Josh Pigford built Baremetrics with just $0 in reported startup costs in 2013; years later, the software business was generating an estimated $1.2 million a year

Josh Pigford built Baremetrics in 2013 to solve a problem he faced as a software founder. He wanted a simpler way to understand the money coming into his business without spending hours working through spreadsheets and Stripe data.

The first version took seven working days to build. Pigford wasn't planning to create a large software company at the time. He was developing a tool for his own use and believed other founders might need it too.

The reported startup cost was $0, meaning the project began without a reported upfront investment in its development.

He built the tool because he needed it

Baremetrics came from Pigford’s own frustration. He ran a SaaS business and wanted clear revenue numbers from Stripe, the payments platform. Getting them took time, and the manual calculations were easy to get wrong.

The numbers he wanted were MRR, churn and LTV. MRR is monthly recurring revenue, the subscription money a company expects every month. Churn is the share of customers who cancel. LTV is lifetime value, roughly what a customer pays over the time they stay.

Pigford didn’t do market research. He built the first version as a side project, in seven working days spread over a month. It had only the features he personally needed, so at the start it was close to an internal tool.

The early product had trouble. Importing data accurately was hard, and the servers weren’t stable. He worked through it by talking directly to early users and changing the product based on what they said.

Pigford has said Twitter was his secret weapon for finding the first customers. The first 100 came directly from his tweets. He didn’t offer a free plan or a free trial, and he didn’t send out press releases. By April 2014, Baremetrics had reached $10,000 in MRR. At that rate, subscriptions were bringing in about $120,000 a year.

The arrangement became part of what the source calls the Open Startup Initiative. It also tied Baremetrics to the “build in public” idea, where companies share their numbers openly. Working with a known name like Buffer gave the young product credibility, and it appealed to other SaaS companies that liked that openness.

A blog post about revenue also went viral on Hacker News and Product Hunt in 2014. Another account describes a post about a Facebook retargeting ad campaign that got attention on Hacker News and helped lift MRR. The sources don’t say whether these are the same post.

Content that informed, and pricing that scales

As the company grew, blog posts became a steady source of attention. Pigford wrote about revenue strategies, common SaaS mistakes and case studies from Baremetrics’ own experience. The writing was meant to be useful to readers, not to sell. The idea was that people who found the advice helpful would also look at the product.

Twitter worked the same way. By sharing how he was building the product, he reached founders who already had the problem Baremetrics solved. Being open about the process also built some trust before anyone paid.

Pricing today is tiered. Plans start at $208 a month and scale with a customer’s MRR, so a larger business pays more. Baremetrics also sells add-ons, including one called Recover.