Baremetrics

Pigford created Baremetrics after wrestling with SaaS metrics while running PopSurvey and Temper. His April 2014 post walks through going from idea to over $5,000/month recurring revenue in exactly five months — faster than anything he had built before.

He literally restarted: new Rails project, new Heroku app, new design — all based on feedback from paying customers. The product was a thin layer over Stripe pulling MRR, churn, and LTV without spreadsheet surgery.

Baremetrics became synonymous with the open startup movement — public MRR dashboards customers could embed, starting with early adopters like Buffer in 2014. Transparency was distribution: founders wanted the same charts Pigford used internally.

Pigford published spending post-mortems too — including a funded-era breakdown showing where dollars actually went. The brand sold trust through spreadsheets, not enterprise sales calls.

After raising a $500k round, Pigford’s “Why we spent $250,000 in 120 days” post itemized infrastructure at roughly $8,500 — mostly Postgres on Amazon RDS and background workers on Heroku, with plans to leave Heroku to cut costs.

The stack stayed Rails-shaped throughout: boring CRUD and charting over Stripe webhooks, scaling workers before rewriting languages. Baremetrics proved you can publish infra line items and still win the category.