In 2015, Josh Pigford did something that felt reckless.
He started posting Baremetrics' exact revenue numbers on the company's website. Not "strong growth," not "we're doing well" — the actual MRR figure, updated monthly, visible to everyone including competitors.
The results surprised everyone, including him.
Traffic increased. Customers signed up citing the transparency. Press wrote about it. Other founders asked how he did it. Within a year, a movement had a name: the open startup.
A decade later, revenue transparency has become one of the most powerful growth tools available to indie hackers — and it's still underused.
What the open startup movement actually is
The open startup movement is simple in theory: founders share real metrics publicly, usually including MRR, user count, and sometimes expenses. The sharing is ongoing — not a one-time announcement, but a consistent public record.
What started with a few outliers (Baremetrics, Buffer, Nomad List) has grown into a broad practice. Hundreds of indie founders now maintain public revenue pages. Platforms like Indie Hackers, Product Hunt, and mrr.fyi have built community around it.
The founders who do this aren't naive about competition. They're making a deliberate choice based on what they've observed: revenue transparency creates compounding value that far outweighs any risk of being copied.
Why transparency builds trust
Consider the founder's credibility problem.
You launch a product. You say it's great. You say users love it. You say you're growing. Why should anyone believe you?
Marketing is cheap and claims are free. Anyone can write "thousands of happy customers" in their hero section. A public MRR number, verified by a payment processor, is different. It's a specific, auditable claim about the health of your business.
When customers can see that you're generating $4,200 MRR from real paying users, they draw two conclusions: someone found this valuable enough to pay for, and this founder is honest about their business. Both of those conclusions make them more likely to try your product.
This is why a Verified badge on mrr.fyi changes behavior. It signals that the number shown isn't self-reported or rounded up — it's pulled from Stripe. That level of specificity and verifiability is unusual on the internet, and it builds trust quickly.
Why transparency attracts users
Revenue transparency is one of the few marketing strategies that works because of what it doesn't do, not what it does.
Most marketing speaks to potential customers. Revenue transparency speaks to everyone at once.
When a founder posts "$2,300 MRR — up from $1,800 last month," they're simultaneously:
- Proving to potential customers that the product has traction
- Attracting potential co-founders who want to join something real
- Getting feedback from other founders who went through the same stage
- Building a public narrative that compounds over time
The people who find your public MRR profile aren't the same as the people who see your ad. They're often higher-intent — curious about whether your product works, interested in the founder story, open to paying for something that's demonstrably useful.
And unlike paid acquisition, this attention compounds. A post about hitting $1K MRR gets less traffic than a post about the full journey from $0 to $1K to $5K. The longer you've been transparent, the more valuable the archive.
Why transparency accelerates growth
There's a practical growth mechanism inside revenue transparency that's easy to miss.
When your MRR is private, you have one feedback loop: your own internal sense of whether things are going well. You can rationalize flat months, ignore warning signs, and gradually drift from reality without any external signal.
When your MRR is public, you gain several additional feedback loops:
Community response: Other founders notice patterns in your numbers before you do. Someone who went from $2K to $10K MRR has seen the plateau you're about to hit. They might tell you.
Customer feedback: Existing customers sometimes find your public profile and engage differently. Seeing your exact MRR makes the business feel real to them — like a company they're invested in, not just a service they use.
Your own honesty: The act of publishing a number forces you to know the number. Founders who post publicly track more carefully, notice problems sooner, and act on data more consistently than founders who keep everything private.
Milestone momentum: Every milestone feels different publicly. Hitting $500 MRR privately is a private satisfaction. Hitting $500 MRR publicly, with a Verified badge and a tweet about it, creates momentum. People congratulate you. You feel the progress more concretely. You want to hit $1K faster.
How to start sharing your MRR without oversharing
Revenue transparency doesn't require posting your profit margins, your customer list, or your operational details. Most founders share just the MRR number — and that's enough.
The minimum viable public revenue setup:
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Connect your payment processor. Use a tool like mrr.fyi that reads directly from Stripe or Lemon Squeezy. Your MRR is calculated automatically and verified.
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Create a public profile. Your profile at
mrr.fyi/yourproductshows your current MRR with a Verified badge. It's a URL you can put anywhere — Twitter bio, about page, cold emails. -
Post monthly updates. A short tweet or Indie Hackers post each month — MRR, what changed, what you learned — is the minimal version of building in public. You don't need a detailed breakdown. Just the number and one sentence of context.
That's the whole practice. Start small, be consistent, let the compounding work.
The founders who share early win more
The most valuable public MRR profiles aren't from founders at $50K MRR who started sharing when they became successful. They're from founders who started at $0 and documented every step.
The journey from $0 to $1K MRR is actually more interesting and more useful to other founders than the journey from $10K to $50K. Starting early, when your numbers are small and imperfect, is the right call.
Share the $300 MRR. Share the month it went to $200 MRR. Share the experiment that brought it back to $400 MRR. That's the story that attracts customers, builds community, and creates the kind of compounding attention that money can't buy.
Revenue transparency works because it's rare, it's honest, and it compounds over time. Start now.
Join mrr.fyi and make your revenue public. Create a free verified profile →