Baremetrics founder Josh Pigford reflects on competitive pressures from ChartMogul during Baremetrics' 2017-2019 revenue plateau.
Insight
Pigford: Discounting SaaS plans for branding links yields negligible referral traffic
“Someone who's that price conscious, that they're like, I'm gonna save 20 bucks so that I can remove the branding, probably isn't going to send you anything anyways. Like, they're too small or too early in business or whatever, for whatever, wherever they're in…”
Insight
Pigford: Users hacking spreadsheets signals an area ripe for new software
“I think with bare metrics, one of the things that I felt was sort of this indicator that something was ripe for being built in the software space was that everybody was doing like custom stuff, either like actually programming their own stuff or doing it in sp…”
Insight
Pigford: SaaS founders should constantly test pricing without publishing announcements
“And the reality is you should be testing and changing prices all the time to be figuring out, you know, what's the optimal price point? What are people willing to pay for? And there's no need to write anything every time you like test out some new pricing.”
Insight
Pigford: Hyper-focused specialists are usually poor fits for early-stage startups
“Anybody who's like hyper focused on a specific job likely wouldn't be a good fit in an early stage because they're optimizing for being the very greatest at a very specific thing, and that's not what you need in those sort of early small team days.”
Insight
Pigford: Onboarding back-end engineers takes months before driving real business impact
“Specifically with developers, there can be a very long onboarding sort of run up to them being really productive. So it's hard to bring in someone who can just like jump in. A back-end engineer, especially if you've got a pretty complex product, it could take …”
Disclosure
Pigford: Baremetrics rejected a $5M 2019 asset sale due to 50% tax hit
“Totally. No, I would not. Like, I remember in 2019, I think, like early, this is probably April, 2019, had an offer for, I think it was around five million, but it was an asset sale instead of a stock sale. And that would have just, I mean, like cut almost aft…”