Thread by @Shpigford

1/ Despite Baremetrics being the "first-mover" and arguably inventing 1-click SaaS analytics back in 2013, ProfitWell (just sold for $200m!) and ChartMogul (who passed us in revenue early on and will almost certainly sell for 8-9 figures) became much larger.

Why? 🧵👇

2/ At the risk of oversimplifying things, I believe starting Baremetrics as a side project was probably the single biggest reason we had a drastically lower financial outcome.

This "side project" mentality, in hindsight, affected a lot of early decisions.

3/ It was quite literally just me for the first 6-months and the foundational decisions made then ultimately had a massive effect for years to come on everything from tech to funding to business development.

4/ Every opportunity or decision was viewed through the lens of "hey if this works at all, it's amazing!" because...side project. It wasn't until a year or two in that I honestly started shifting my view away from that to "building a real business."

5/ The tech decisions I made in the early days attached us directly to Stripe. And undoing that decision meant many months of work making the system agnostic.

6/ Those same decisions made it very hard to scale in the early days, preventing us from trying the "freemium" route that ProfitWell had so much success with.

7/ And similar scaling issues meant ChartMogul was able to come in as a "more stable" alternative while we had to spend the better part of a year rewriting massive parts of the product.

In large part because I didn't view this *from the start* as something I wanted to scale up.

8/ In addition, the source of our funding was in partnership with Stripe and with that came an exclusivity agreement. So on top of all those early tech decisions, we weren't even able to support all of the huge companies that were on other payment providers.

9/ In hindsight, that exclusivity deal just didn't play out like I thought it would. Yes, we got $500,000. But there were other things that I was led to believe would come from our agreement that simply...didn't. Things that would have made it a much more lucrative deal.

10/ It was frustrating but not surprising. They were growing at an obscene rate. Nearly all the contacts I had when we made our deal were gone within a year, so there wasn't anyone there to really follow through with.

11/ So we found ourselves with our hands tied due to a mix of poor tech decisions early on and a business agreement that ended up being far more one-sided than I imagined.

12/ And in that time, both PW and CM were starting their companies (focused on building actual "companies" and not "side projects") enabling them to make better tech decisions and without the restraints of exclusivity.

13/ It's one of the reasons I was *very* intentional about NOT just sort of poking around on @maybe as a hobby and instead focusing on building a proper business right out of the gate. We're focusing on building something huge. Because mindset matters.

@maybe 14/ To be clear, I can't complain AT ALL about the Baremetrics outcome. I literally made millions of dollars.

But I do think it's helpful to do retrospectives on these things as there's a lot to learn and because Baremetrics wasn't my last rodeo.