wasn't feeling great, mentally. I had a level of anxiety I hadn't felt in a long time that started in the morning and really persisted through the night. I can't pinpoint it to any one specific thing. It was more the sum of a dozen small things. I felt like I hadn't been leading the team well through a big product change, parenting has been taxing lately, I was second guessing all sorts of life decisions, the things that typically bring me joy day in and out have just fe...
Why founders need hobbies
May 09, 2018 10:00 - 7 minutes - 6.7 MBAs founders, a lot of our identities get wrapped up in our companies. Certainly within our industries, but even to family and friends it’s how people know us. And over time, we sort of become our companies. Most founders or CEOs are the “face” of their businesses and eventually they’re inseparable. Being wholly consumed by your company hurts not only you and the people around you, but even the company itself.
How to identify your perfect customer
April 04, 2018 10:00 - 11 minutes - 10.3 MBA couple of years ago, we were in a hard spot. I had just realized we were mere weeks away from running out of cash and had asked the whole team to take a pay cut while we figured out how to get profitable. But in addition to cutting costs, we needed to figure out how to speed up growth. One of the things we did to speed up growth was figure out who our “perfect customer” was. We’d spent the first two years making some big assumptions about who our ideal customer was and who we shou...
No, that thing is not a big deal
March 14, 2018 10:00 - 8 minutes - 7.64 MBWhen you’re just getting started, everything feels like a big deal. Everything. The tinniest things can turn in to huge showstoppers that drain time and, in many cases, money. But the longer you’re in the game, the more you realize how few things actually matter.
Why we transitioned from Medium back to our own blog
January 24, 2018 11:00 - 11 minutes - 10.8 MBWhere to publish something has becoming a difficult decision for a lot of businesses. You read so many stories about using various channels to distribute content and grow traffic, it's hard to know what does and doesn't work. Medium, in particular, has become a major player in the world of startup content, but is it really that great? https://baremetrics.com/blog/medium-back-to-blog
Don’t let personal health take a backseat in your company culture
January 10, 2018 13:00 - 13 minutes - 12.6 MBWhen building a startup, so much emphasis is put on “the product” or even “the customers”. Everything else takes a backseat. On some level, and at some points in a company’s lifecycle, this makes sense. Of course you’ll make sacrifices and you’ll have to work really hard and work really weird hours. But eventually, you’ll have to stop. The downsides far outweigh the benefits and the damage done to you and your team can be detrimental. That’s what I’m writing about to day. Managing ...
Everybody’s winging it
August 16, 2017 10:00 - 8 minutes - 7.43 MBLast week I hit some sort of boiling point with life and work. July was an incredibly stressful month for me both, personally and with work. Just lots of extremes, and it wore me down. Every single founder is struggling with something. Maybe it's big, maybe it's not. But there's always something. Even the most successful founders deal with this stuff and don't know what to do. Everybody’s winging it. https://baremetrics.com/blog/winging-it
Navigating the long, slow SaaS ramp of death
June 21, 2017 10:00 - 9 minutes - 8.4 MBThere can be some really exciting days when you’re building a SaaS company, but the large majority are a slog. Just one foot in front of the other, slowly trudging your way up the hill in the muck. The hockey-stick growth you’ve envisioned feels laughably far away. Amazingly, you are growing every month, but it’s just…so…tedious. This, my friends, is the long, slow SaaS ramp of death. It’s perfectly normal and par for the course for the large majority of SaaS companies. Check it ou...
Being a Solo Founder: Pros, Cons, Tips & Tricks
June 14, 2017 10:00 - 9 minutes - 8.7 MBFounding a company is hard. You’ve got an infinite number of decisions to make while simultaneously trying to catch lightning in a bottle with creating something out of nothing. It’s even harder when you’re doing it alone. Being a solo founder, in many ways, stacks the deck against you. You’re left shouldering the weight of every single decision and don’t really have any one to share it with. However, there are some ways to make it easier and, in many cases, it can actually be a ma...
Most startups are not “crushing” it
May 17, 2017 17:08 - 7 minutes - 6.88 MBhttps://baremetrics.com/blog/most-startups-are-not-crushing-it Ask any startup founder how things are going and they’ll tell you it’s “going great”. They’ll talk about some new feature they’re rolling out, or a new round of funding. Or maybe they’ll mention how much user growth they’ve had or that they just got covered in TechCrunch. All signs will point to “crushing it”. But, for better or worse, there’s a very high probability that they are, in fact, not crushing it. The exact o...
Startups: Keep It Classy
April 12, 2017 10:00 - 3 minutes - 2.89 MBhttps://blog.baremetrics.com/startups-keep-it-classy-5bba13285cc6 Building a business makes relatively sane humans do some insane things. The past 10 years have been the modern day gold rush for tech. And I mean that in the sense where lots of people risk everything and make nothing while a few hit it big. And that “gold rush” culture makes people do some desperate things in the name of business survival. Every day founders have an infinite number of tiny decisions to make and it...
The startup echo chamber is making you deaf
March 23, 2017 19:09 - 5 minutes - 5.42 MBhttps://blog.baremetrics.com/the-startup-echo-chamber-is-making-you-deaf-771eec220181 Being an entrepreneur is a lonely place, especially if you’re the founder/CEO. Sure, you may have co-founders, but the reality is, there’s a lot of weight on your shoulders, a lot of pressure (self-applied or otherwise) to not drop the ball. To combat this, we’re basically permanently in “problem solver” mode. Everything needs a solution. Which is a natural fit because most entrepreneurs are self...
Getting out of the startup rat race
February 01, 2017 11:00 - 7 minutes - 7.22 MBhttps://blog.baremetrics.com/getting-out-of-the-startup-rat-race-66a5a0ca3055 I’m done. I’m tapping out. I’m bowing out of the startup rat race. No, we’re not shutting down Baremetrics. Very much the opposite. I’m just finished subscribing to and following the traditional startup mentality as we build our company. In June 2016, I realized we had less than two months of runway left. We had an existential crisis on our hands, the kind that you’ve read about hundreds of times. The ki...
How removing self-serve cancellations saved our business (and why it’s not as evil as you think)
January 18, 2017 10:00 - 12 minutes - 11 MBhttps://baremetrics.com/blog/self-serve-cancellations-saved-our-business There may be no topic in the world of business that spurs such impassioned responses than self-serve versus manual cancellation of a subscription. Let’s just say the word “evil” gets tossed around a lot. There’s a lot that gets overlooked in the conversation about this, so I want to walk through the different sides of the arguments for/against and try to keep things as rational as possible. I sincerely want t...
Calculate what feature to build next
October 05, 2016 10:00 - 5 minutes - 5.49 MBhttps://baremetrics.com/blog/feature-framework “What feature should we build next?” Ain’t that the question of the year? While that next feature won’t save your business, it’s still important to actually improve your product and create more value for your customers. And figuring out what you should tackle next may be one of the hardest decisions you make on a regular basis. Most founders (heck, most people) are overflowing with ideas. The problem is, most ideas are, you know…terri...
Our system for scoring & prioritizing every marketing idea
September 14, 2016 10:00 - 8 minutes - 8.12 MBhttps://baremetrics.com/blog/marketing-idea-scoring-system What if you could put a system in place that instantly scores and prioritizes any marketing idea you had? You could focus in on exactly the strategies that are most likely bring you a return on your effort while minimizing costs and increasing impact. #synergy amirite?!? Lucky for you, we’ve got a system for doing just that, and I’ll walk you through how to set it up and get going today! The implementation of this is in a...
That new feature will not save your business
September 07, 2016 10:00 - 3 minutes - 3.47 MBhttps://baremetrics.com/blog/new-features-will-not-save-your-business As a founder, you ooze optimism. It’s a necessary coping mechanism to deal with the volatile up’s and down’s of creating something out of nothing. But that becomes problematic when you’re still finding product/market fit as it makes you believe that next feature will be the feature that solves all of your product’s problems. It won’t. Andrew Chen calls this the Next Feature Fallacy. Above is a chart of our Mont...
Our 7 day launch sequence for announcing anything
August 31, 2016 10:00 - 11 minutes - 10.8 MBhttps://baremetrics.com/blog/product-launch-sequence Our 7 day launch sequence for announcing anything If you launch something on the internet and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? I know. Deep. But seriously, how do you launch/release/announce/publish something and make sure people do in fact hear? Here at Baremetrics we have a launch sequence that we use variations of for basically anything we put out: articles, products, features, news…anything. It’s a repeata...
How we increased annual upgrades by 30%
August 17, 2016 10:00 - 5 minutes - 4.81 MBWhen you’re building a business based on recurring revenue, what you want is predictability. The “recurring” part has a pretty strong measure of that, but getting more of that recurring payment upfront reduces churn and improves cashflow, letting you spend more money now to acquire customers faster. Most companies are very low-touch with annual plans. It’s offered as an option on pricing pages, and that’s usually where it’s left. But you can drastically improve conversions to annua...
The importance of reflection: How writing monthly updates improves our business
July 20, 2016 10:00 - 5 minutes - 4.86 MBhttps://baremetrics.com/blog/reflection-business-updates It’s easy to focus on forward momentum. Looking to the future naturally has an optimistic flair and so we spend more time thinking about it and planning it out. But if we don’t stop to reflect on the past, we’ll miss out on things we could learn. Mistakes that we could, inadvertently, be repeating and best practices that we might fail to adopt. I don’t spend a lot of time reflecting on the past, but once a month I sit down ...
How to write a startup culture manifesto
July 06, 2016 10:00 - 9 minutes - 8.3 MBWhen I hear the words “company culture” my gut reaction is generally to contort my face in some way that conveys “Ewwwwwwww”. It’s just one of those buzz phrases that gets thrown around without anyone knowing what it actually means. But as our team has grown and my role has changed, I’ve been able to step back and spend more time looking at the big picture. As I began to look at what other companies and founders had to say on the topic, I decided it’d be a healthy exercise to actua...
Embiggening the Mission: We now support Recurly & Braintree
June 28, 2016 10:00 - 6 minutes - 5.74 MBToday we’re launching the biggest update in Baremetrics history: we’re expanding our platform to support Braintree and Recurly, in addition to the Stripe support we’ve always had (with more data sources on the way!). A chapter I didn’t plan on writing One of the most interesting parts of being an entrepreneur is the constant evolution. So much of my role is just putting things in motion. It’s sort of like pushing a snowball down a hill. Maybe it gets huge. Maybe it crumbles before...
How we’re fixing “unlimited” vacation
May 04, 2016 10:00 - 7 minutes - 6.94 MBIt’s a common startup benefit to have a “loose” or “unlimited” vacation policy. “Take all the time off you need!” “We don’t babysit you, take off whenever you need off!” But does anyone actually take off any more time than if they were working somewhere that had a “strict” or “limited” vacation policy? My hunch was that if we said we had unlimited vacation then the lack of limits would prevent anyone from actually taking off enough time. They’d self-impose boundaries and instead en...
Remote Hiring: Our 5-step Interview Process
April 27, 2016 10:00 - 14 minutes - 13.2 MBYou’ve plastered your job listing on every job board and social network known to man. Now comes the fun part: sifting through the hundreds or even thousands of applications. But how? How do you narrow down a seemingly endless stream of folks who all want to be a part of your team? Baremetrics is a remote company. We have no main office. We use Earth Class Mail to scan, process and store all of our incoming mail. We all work from a mixture of coffee shops and home offices. Most of u...
The Impossibility of Separating Work & Life
April 13, 2016 11:00 - 7 minutes - 6.94 MBThere’s a lot of talk about “work/life balance” and figuring out how to find some sort of perfect equilibrium wherein your personal life is completely divided from your work building a startup. This is not about that. In fact, it’s about the opposite. It’s about accepting they can’t possibly be separated, and that perfect equilibrium doesn’t exist. However, it’s not all doom and gloom. There are quite a few ways to help mentally process and sort through running your own business in...
10 common mistakes founders make
April 06, 2016 10:00 - 11 minutes - 10.5 MBhttps://baremetrics.com/blog/founder-mistakes Bless our little founder hearts. We’re eternal optimists who have great intentions paired with a propensity to try things that common sense would say is a bad idea. That means we try a lot of things, most of which don’t pan out. But it’s the things that do pan out that keep us motivated. Having talked to and seen the businesses of thousands of entrepreneurs, there are a few mistakes I’ve seen crop up regularly. You should always keep t...
Why we’re changing how we calculate metrics
January 14, 2016 11:00 - 9 minutes - 9.07 MBWe just rolled out a change to Buffer’s very public revenue dashboard that resulted in a $25,000 increase in MRR. This article provides some backstory in to how we originally calculated metrics and the transition to a greatly improved version of metric calculation we’ve been building over the past year._ Very few things in life are black & white, but we so desperately want them to be. Life’s just easier when the choices are obvious. And that certainly holds true with entrepreneursh...
How we generated a $14,000 influx of cash in 7 days
December 09, 2015 14:00 - 7 minutes - 4.88 MBWhen you’re building a business, cash is king. Cash lets you do things like hiring and customer acquisition, and the more of it you’ve got at any given time, the faster (theoretically) you can grow. We recently tried something that got us an extra $14,000 in cash in seven days. Let’s take a look at how we did it. So, what’s great about subscription businesses is the relative stability. You get a steady-ish stream of revenue that slowly increases over time and is much less susceptib...
How freemium nearly caused our business to implode
November 10, 2015 14:00 - 11 minutes - 7.63 MBThree months ago, we introduced a Free plan…and it nearly brought Baremetrics to its knees. Let’s take a look at what we did, how it affected our business and how it was ultimately a failure. When I first built and launched Baremetrics over two years ago, I charged from day 1. No free plan and no trial. You signed up with a credit card and were charged real actual money. Not happy? No sweat, we had a 60 day money back guarantee. We kept this setup for almost two years and grew the...
How to use customer feedback to drive your business
July 08, 2015 10:00 - 12 minutes - 8.47 MBWhile customer feedback is crucial to your startup, it’s also something most founders have a love/hate relationship with. How do you decide if feedback is valuable or not? How do you keep complaints from dragging you down? Where do you draw the line on letting feedback steer your company? We’ll take a look at answers to those questions, along with a story and announcement about how customer feedback is directly changing a core part of Baremetrics. Types of feedback There are two ...
Maker to Manager: What a startup founder does
June 24, 2015 14:45 - 11 minutes - 8.25 MBI’ve long considered myself a “maker”. Heck, it’s the first word in my Twitter profile, so you know it’s official. I’ve been making things for the web since the late 90’s. When I was splitting my time between building my own products and doing consulting, I’d tout myself as the guy who could do everything. I took pride in my ability to do design, frontend, and backend, selling myself as the quintessential “maker of things”. Then, Baremetrics started taking off. I quickly realized t...
How to Deal with Competition (or Not)
June 18, 2015 10:00 - 6 minutes - 4.42 MBAs an entrepreneur, one of the biggest sources of stress you have with your startup is likely your competition. It’s easy to become really paranoid about each move they make, each feature they launch and each piece of content they’re publishing. Everything can feel like it’s aimed directly at burning your castle to the ground. So how do you deal with that? Or do you even deal with it at all? A competitive change of mind Back in 2008 I built a hosted ad serving platform. Publishers...
3 things we did to reduce churn by 68%
May 06, 2015 10:00 - 11 minutes - 7.76 MBIf recurring revenue is a rainbow leading to a pot of gold, then churn is the dirty leprechaun trying to keep it all from you. Okay, so my rainbow leprechaun metaphor is a little weak, but you get the idea. SaaS products are amazing because of how recurring revenue has a compounding affect. That $100/mo customer keeps paying…over and over again. Until they don’t. And that’s where churn comes in and why it’s so vicious to the growth of a company. I’ve written before about how to re...
Build vs. Buy: How to blow $100,000 saving money
April 29, 2015 10:00 - 10 minutes - 7.01 MBWhen you’re just getting started and you’re strapped for cash, you typically do all sorts of things to pinch pennies. It’s just part of surviving, and it’s a healthy thing to do when you’re not actually making any money. The danger, however, is keeping that mindset after you’ve got a steady stream of cash flowing. It’s a danger that creeps in to a lot of startups and never goes away, causing generally sane people to do insane things in the name of not spending money. How the story...
How to organize the daily chaos of running a startup
April 08, 2015 10:00 - 14 minutes - 10.2 MBAs a Founder, you’ve got your hand in everything imaginable, from legal paperwork to hiring to product management to support and everything in between. You’re pulled in every direction from everyone who’s got your contact info and you feel obligated to chase every rabbit you think of. But one of the hardest lessons to learn is that “busy” does not equal “productive.” All of those random things you’ve got your hand in, all of those rabbits you chase in the name of “traction” aren’t ...
The Startup Guide to 1-on-1's
April 01, 2015 11:30 - 13 minutes - 9.02 MBhttps://baremetrics.com/blog/startup-guide-to-1-on-1 If there’s one thing I’ve found to be true over the past year and half of building this company, it’s that I’m completely winging it. Sure, I’ve read articles and books on how to build a company, but I've never actually done this before and I learn best by doing. So, every time I come across something that works for us, it’s a huge win for me. Doing 1-on-1’s has been one of those huge wins. A few months after I started building ...
Why we spent $250,000 in 120 days (and the mistakes we made)
February 11, 2015 10:00 - 13 minutes - 6.02 MBA few weeks back I wrote about our experience going from bootstrapped to funded as we raised a $500,000 round, why it was good for our business and some of the things we’ve learned along the way. Now, I want to give you an in-depth breakdown of why and how we spent $250,000 in the months after receiving our funding. The purpose of this post is to give some insight into the costs of a small team building a startup. Maybe there are places you’ll realize you’re spending too much, or a...
The Fallacy of Motivation
February 04, 2015 10:00 - 6 minutes - 2.87 MBMost days now I wake up before my alarm goes off (at 5am) and I immediately hop out of bed, excited to get the day started. But that wasn’t always the case, especially when things weren’t going so well. It’s easy to be excited when the skies are blue, but what about when they’re gray? How do you stay motivated then? Or is there even such thing as “motivation”? For 10 years I was on a perpetual journey to kick the consulting habit and just focus on my own products, but minus a few 3...
How to Pull Off a Startup Retreat
January 29, 2015 11:00 - 17 minutes - 8.1 MBIn mid-January we did our first retreat as a team. Since we’re completely remote, this was the first time most of our team had met and worked with each other face-to-face. I’ll take you through how we planned and budgeted for the trip, what we did, what worked and what didn’t. https://baremetrics.io/blog/startup-retreat Why do a retreat at all? Since growing our team from little ol' me to 6 people, with the exception of me meeting a couple of our team members, no one else had eve...
How we grew from $0 to $25,000/month in 12 months
January 21, 2015 08:00 - 14 minutes - 6.61 MBOne year after Baremetrics was launched, we hit $25,000 in monthly recurring revenue. I’ve tried a lot of things to grow the company over the past year. A few things have worked well. A lot of things have flopped. We grew quickly, then stagnated for a bit, and are on the upswing now. So, what worked and what didn’t? It’s worth mentioning that I’ve written about our journey to $5,000/mo as well as growing to $14,000/mo, both of which may be worth your time if you’re at those stages ...
How I hired a team of 6 without having a clue what I was doing
January 15, 2015 13:00 - 9 minutes - 4.33 MBLast week I wrote about our experience going from bootstrapped to funded, why it was good for our business and some of the things we’ve learned along the way. I mentioned there were some big shifts for me and one of those shifts was the transition from being a solo entrepreneur to managing a team. I have 10 years of do-it-yourself mentality to undo, or to at least adjust, and that’s been an interesting process. I’ve moved from a pure maker to more of a manager…an enabler. Instead o...
Bootstrapped to Funded: What's it like? Was it worth it? Should you do it?
January 07, 2015 13:00 - 12 minutes - 5.67 MBI’ve been building products and creating businesses for a solid decade. Prior to Baremetrics, I’d started just about every type of business imaginable: consultancy, ecommerce, content, software and more. And while the business models have all been different, the one unifying factor is they were all 100% bootstrapped to the end. So, what’s it like going from a decade of bootstrapping to running a funded business? And what’s it like transitioning a business that started out bootstrap...