Baremetrics publishes its own revenue live and turns transparency into growth

Baremetrics, a subscription-analytics side project Josh Pigford built in days to see his own Stripe data, needed to win trust from founders who were skeptical of startup metrics — and he believed the product should prove itself with its own data.

Publish your own revenue metrics live for anyone to see — MRR, churn, customers — so a metrics company's real numbers become its most persuasive ad.

From the start Pigford shared Baremetrics' real revenue figures publicly and on Twitter; in 2015 he launched the Open Startups Initiative, letting SaaS companies connect billing data and publish live dashboards of MRR, ARR, churn, LTV and customer counts, starting with Buffer's public metrics page.

The openness became the growth engine: the first 100 customers came by word of mouth over Twitter, thousands of businesses adopted the tool, and Baremetrics passed $1M in annual revenue without outside funding — reaching about $1.5M ARR before a $4M cash sale to Xenon Partners in November 2020.

Baremetrics began in 2013 as an internal dashboard Josh Pigford built to understand his own Stripe revenue while running survey products. He put a logo and a credit card form on the internal tool, a stranger paid $249 a month almost immediately, and the side project became a company.

The unusual bet was radical transparency. Pigford published Baremetrics' real revenue numbers publicly and on Twitter, and in 2015 launched the Open Startups Initiative, where subscription companies connect billing data and share live metrics — MRR, ARR, churn, LTV, customer counts — with no spreadsheets and no spin. Baremetrics' own open page, along with a public metrics page for Buffer, demonstrated the idea.

It worked as both marketing and discipline: 'founders trusted a metrics company that showed its own metrics.' The first 100 customers arrived by word of mouth over Twitter, and by 2018 the company was doing over $1M a year in revenue, used by thousands of businesses, with no outside funding. In November 2020, at roughly $1.5M ARR, Baremetrics sold to Xenon Partners for $4 million in cash.

It aligned the medium with the message: a metrics company publishing its own metrics made the product's value self-evident.

Public numbers created trust and accountability at once, giving customers and investors proof instead of promises.

The live dashboards gave early founders real benchmarks, turning a single company's transparency into a resource hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs followed.

It converted a cost (openness) into a compounding growth channel that needed no ad budget.

Show your own numbers: for a company that sells metrics, publishing real revenue turned skepticism into trust and became the cheapest, most credible growth channel it had.

The Open Startups Initiative grew into a directory of companies sharing live metrics, and the practice spread across indie SaaS. Baremetrics' own page stayed public through the 2020 sale, and Pigford then published the full deal terms — price, payout structure and investor write-offs — continuing the same transparency. He later sold side projects under the same open playbook, and the open-revenue model became a standard benchmark for bootstrapped founders.