Shpigford

Main thing is finding a CPA who has some experience with the type of business you're running. Freelancer, Corporation, etc...find a CPA who can speak the language.

It's less an issue now, but 10+ years ago, there were a lot of CPAs who didn't have much/any experience with internet-based businesses and so they weren't familiar with some of the additional bits to take in to account.

As for affiliate sites...I probably made a grand total of 50 cents from them...total. :P

No clue. Everybody's route is different. This is just how I've figured things out (and I'd still say there are many things I definitely have not figured out).

Fixed! Sorry about that.

Or a massive waste of time. Some days I'm not sure which. :P

Thanks so much!

Not at all.

From 2003-2013 I split my time with consulting. Did ~300 client projects over that time period.

I also wasn’t trying to do that. The large majority of these were me just trying things out to see what would happen. It’s how I learn. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The title of the spreadsheet is “Josh Pigford's Absurd List of Products, Apps, Websites & Businesses”...they definitely weren’t all full on “businesses” and the large majority of them were terrible ideas. I definitely don’t recommend most people go the route I did. :)

Flippa for all except TheAppleBlog.

Thanks so much!

Part naivety on how markets/competition worked at the time and part “I have a $10k tax bill that I need to pay” (which is a whole other story in itself).

Completely agree! Me posting that spreadsheet was certainly not a recommendation for anyone to emulate me.

There are definitely businesses in there that I regret moving on from too soon but you live and learn. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If we’re talking about the affiliate sites, it’s because they collectively grossed a total of maybe 50 cents.

Wasn’t worth the time to try to sell them.

So true! I’ll be the first to tell you the _vast_ majority of those ideas were objectively terrible but every single one of them taught me _something_.

Maybe it's because that's not where our customers are? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I write most of our posts in ~1 hour and hot dog, here we are on HN and you're reading it. :)

Fair enough! 2017 was a tough year for us (especially May to December). You're correct that we launched very few improvements in that time. On the backend we were doing a complete rewrite, which ultimately set the stage for us to roll out really powerful new features like Segmentation (https://baremetrics.com/features/segmentation) which launched a couple of months ago.

Since January we've been on a roll, releasing a slew of new features and updates and have a ton more on the way.

Certainly wish we'd handled that big rewrite differently since it did leave a bad taste for some folks, but it is what it is. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The features that are crucial to one business are inconsequential to others, so I appreciate your perspective on what you guys really need.

Would love for you to give us a try again down the road and thanks again for taking the time to give feedback!

Would love to hear what "more featureful" means for you and your business! What are the big features they have but we don't? (I honestly don't pay attention to them so not sure what features they offer...genuinely curious how we could be serving businesses like yours better.)

Haha, sorry, I've still got a bit of flu fog. Fixed. :P

Exactly. Medium does what's best for Medium (which is reasonable). I want to do what's best for our business.

Spot on re: currency exchange.

How Google ranks the Medium post doesn't really matter in this case as that's not the point of it. Posting on Medium is about distribution to Medium readers.

I think you're probably overestimating what Sigma does and underestimating what Baremetrics does. If anything we've just got a bit more work coming for us to explain the differences and intricacies of it all. But, I'm not losing sleep. :)

Heyo! Founder of Baremetrics here.

Wanted to touch on a couple of things in this sub-thread on Baremetrics.

It means a lot that literally _anyone_ has ever used Baremetrics. I started it over 3 years ago to scratch my own itch and hot dog it kinda took off. So, I'm grateful...certainly for the nearly 700 happy paying customers, but also for the others over the years who's experiences were less than stellar.

We've had some growing pains, but the majority of the painful ones are far in the past.

I did want to address the specific things folks brought up here, just to clear the air.

* Regarding changing our pricing "a lot"...we've changed pricing just once in 3 years. And that was based directly on customer feedback.

* Regarding us being "notoriously slow for the past 2 years"... We had some temporary scaling problems over a year ago, but that's just not the case any more. We've got a whole suite of server monitoring tools that show we have, in fact, not been "notoriously slow for 2 years".

* Regarding us being "inexperienced"...busted! I've never built a complex analytics platform storing and processing in near real-time terabytes of data! ;) Every single entrepreneur is winging it. You'll make some good decisions and some bad ones. That's life. :) But to be clear our team is very equipped and extremely talented. We're just solving a complicated problem...much more complicated than anyone who's never built this sort of thing before realizes.

At the end of the day, though, there are obviously some people who haven't had the experience they wanted with Baremetrics. I hate that that's the case, but we're constantly improving and innovating...most of the time for the better.

If anyone has had a less-than-positive experience with Baremetrics, please email me. I'd love to chat: josh@baremetrics.com

Thanks again for all the feedback!

Haha, same!

Ah, man...I LOVED the old SP forums. I spent an absurd amount of time there back in the day. Seriously nostalgic.

Thanks! Indeed, transparency doesn't guarantee profit. :) We'll be there soon, though.

As others said, those are pulled from the UI Faces API at random. No personal data is getting leaked. :)

While we're throwing out ways to solve CC declines with other solutions, Baremetrics actually has this very thing built in. :) https://baremetrics.com/dunning

We don't hassle. You send an email saying "Hey, I want to cancel!"

We respond with: "Bummer to hear, but happy to take care of that for you. Anything we could have done better?"

Then that usually sparks a longer conversation, but if we don't hear back within 24-48 hours, we just go ahead with the cancellation.

We're also very generous with refunds and certainly wouldn't keep someone's money just because we delayed the cancellation a day or two. That's just silly.