The Backstory
I (@Shpigford) started Baremetrics in 2013 on a whim to scratch an itch I had to get SaaS analytics from my Stripe account for a previous business. I threw together this code over the course of a few weeks and put it out there to see what would happen.
Long story short, it worked a lot better than I ever could have imagined. We're now a team of 10 doing ~$1.5M in revenue and serving nearly 1,000 businesses with an incredibly powerful suite of business insight tools.
We no longer use anything from this initial version I built, but we've decided to publish here to show how little you need to get started building a business.
From a code-quality standpoint, this stuff is terrible. 🙃 But the reality is, the quality of code doesn't matter when you're just trying to prove an idea. Once I proved the idea, I promptly hired engineers who actually knew what they were doing. 🎉
If you're an engineer trying figure out what to build or how to build it, I encourage you to just ship something. Don't get caught up in having "perfect" code. Just get your product out there and start getting real feedback from real customers.
Hat tip to Sahil Lavingia @ Gumroad for the idea to release this!
Nerdy Bits
- Rails 3.2
- Ruby 1.9.3
- Postgres
- Sidekiq
- jQuery + Chart.js
- Hosted in a single Heroku app