In this episode of the My First Million podcast, host Sam Parr and co‑host discuss the practice of companies publicly sharing detailed business metrics—a movement they refer to as "transparent numbers." They outline the philosophy behind transparency, citing founders who openly post revenue, valuation, customer counts, churn, salaries, and other financial data on platforms like Twitter and Baremetrics. Specific examples include Ankur Nagpal of Teachable, Sahil of Gumroad, Joel of Buffer, and Nathan Barry of ConvertKit, with details on their revenues, valuations, and growth. The conversation explores how such openness can serve as a powerful marketing and customer‑acquisition tool, allowing potential users to see real performance data. They also examine the downsides: employee discomfort with salary visibility, complications as companies scale, and potential strategic risks when preparing for fundraising or acquisition. Sam expresses personal reluctance to share his own numbers, citing limited benefit and privacy concerns. Throughout, the hosts reference live dashboards, churn and MRR figures, and discuss how transparency can both attract attention and create challenges for growing SaaS businesses.
Chapters
Something that has made a huge impact on me, and I think more people need to take advantage of it, which is transparent numbers. So basically there's a group of people out there who believe that transparency is good and they share all of their revenue. They share, they share their every metric about their business as deep as everyone's salary, their bank balance, churn, how much it costs to acquire a customer, how much a customer stays on for. Everything. Some are a little bit less. Well, they'll share how many customers they have, how much revenue they have, what their bank balance is. More people should follow these businesses. I, for one, am totally against that. I don't think you should ever reveal that, but I'm happy they do.
And yeah. So some examples. So throw them out.
So first of all, my friend Ankur— what's Ankur's last name? He runs Teachable.
I don't remember his last name.
If you Google— can you tell me Ankur's last name? Founder of Teachable. Okay. So he reveals on Twitter the valuation of every round. What is it?
Nagpal.
Yes. Say it.
Nagpal.
Nagpal. He reveals the valuation of every— every time they just raised like $20 million at whatever, $200 million, something really good. And he reveals how much revenue they have, how many customers they have. It's awesome.
Yes.
I love that. The other guy is Sahil. Sahil, uh, from Gumroad. Shitty business. Seems like an awesome guy. Uh, he reveals every single month. Yeah. All the— you could Google Gumroad founder Sahil.
It's on his Twitter. If you— he just, he does it in a tweet length. So you don't even have to, you don't even have to dive into the books. It's like, yeah, here's 140 characters.
Um, Joel from Buffer, he does this. They actually just switched. So if you go to baremetrics.com or Google baremetrics, They have like 18 different companies that do this and it's pretty cool. And Joel from Buffer used to be on there. They're a $22 million a year company, so pretty valuable. And they would, would, would reveal everything. Everything.
Employee salaries, like name, salary, equity, you know, level, everything.
And you know what? They're changing. They're showing less and less because—
have you talked to 'em? Do you know why?
It becomes problematic when you add more people. Um, yeah. Duh.
It's like, you know, guy, you know, creates, you know, turns his kitchen into a man cave instead, gets a girlfriend and is like, ah, she doesn't like it. It's like, yeah, no shit, man. Like I could have told you this, like when you bought the plasma and put it on the fridge.
Grow up, Joel.
Yeah. People don't like their salary being public.
What? So they still do salary. They still do equity.
People get upset when they see their coworker who slacks off and works from home 2 days a week and they see his salary.
Yeah. That's not good because people don't understand that like different people have different situations. Situations. It's not like—
So, so they did it, I think, in a smart way, which is they basically were like, they used it as customer acquisition.
Yeah, it's part of their story because they got their ass kicked by HubSpot.
And so they like—
I'm sorry, uh, Hootsuite.
You know, this has become a bit of a playbook for small business-to-business SaaS companies, which is, look, you know, acquisition of customers is hard. If my customer is a small business owner, what is small business— what would bring a small business owner to me? What content could I put out there that would make a small business owner come? So instead of saying, 7 tips to have more effective meetings, they were like, here's our P&L for this month. And sure enough, a lot of people wanted to see that. So a lot of people discovered their product through this, and so, you know, maybe this lines up totally with their values and that's why they did it, but definitely it was a great way for people to discover their business. I didn't use Buffer, but I read all their shit, And if anybody ever needed a solution like Buffer, I was like, oh, Buffer, you should use Buffer. Why? Because otherwise I wouldn't have even known about them. And so this was a pretty counterintuitive thing that they did. And, uh, they were the only ones doing it. And so you always get paid when you're the only one doing it if it's juicy.
Yeah. And so, um, one more person who's doing it and the, his business is way better than Buffer actually.
I love this guy's business.
So it's my friend Nathan Barry. I've met Nathan a while ago and Nathan has this company called ConvertKit. They do close to $2 million in monthly recurring revenue. So $24 million. He owns 100% of it. It's, it's probably a $100 to $200 million company. Like, it's really valuable because once customers are locked in, it's basically a Mailchimp competitor. It's an email—
that seems high. 2, 2 million a month, you said? 2 million?
Oh, that's for sure. That's how much they do.
So they're doing 2 million a month? No, no, that part's— that— so, so $24 million a year. So $24 million, you think they're worth what?
10 times.
10 times that. Okay. Maybe.
It's grown like a weed.
Maybe.
People don't switch from their email platform.
Yeah. It'll all depend on the retention. So can you pull up, actually, can you open it, open up their, their metrics. So just, retention's high. Just Google like, like Baremetrics dashboard or something. I forgot what the URL is, but it's like something.baremetrics.com and it's like their whole company. It's like, here's how many new customers we got. Here's how many people churned this month. It's like all their graphs and you can use it for your company.
He even showed how much profit they make.
I think it's like ConvertKit. Uh, it's, it's like, yeah, here it is.
You gotta zoom in. There you go.
So this, I don't know if this is their business or this is like the example thing, but it's like monthly recurring revenue, net revenue fees.
Yeah, that's not it.
This is somebody else's business.
That's an example. You gotta do ConvertKit.
Yeah, do ConvertKit bare metrics.
Just type in ConvertKit revenue maybe if you can't, can't spell bare.
Uh, I also use ConvertKit. I, I actually, I pay for a subscription because I'm like, this product is so fucking powerful. I don't actually have many sequences set up. I have, I have a sequence of one email right now, which is not a sequence. It's just an email. But I think it's a great product.
I love ConvertKit. I love Nathan. Nathan's a great guy. Nathan's only 26 or 27 years old.
We talked about the idea of doing a drip sequence to build a newsletter for women going through pregnancy and like week by week. And I had a friend, or sorry, no, I had a random listener reach out on Twitter, was like, I'm doing this. Here's my kind of unique asset I have to go about this. And how should I set this up? And I sent him to ConvertKit. I was like, dude, your problem is gonna be solved in like, you know, the next 90 minutes.
Um, are people leaving Baremetrics or something? Why can't you find it?
Here you go. 1.7 million.
Oh, is that it? Does it— what's the URL?
Oh yeah, so 1.7 million monthly recurring revenue. And you could just look at the—
it'll say churn.
So annual run rate doing $20 million a year, which is up 1.7%. That's gotta be how much this month? Revenue churn 5.1% per month.
That's not bad.
That's not great either.
Well, it's cuz it's a small to medium business.
Like if you're churning 5% a month, that's, uh, like what's his, what's the net growth? So 5% a month is the churn. What's the new business every month?
1.5%. It's low.
1.5%. Yeah. So he's net negative then per month.
No, I think that, that Churn, that growth number takes into account churn.
I see. Okay. Gotcha. Oh, okay. That's the net.
But this is because it's the average revenue. It even says, so they make on average $60. Is it $60 a month per user?
Right.
Um, and the thing on the right, small to medium business, it's going to have higher churn compared to other SaaS.
But dude, if you're, if you're a real sicko, you can just look at the live stream on the right and see every minute when somebody pays them, it'll say like right now it says $29 paid by. You know, you know, anonymous company. Um, dude, he's got a lot of failed payments here. Get on that, Nathan. What's going on? You can't be failing. It's 3 out of the 12 payments here have failed.
4. He has a chart that says which ones fail. So these, these companies are, are badass.
I, uh, so you wouldn't do it?
No, I think it's—
what about a part of what you do? The email list size, the revenue?
I don't wanna share anything publicly. Um, well, I'll say like 8 figures or—
right.
Something. No, I just don't think it brings a lot of good either.
You know when a company's trying to raise or sell their business because like 2 months before all these articles will come out just like handing over, handing over information. Yeah. Um, why, why is that happening? Because they wanna raise their round or they wanna sell their company within the next 6 months.
I don't, can you go to the next, go back to the Google Doc? No, I'm not a fan of it. Uh, one time when I, when I did my first conference, uh, when I was younger, it made like $60 grand in profit and I told told everyone in the blog post, and I hated the attention, so I'm never gonna do that again.
