
Show HN: Open startups with their revenue, metrics, and stories - Malfunction92
https://postmake.io/open
======
shubhamjain
Funny thing is I have known about some of these companies since about a few
years. I distinctly remember seeing Ghost's revenue (around $40K) and
thinking, "umm.. that doesn't seem much to go around five people."; watching
Hubstaff numbers (which was ~$80K/month, I believe), and saying to myself,
"that's a very niche software. Would it ever go to make revenue that justifies
expenses of a team?" (I think the CEO mentioned that he had taken zero salary
since starting the company)

I am amazed how far they have come. So, a lesson learned well: If you're
starting a company, you're fighting a long, hard battle against pessimists
like me.

~~~
patio11
Don't want to personalize this but, since we're mutually reflecting on the
sociology of talking about running a company and dealing with external
perceptions: the specific names of the pessimists may change but there is
absolutely no level of success at which folks will stop saying "Pfft, that's
not a real business."

I think the takeaway for founders is being prepared for this and learning to
not weight external pessimism all that highly, particularly not of the low-
brow dismissal variety (what are the general odds that someone who has known
about a business for 180 seconds has found the fatal flaw). For the broader
community, I think the takeaway is intentionally being almost unreasonably
supportive of people building things.

~~~
andy_adams
As a pessimist for the first 30 years of my life, I've finally realized just
how little utility there is in being negative. On the flip side, being
positive:

1\. Helps you get more done 2\. Helps other people get more done 3\. Makes you
more friends

~~~
existencebox
So I'm going to chime in as a perpetual pessimist.

I've found tremendous utility in expecting negative outcomes. I'm wording this
very pedantically, because my father and I used to argue past each other for
hours re: "being negative vs saying something is negative."

Perhaps it's just that I've been in Ops/distributed system maintenance and
development, but I've found expecting a worst case/pessimistic outcome pretty
much always leaves me far more prepared, and more often than not, ends up
being more predictive than my optimistic peers.

This has held true across time estimation, black box complexity, political
outcomes, social overhead, model performance, outage frequency, pretty much
every situation I can think of where I had to do long term planning in recent
memory I feel well served by attacking from a "how is this going to go
wrong/what are our blind spots/what do we do when this fails" angle.

The primary reason I make the (socially risky) statement of this is that I
very often get (no hyperbole) guilted for being a pessimist, even when taking
nontrivial effort for the negativity to be actionable and focused. It took me
a good few decades to learn how to wrap my words and beat around the bush, (I
was told by managers early on in my career things verbatim such as "you need
to toe the party line more.") but even now that I experience almost none of
the social friction that I used to, I find myself frustrated by the
inefficiencies and gaps in this manner of communication, and find these gaps
almost immediately ameliorated when I'm on teams which have a much more
pragmatic approach towards being pessimistic.

Simply put, I had a very different experience than you, I've found an fixation
on "being positive" to _massively_ impede Just Getting Things Done, and I've
actually had much more luck bonding with coworkers over shared
frustrations/issues and building lasting friendships like that than in teams
where we're all wearing "let's be happy" masks. (This is a strawman, I don't
expect you were arguing to this extreme, but I often find it manifests in this
way in larger companies and as such want to try and argue the benefits of
other angles of approach)

~~~
nostrademons
I think there's a happiness vs. success tradeoff with optimism vs. pessimism,
and it works in counterintuitive ways.

In my experience (both personal and with close family members), pessimists are
_happier_ but _less successful_ than optimists. They're happier because if you
already think the worst is going to happen, it doesn't take much to exceed
expectations. It's the old "happiness = reality - expectations" saying: set
expectations at zero and anything that happens makes you happy. There's also
an aspect of taking control of risks and actively working to avoid them that
you mention, which makes _near term, immediate_ reality more likely to go
their way.

They're less successful because if you believe that most risks will turn out
badly, you are less likely to take "leap of faith, have no idea what's going
to happen" risks. Why would you, if the outcome is already known and will
likely be bad? But in today's economy, many of the great successes come from
taking big risks where you don't know the outcome and nobody else has the
balls to try them. (This is a feature of markets: gains accrue to the people
who supply what nobody else is willing to supply but which many other people
demand.) So pessimists tend to make great _technicians_ but shitty
_visionaries_ , while optimists tend to make great _visionaries_ but shitty
_technicians_.

I've fallen on both sides in my career. I've found my biggest successes
usually have come from leaps of faith that I was was willing to suspend my
"This is totally gonna blow up in my face" belief for, but those opportunities
come from and must be followed by periods of actually thinking about and
managing all the ways that it could blow up in my face.

------
sahillavingia
Add Gumroad? It started out as a Show HN weekend project and I release the
numbers every month:

[https://mobile.twitter.com/shl/status/1083805607201669120](https://mobile.twitter.com/shl/status/1083805607201669120)

    
    
      Gumroad in December:
    
      Volume processed: $5.4M (down 4%)
      Revenue: $341K (down 3%)
      Gross profit: $135K (up 9%)

~~~
PhilipDaineko
As far as I understand creativetim.com uses gumroad for payment processing.
Creative team has self-reported their revenue to about 1M per year. So kind of
20% from a single customer

~~~
kevinyun
That's a very interesting insight. I'd love some verification, but with the
openness of all these numbers, it seems very plausible. If 20% is truly from a
single customer, that seems very fragile, no?

------
Scullwm
Similar to this, I was looking for some inspiration about a landing page, I've
found the top 1000 SaaS ([https://saas1000.com/](https://saas1000.com/)) with
some data about them: Location, employees, 6 month growth and if they have
some investisors.

------
lexda15
Looks interesting!

I see Buffer in the list with 100+ Companies with Remote Open Positions and I
guess that important to see real information about a company that you'd like
to be hired. When you see Key Metrics of a company, you know how you can grow
there and help it to be better.

PS Just for info. I found it here.
[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Sr0vy3eDn2fcEhxOdkPv...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Sr0vy3eDn2fcEhxOdkPv0BjsWBR7JntDJqRM6_hyjbE/edit?usp=sharing)

~~~
samstave
Great doc - thanks

------
eruci
I made an open revenue page for
[https://geocode.xyz/open](https://geocode.xyz/open) It is hard to keep it up
to date when there are 4 different revenue sources, but it is a good signal to
send to customer s saying "hey, we are growing, so you can be more confident
working with a company that's going to be still around down the road."

~~~
BartBoch
Yeah, a part of "open" community is to provide MRR, or at least Annual
revenue, so potential makers can have an insight on how business in a given
niche performs.

------
projectramo
Additional interesting info that would be interesting:

1\. Headcount history \-- When they added roles \-- What the roles were

2\. Cost structure history

edit: clarify

------
jchallis
If good design makes one want to lick a site, this is very lickable.

~~~
Malfunction92
As a developer who really struggles with design, this is the last thing I
expected to hear from this. Thanks a lot!

~~~
waterside81
You're being hard on yourself - the site is perfect. Easy to read, clear &
concise. Good job.

------
Malfunction92
Wow I did not expect this to blow up so fast! I'm sure there's a bunch I
missed, so if you have any please let me know and I'll add them in.

~~~
giancarlostoro
Do you have number of employees for any of those startups? That's also
fascinating, especially for the really small shops.

~~~
Malfunction92
Never thought of that honestly. Most of these companies have information about
their employees, so maybe I can add them.

~~~
samstave
If you link to the corporate linkedin profile, it can tell you how many
employees self-identify with each via linkedin profiles.

------
avip
I have little interest in the content, but kudus to the creator for a very
well designed site.

~~~
mcliam
Why bother with the preamble?

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alexxtomsk
I made a similar open startup list with stories, links and other insights a
while ago. I think you will find more startups to pick from that post:
[https://standuply.com/blog/saas-startups-reveal-their-
journe...](https://standuply.com/blog/saas-startups-reveal-their-journeys/)

------
tripnine
This is great. I love transparency. Every company on this list just gained a
little bit most trust in my book.

Thanks for putting this together!

------
cenal
If you want to read content and engage in conversation with folks who boot
strap this is a site I found on hacker news a while back that’s been good:
[https://barnacl.es](https://barnacl.es)

------
fredb19
This is awesome! Very very small thing: it would be good if the icon based
buttons had a `title` attribute so that what they represent is clearer.

------
ezekg
I'm like 99% sure that Carrd makes more than $4k/mo [0]. Those numbers in that
tweet would put him at around $12k/mo. I could be wrong though.

[0]:
[https://twitter.com/ajlkn/status/1080163380990746626](https://twitter.com/ajlkn/status/1080163380990746626)

~~~
Malfunction92
I pulled that number from an older post. Updated!

~~~
martin-adams
Just remember, $12K a month means zero growth in 2018. So it is probably
higher. I totally get that you don't know what that figure is instead though.

~~~
indemnity
How do you figure that? He doubled revenue from 2017, or am I missing
something?

------
cdiamand
Just a heads up - there is an issue with the carrd.co link.

Otherwise, site looks great. Looking forward to seeing more!

~~~
Malfunction92
Good catch, fixed!

------
blairanderson
the frontpage of HN can be all the `funding` you need:
[https://simpleanalytics.io/simpleanalytics.io?start=2018-01-...](https://simpleanalytics.io/simpleanalytics.io?start=2018-01-01&end=2019-01-01)

------
PacifyFish
Love this site! Did you use a front end framework/template to design it? It’s
so slick.

~~~
Malfunction92
Thanks! Tried to keep it as clean as possible, which turned out good I guess.
It's plain bootstrap for the front end, built and served by a SSR Nuxt
application.

------
tomerbd
Could you please share how you approached the UI creation as it's beautiful

------
tych0
Looks like you can add farmbot to that list:
[https://meta.farm.bot/docs](https://meta.farm.bot/docs)

------
cromantin
Is there burn rate for any of them?

~~~
nathanbarry
A burn rate assumes a negative number. At ConvertKit we operate with about 18%
profit margins.

~~~
cromantin
Wow! 18% is a lot. You are good.

------
godelmachine
The amount written at the bottom of every startup is how much they earn/
month?

~~~
Malfunction92
Yup, monthly revenue. Of course these aren't in real time but are the most
recent data I could find online.

~~~
godelmachine
That’s great to know! Surprised that IndieHackers rolls in less dough.

~~~
ChanningAllen
We actually roll in 0 dough as of 2017!

[https://www.indiehackers.com/blog/acquired-by-
stripe](https://www.indiehackers.com/blog/acquired-by-stripe)

------
FahadUddin92
Indiehackers.com does this.

~~~
wuliwong
>Indiehackers.com does this.

ya.

[https://www.indiehackers.com/products](https://www.indiehackers.com/products)

