Last week we crossed $15 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) for ConvertKit. My original dream was to get to $600,000 in ARR, so I’m pretty thrilled! Over the last six years I’ve learned and written about quite a few lessons, but it’s always fun to reminisce on the highlights, that oddly enough mostly come […]

What makes some products great and others painful to use? At a conference this weekend I was discussing this question with a few friends. Is it complexity? A lack of product people on the team? Experience building software? Those all matter, but I wanted to distill them to principles teams could keep coming back to. […]

For years I advocated for profit sharing instead of stock options for compensating team members. My reasons for going against the grain of common startup advice came down to: Without selling ConvertKit (which I don’t want to do) the equity doesn’t have value. Most stock options aren’t ever worth anything, so employees who take a […]

Think about the difference between the value you receive from a product and the price the company charges for it—often referred to as consumer surplus. A company with a low price that provides a minimal amount of value would look more like this: Customers are happy to pay because the value still exceeds the price. […]

The founder on the other side of the call had over 100 clients he wanted to bring over to ConvertKit. With an opportunity that size I wanted to make sure we got it right and could answer every question, so I pulled one of our senior engineers into the conversation. Just a few minutes into […]

When we crossed $1m in monthly recurring revenue (MRR) ConvertKit’s open metrics dashboard received a wave of attention. That attention brings good questions, but also confusion and people reading the metrics only on the surface level. In this article I’ll break down what I look for in the metrics and how you can go beyond […]

2018 was simultaneously one of the most challenging and rewarding years of my life. While many things didn’t go the way I would have hoped they would, I’m proud of the risks we took and how hard we pushed to build the team, company, and world that we want to exist. I’ve also never been […]