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@pc Any thoughts on either acquiring https://baremetrics.com/ https://baremetrics.com/ or creating similar functionality within Stripe? Seems like a natural e

@pc Any thoughts on either acquiring https://baremetrics.com/ https://baremetrics.com/ or creating similar functionality within Stripe? Seems like a natural extension to Billing to also have Revenue Analytics.

scrollaway 9y ago
I've been using Profitwell, switched away from Baremetrics. Its a lot better, cleaner, more featureful and it's free.
- dictum 9y ago
  > it's free For non-basic usage, that's a con, not a pro.
  - scrollaway 9y ago
    But it's better than Baremetrics, so I don't get your point. It being free just makes it both better and less expensive. ChartMoguls is excellent if you want to be on a paid plan. It's also super expensive.
    - pccampbell 9y ago
      Thanks so much for the love here. :)
    - nickfzx 9y ago
      We don't want to be perceived as cheap, but super expensive isn't our plan either. We're free for companies below $10K MRR, then charge on subscriber volumes. We can offer custom pricing to high-volume/low-margin businesses, feel free to reach out if you'd like to discuss nick [at] chartmogul.com
  - pccampbell 9y ago
    Hey Dictum - we're free for non-basic usage, basic usage, and everything in-between. I explained a lot of why this is the case in the blog post link below (when we went all in for free), but it really comes down to the following: PHILOSOPHICAL 1. In software (and the subscription economy) we're moving away from function based pricing to outcome based pricing. Putting this simply in the context of analytics/reporting means that if I just take your data and put it into a bunch of graphs, it's helpful, but not valuable, even if they are the right graphs (and most of the time they aren't the right graphs, at least in most BI/analytics products). 2. Based on this, we believe in outcome based pricing. We make money by selling products like Retain, Price Intelligently, etc. that all have a specific number we can point to (in your free ProfitWell account :)) that we helped move in the right direction. For some of these products we then only perfectly charge based on our performance. Others where we can't measure this precisely, we still price on a value metric axis. ANALYTICAL 1. Metrics/analytics are a terrible business from a willingness to pay and unit economics perspective. People don't really appreciate how much work goes into 100% accuracy (that's our thing compared to our competitors fwiw). It took years to be perfect and even now we're still finding edge cases of edge cases. Multiply this by the number of billing systems and it takes a lot of work to support this free product. Here's the thing though - back to that lack of appreciation - when measuring the willingness to pay for analytics/metrics, people just aren't willing to pay that much. We measured this well ahead of going all in on free and found that our unit economics, especially in a market that's weak in number of logos (subscription market is much smaller than people think). As a result, most BI/analytics companies go up market. We're upmarket and do have an enterprise plan for all the fun enterprise fixings people need, but we don't want to waste massive amounts of CAC fighting for $50/month or even $150/month. Creating a phenomenal user experience (we're not there yet) is so much valuable. Plus, we're able to show our customers they have a problem that we can then sell an add-on for. Long story short, this business and space requires a scalpel, not a sledgehammer for growth. Hope that's helpful. Always up for answering questions. Here's the blog post we wrote up with some of the data, too: https://www.profitwell.com/blog/why-we-released-a-better-product-for-free-and-maybe-you-should-too https://www.profitwell.com/blog/why-we-released-a-better-pro...
    - mkarnicki 9y ago
      Hey Patrick, thanks for this comment. "Plus, we're able to show our customers they have a problem that we can then sell an add-on for." - I really like that part.
      - pccampbell 9y ago
        Great. :) We don't plan on stopping. Admittedly this gets us in some trouble being a growing company, because we need to make sure our free product is the best for our customers AND we offer up stellar paid products. A whole lot of surface area, especially for a bootstrapped company (although we're past the Ramen stage - $10M+ ARR and 45 folks :)). There's a lot of work we did to make sure we're learning as quickly as possible that really helps advance the mission on all fronts.
- Shpigford 9y ago
  Would love to hear what "more featureful" means for you and your business! What are the big features they have but we don't? (I honestly don't pay attention to them so not sure what features they offer...genuinely curious how we could be serving businesses like yours better.)
  - scrollaway 9y ago
    Josh to be honest we used you guys for almost a year and repeatedly gave large amounts of feedback, none of it which was really acted upon. To the point it felt that Baremetrics had essentially stalled. In fact, the only change I remember from the time we used Baremetrics is that the colors of the dashboard changed to be more pastel. Baremetrics is a great "early release" product, but we don't see development on it, nor even a hint at a roadmap. Profitwell has a lot more features (Paypal support, customer tracing, a powerful UI, etc) and we constantly see new features being added. I could tell you the same stuff I said when we unsubscribed: Paypal support, a better API, "cancel at period end" support (which Profitwell does have), etc... Wish you well with it, and I hope for your success as I really like how transparently you run Baremetrics, but the product just doesn't cut it for us. And I think you should definitely pay attention to what Profitwell is doing (or any competitors really).
    - Shpigford 9y ago
      Fair enough! 2017 was a tough year for us (especially May to December). You're correct that we launched very few improvements in that time. On the backend we were doing a complete rewrite, which ultimately set the stage for us to roll out really powerful new features like Segmentation (https://baremetrics.com/features/segmentation https://baremetrics.com/features/segmentation) which launched a couple of months ago. Since January we've been on a roll, releasing a slew of new features and updates and have a ton more on the way. Certainly wish we'd handled that big rewrite differently since it did leave a bad taste for some folks, but it is what it is. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ The features that are crucial to one business are inconsequential to others, so I appreciate your perspective on what you guys really need. Would love for you to give us a try again down the road and thanks again for taking the time to give feedback!
  - 9y ago

scrollaway 9y ago

I've been using Profitwell, switched away from Baremetrics. Its a lot better, cleaner, more featureful and it's free.

dictum 9y ago
> it's free For non-basic usage, that's a con, not a pro.
- scrollaway 9y ago
  But it's better than Baremetrics, so I don't get your point. It being free just makes it both better and less expensive. ChartMoguls is excellent if you want to be on a paid plan. It's also super expensive.
  - pccampbell 9y ago
    Thanks so much for the love here. :)
  - nickfzx 9y ago
    We don't want to be perceived as cheap, but super expensive isn't our plan either. We're free for companies below $10K MRR, then charge on subscriber volumes. We can offer custom pricing to high-volume/low-margin businesses, feel free to reach out if you'd like to discuss nick [at] chartmogul.com
- pccampbell 9y ago
  Hey Dictum - we're free for non-basic usage, basic usage, and everything in-between. I explained a lot of why this is the case in the blog post link below (when we went all in for free), but it really comes down to the following: PHILOSOPHICAL 1. In software (and the subscription economy) we're moving away from function based pricing to outcome based pricing. Putting this simply in the context of analytics/reporting means that if I just take your data and put it into a bunch of graphs, it's helpful, but not valuable, even if they are the right graphs (and most of the time they aren't the right graphs, at least in most BI/analytics products). 2. Based on this, we believe in outcome based pricing. We make money by selling products like Retain, Price Intelligently, etc. that all have a specific number we can point to (in your free ProfitWell account :)) that we helped move in the right direction. For some of these products we then only perfectly charge based on our performance. Others where we can't measure this precisely, we still price on a value metric axis. ANALYTICAL 1. Metrics/analytics are a terrible business from a willingness to pay and unit economics perspective. People don't really appreciate how much work goes into 100% accuracy (that's our thing compared to our competitors fwiw). It took years to be perfect and even now we're still finding edge cases of edge cases. Multiply this by the number of billing systems and it takes a lot of work to support this free product. Here's the thing though - back to that lack of appreciation - when measuring the willingness to pay for analytics/metrics, people just aren't willing to pay that much. We measured this well ahead of going all in on free and found that our unit economics, especially in a market that's weak in number of logos (subscription market is much smaller than people think). As a result, most BI/analytics companies go up market. We're upmarket and do have an enterprise plan for all the fun enterprise fixings people need, but we don't want to waste massive amounts of CAC fighting for $50/month or even $150/month. Creating a phenomenal user experience (we're not there yet) is so much valuable. Plus, we're able to show our customers they have a problem that we can then sell an add-on for. Long story short, this business and space requires a scalpel, not a sledgehammer for growth. Hope that's helpful. Always up for answering questions. Here's the blog post we wrote up with some of the data, too: https://www.profitwell.com/blog/why-we-released-a-better-product-for-free-and-maybe-you-should-too https://www.profitwell.com/blog/why-we-released-a-better-pro...
  - mkarnicki 9y ago
    Hey Patrick, thanks for this comment. "Plus, we're able to show our customers they have a problem that we can then sell an add-on for." - I really like that part.
    - pccampbell 9y ago
      Great. :) We don't plan on stopping. Admittedly this gets us in some trouble being a growing company, because we need to make sure our free product is the best for our customers AND we offer up stellar paid products. A whole lot of surface area, especially for a bootstrapped company (although we're past the Ramen stage - $10M+ ARR and 45 folks :)). There's a lot of work we did to make sure we're learning as quickly as possible that really helps advance the mission on all fronts.
Shpigford 9y ago
Would love to hear what "more featureful" means for you and your business! What are the big features they have but we don't? (I honestly don't pay attention to them so not sure what features they offer...genuinely curious how we could be serving businesses like yours better.)
- scrollaway 9y ago
  Josh to be honest we used you guys for almost a year and repeatedly gave large amounts of feedback, none of it which was really acted upon. To the point it felt that Baremetrics had essentially stalled. In fact, the only change I remember from the time we used Baremetrics is that the colors of the dashboard changed to be more pastel. Baremetrics is a great "early release" product, but we don't see development on it, nor even a hint at a roadmap. Profitwell has a lot more features (Paypal support, customer tracing, a powerful UI, etc) and we constantly see new features being added. I could tell you the same stuff I said when we unsubscribed: Paypal support, a better API, "cancel at period end" support (which Profitwell does have), etc... Wish you well with it, and I hope for your success as I really like how transparently you run Baremetrics, but the product just doesn't cut it for us. And I think you should definitely pay attention to what Profitwell is doing (or any competitors really).
  - Shpigford 9y ago
    Fair enough! 2017 was a tough year for us (especially May to December). You're correct that we launched very few improvements in that time. On the backend we were doing a complete rewrite, which ultimately set the stage for us to roll out really powerful new features like Segmentation (https://baremetrics.com/features/segmentation https://baremetrics.com/features/segmentation) which launched a couple of months ago. Since January we've been on a roll, releasing a slew of new features and updates and have a ton more on the way. Certainly wish we'd handled that big rewrite differently since it did leave a bad taste for some folks, but it is what it is. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ The features that are crucial to one business are inconsequential to others, so I appreciate your perspective on what you guys really need. Would love for you to give us a try again down the road and thanks again for taking the time to give feedback!
- 9y ago