Blog

July 29, 2026

The fastest way to know about new Supabase signups isn't a dashboard refresh — it's a Database Webhook on auth.users firing straight to Slack, email, or your own endpoint.

July 28, 2026

App Store Connect's sales reporting API uses a .p8 key, not OAuth — here's exactly where to click, what role to pick, and how to keep it locked down.

July 28, 2026

Google Play's permission system is built for teams, not solo founders pulling install and revenue data into a dashboard. Here's the exact, minimal-permission path to read-only access.

July 27, 2026

RevenueCat doesn't have a native "read-only dashboard" toggle, but you can get the same effect with a scoped API key or OAuth connector. Here's exactly how, and what to check before you hand access to anyone.

July 27, 2026

You don't need to hand any tool full API access to your Stripe account just to see MRR. Here's how restricted keys and OAuth actually work, and what to check before connecting anything.

July 26, 2026

If you live in App Store Connect and Google Play, Appfigures covers rankings, reviews, and store analytics well. The question is whether "store performance" is the whole picture for your portfolio — or just half of it.

July 26, 2026

A spreadsheet is the right call for 1-2 apps. Past that, the manual-update tax starts costing you more time than a dashboard would. Here's the actual threshold.

July 25, 2026

If you run more than one product, the question isn't "is Baremetrics good" — it's "does it show me my portfolio, or just one project at a time." Here's how to think about it.

July 25, 2026

ChartMogul's free tier is a solid single-product SaaS metrics tool. The moment you run more than one app, or need to see mobile revenue alongside web revenue, the math changes.

July 24, 2026

If you run more than one app, one of them is almost certainly doing most of the work. Here's why the average MRR across your portfolio lies to you, and what to measure instead.

July 24, 2026

Flat revenue is the last symptom to show up, not the first. Here's how to spot a real stall early, find which part of the funnel is actually stuck, and decide with evidence whether to push, pivot, or move on.

July 24, 2026

GA4 and PostHog measure your traffic differently, not wrongly — different user/session definitions, bot filters, sampling, and blocking mean they'll rarely agree. Pick one as your source of truth and track its trend.

July 24, 2026

An MRR projection says 'if the recent trend holds' — not 'this will happen.' Here's why short data windows make them unreliable, what confidence bands actually mean, and how to use a forecast as a gut-check rather than a promise.

July 24, 2026

There's no universal answer — reaching $1k MRR can take weeks or years, and it tracks distribution effort far more than product quality. Here's how to estimate your own timeline from your current numbers, and what actually shortens it.

July 24, 2026

Shutting down a product cleanly is its own skill. Here's an ordered checklist — set a date, tell users early, let them export, handle billing fairly, and wind down the infrastructure without loose ends.

July 24, 2026

Gross volume is every successful Stripe charge before anything comes back out; net is what's left after refunds, disputes, and fees. Neither one is your MRR — here's how to tell them apart before you compare or celebrate a number.

July 24, 2026

The honest answer is most founders check too often, not too rarely. Here's how to match checking cadence to metric type instead of refreshing dashboards out of anxiety.

July 24, 2026

A single signup or cancellation can swing your growth percentage by 100% or more when your MRR is small — that's math, not momentum. Here's how to read early growth rates without being misled by them.

July 24, 2026

Reviving a stalled app starts with diagnosing which funnel stage broke, then committing to one change, one metric, and a deadline — not just leaving it running and hoping.

July 24, 2026

Looker Studio is free, flexible, and GA4-native, so it's a genuinely strong choice for traffic dashboards. The friction is revenue — no native Stripe, RevenueCat, or app-store connector — plus the setup and maintenance burden that falls entirely on you.

July 24, 2026

A December spike extrapolated forward predicts a fantasy January. Here's why forecasting a seasonal business needs a year or more of data, how to compare year-over-year instead of month-over-month, and when to just stay humble about it.

July 24, 2026

A combined portfolio total can mask one app dying while another grows. This guide covers attributing growth to the right product and channel, catching cross-promotion between your own apps, and a simple spreadsheet system to decide where your next block of time goes.

July 24, 2026

Your Stripe dashboard says one MRR number, RevenueCat says another, and neither is "wrong." Here's where the gap actually comes from and how to reconcile it.

July 23, 2026

Most solo founders don't have a dashboard problem — they have a "12 tabs pretending to be one system" problem. Here's how to count what you really need.

July 23, 2026

A merchant of record handles global sales tax for you — at a cost. How Paddle, Polar, Lemon Squeezy, Dodo and plain Stripe compare for a small indie business, and what to measure before you switch.

July 23, 2026

Your first $100 MRR is roughly ten customers you win by hand. The step-by-step path — a reachable niche, 20 validation conversations, charging from day one, first customers, and building in public — grounded in what works in 2026.

July 23, 2026

You need fewer analytics tools than you think: one for product behavior, one for traffic, plus Search Console. A practical walk through PostHog, GA4, Plausible/Umami and more — what each is for and when to use it.

July 23, 2026

Your revenue lives wherever the payment is taken — Stripe, RevenueCat, a merchant of record, the app stores. How to read each, MRR vs gross, and how to get one honest number across them.

July 23, 2026

The unglamorous middle: from hand-won customers to a repeatable machine. Pick one channel and go deep, fix retention before acquisition, and raise your average revenue per customer.

July 23, 2026

Where a side project becomes a business: make the machine compound instead of working harder. Double down on what works, add a second channel, raise prices, and treat retention as the real growth lever.

July 23, 2026

The thing that burns founders out isn't the number of projects — it's the constant switching between them. Here's a lightweight system for deciding where your next block of time actually goes.

July 23, 2026

MRR is what actually moves month to month for a monthly-billed indie SaaS; ARR is just MRR times 12, useful mainly when talking to people who think in annual contracts.

July 23, 2026

Most solo founders underprice their first product by a wide margin. Here's how to price on value, keep tiers simple, and know when — and how — to raise prices without alienating existing customers.

July 23, 2026

Most churn is decided in the first two weeks. Here's how to separate activation failures from real churn, fix dunning, and measure cohort retention instead of one blended rate.

July 23, 2026

Validation is evidence someone will pay, not evidence they liked the idea. Here's how to get that evidence in weeks, for the cost of a landing page.

July 23, 2026

There's no algorithm to game, but there are real levers: answering exact long-tail questions, structuring content for extraction, publishing an honest llms.txt, and earning mentions on sites models already trust.

July 23, 2026

Building in public is free distribution for bootstrappers, but only if you share real numbers and decisions instead of performing for engagement. Here's what to share, where to post, and how to avoid the habits that make it cringe.

July 23, 2026

Cold outreach gets you customers this week; content compounds for years but takes months to pay off. Most founders shouldn't choose one — they should sequence them.

July 23, 2026

Don't split effort across five channels. Pick the one where your ICP already gathers and your strengths give you an edge, commit for 60-90 days, and judge it on leading signals — not revenue.

July 23, 2026

Customer churn counts people lost; revenue churn counts dollars lost; net revenue churn nets out expansion and can go negative. Here's how to calculate each one honestly, and why a single blended monthly rate misleads small subscription businesses.

July 23, 2026

A practical guide to running customer interviews for a side project — how to find 20 people in your niche, ask about past behavior instead of hypotheticals, and turn honest conversations into your first customers.

July 23, 2026

A practical framework for deciding when a side project is dead versus stalled, and what to do besides deleting it.

July 23, 2026

A zombie app is still live and maybe earning a trickle, but flat for months while quietly costing you attention. Here's how to find yours by the numbers — and the four honest options once you do.

July 23, 2026

A 15-minute weekly portfolio review checks the same five numbers per project and ends with one decision: where next week's focus block goes. Here's exactly how to run it without it ballooning.

July 23, 2026

Net revenue retention measures how revenue from your existing customers grows or shrinks over time. Here's the plain definition, a worked example, and an honest take on when it's worth tracking versus when churn alone is enough.

July 23, 2026

App Store payouts and Stripe charges aren't measuring the same thing — one is net of platform commission, the other is gross before a small processing fee. Here's how to reconcile them.

July 23, 2026

The safe way to raise SaaS prices is to change them for new customers first, then decide separately and honestly whether existing customers come along. Here's the mechanics, the signals it's time, and what to measure.

July 23, 2026

A new app only needs four metrics at first — visitors, signups, activation, and first revenue — tracked as a funnel, not a dashboard. Here's what to instrument, what to ignore, and when to add more.

July 23, 2026

Focus on the project with the strongest growth trend and best effort-to-impact ratio, not the one you're most excited about. Here's how to score candidates honestly and commit.

July 23, 2026

A refund reduces gross revenue the moment it happens, but it only reduces MRR if the subscription is also canceled. Here's how to keep the two numbers from bleeding into each other.

July 23, 2026

A dashboard is something you pull; a signal is something that finds you. Here's which job each does, why running several products breaks the dashboard-only model, and how to set up signals without drowning in alerts.

July 23, 2026

If you charge in more than one currency, you can't just sum the raw numbers. Here's how to normalize MRR to a single reporting currency, choose a consistent rate convention, and tell real growth apart from exchange-rate noise.

July 23, 2026

Pageviews, cumulative signups, and follower counts all go up regardless of whether your product works. Here's the one test to sort vanity from signal, and what to track instead.

July 23, 2026

Trials should never inflate MRR, but they do belong in engagement metrics. What actually matters is trial-to-paid conversion, not raw trial count.

July 22, 2026

There's no universal "best" — there's the dashboard that matches how many products you run, where your revenue lives, and whether you need mobile app store data too. Here's how to actually decide.

July 22, 2026

Tracking revenue across one app is easy. Across ten, with Stripe on web and RevenueCat on mobile, it turns into a spreadsheet nightmare — here's a method that scales.

July 22, 2026

If your revenue lives in Stripe for the web app and RevenueCat for the two mobile apps, "one dashboard" means one normalized MRR number, not five tabs. Here's how to actually build that.

July 22, 2026

If you run more than one Stripe account, you can connect each one separately to a portfolio dashboard and see them side by side or combined. Here's the mechanics, the gotchas, and when a spreadsheet is still fine.

July 22, 2026

"Portfolio analytics" usually means investor dashboards. For a solo founder running several apps, it means something much simpler: one place to see which products are working, which are stalling, and where to spend your next hour.

July 22, 2026

Search Console tells you traffic went up. It never tells you whether that traffic paid you. Here's how to put both signals side by side, per product, without a spreadsheet ritual.

July 22, 2026

PostHog tells you what people do. Stripe tells you what people pay. Here's how to line the two up without building a data warehouse for a side project.

July 22, 2026

Four real ways to see web + mobile revenue in one view — and the reconciliation table explaining why the two numbers never match exactly.

July 19, 2026

Real MRR from a 10-app portfolio ($64/mo — two apps hold 87%), the power-law concession, and a data-driven framework for when to kill a side project.