Marc Lou even launched TrustMRR to verify these claims, which is genuinely clever and solves a real problem. But some things just bother me. MRR without context is just a number that tells you almost nothing about whether a business is actually working.
The MRR Screenshot Industrial Complex
We spent years making fun of VC-backed startups for chasing users over revenue. "Users don't pay the bills," we said. "Show me the money." And we were right. Then we turned around and did the exact same thing one layer up.
We swapped "users" for "revenue" and somehow called it progress. Revenue is the new vanity metric of the bootstrapper world ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
When someone posts a $50k MRR screenshot, my first thought is always the same: what did it cost to get there? Because $50k MRR sounds incredible until you learn they spent $45k on ads, contractors, and infrastructure to make it happen. That's a very complicated way to make $5k a month.
I'd rather see someone making $8k MRR with $500 in expenses. That person has a business. That person has freedom. That person can take a month off without everything collapsing.
Why We Share Revenue Instead of Profit
Revenue is clean. Profit is messy.
Your MRR chart goes up and to the right in a satisfying line. Your profit chart looks like an EKG because it reflects reality. It shows the month you hired that contractor who didn't work out. It shows the ad campaign that looked great in the dashboard but converted terribly. It shows the course you bought, the tools you added, the scope creep in your AWS bill.
Sharing profit means showing the ugly parts. It means admitting that some months you paid yourself nothing. It means revealing that your "successful" business sometimes feels like it's held together with duct tape and optimism.
Revenue lets you tell a simple story while profit forces you to tell the complete one.
The Unit Economics Nobody Mentions
MRR can get really misleading because it tells you nothing about the cost of acquiring or retaining those customers.
Let's say you're spending $5,000/month on paid acquisition and it's bringing in $6,000 in new MRR. Looks great, right? Your MRR is growing by $6k every month. But if your monthly churn is 5%, you're losing a chunk of existing customers while paying to acquire new ones.
The math on this gets ugly fast.
At $50k MRR with 5% monthly churn, you're losing $2,500 in MRR every month just from churn. So your $6,000 in new MRR minus $2,500 in churned MRR means you're actually only netting $3,500 in MRR growth, and you spent $5,000 to get it.
Your CAC payback period is getting longer, your LTV:CAC ratio is probably under 3:1, and your profit margin is getting squeezed with every new customer you acquire.
Compare that to a business with 2% monthly churn (typical for stickier products or enterprise clients). At $50k MRR, you're only losing $1,000/month to churn. Your acquisition spend goes much further, your margins stay healthy, and you can actually afford to grow slower and more sustainably.
The MRR screenshot doesn't show churn rate. It doesn't show CAC. It doesn't show how many customers are on annual plans versus monthly (annual plans have better retention). It's a single number stripped of all the context that determines whether it's actually a healthy business.
The Math Nobody Wants to Do
Let me give you two businesses:
- Business A: $50k MRR with a 20% profit margin
- Business B: $10k MRR with a 90% profit margin
Business A makes $10k in actual profit. Business B makes $9k. They're almost identical in terms of money in your pocket, but Business A requires five times the revenue, five times the customers, five times the support load, and probably ten times the stress.
Which one would you rather run?
The answer depends on your goals, obviously. If you're building to sell, the calculus changes completely, and this is where it gets interesting from a valuation perspective.
Acquirers typically pay multiples on SDE (Seller's Discretionary Earnings) for bootstrapped businesses, which is essentially your net profit plus your salary plus any expenses you've run through the business. For SaaS companies, multiples usually range from 3x to 5x annual SDE for businesses under $1M ARR, and can climb to 6x or higher for businesses with strong retention metrics and growth rates.
But here's where MRR starts mattering more! Larger acquirers and private equity firms often look at revenue multiples for strategic acquisitions.
A $50k MRR business ($600k ARR) might sell for 2-4x revenue regardless of profit margin if the acquirer sees growth potential or strategic value. That's $1.2M to $2.4M. A $10k MRR business, even with stellar margins, has a ceiling based on its smaller revenue base.
So yes, if you're optimizing for an exit, chasing MRR makes more sense. You're essentially trading daily profit for a bigger lump sum down the road. That's a legitimate strategy.
But if you're bootstrapping for lifestyle and freedom, Business B wins every time. And if you're reading this, chance are this is what you're more interested in anyway.
Lower revenue, similar profit, fraction of the complexity. You're building a life to live, not an asset to sell.
And more people don't consider the high-margin, low-stress business is also more likely to survive long enough to become valuable. The $50k MRR business with 20% margins is one or two bad quarter away from making hard decisions about payroll or shutting down features.
The Costs We Pretend Don't Exist
When people calculate their MRR, they rarely account for everything that eats into it. Let's actually do the math on a hypothetical $10k MRR SaaS.
Payment processing takes 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction through Stripe. If your average transaction is $50 and you're processing 200 payments a month to hit that $10k, you're losing $290 in percentage fees plus $60 in per-transaction fees. That's $350 gone before you've done anything, and it scales linearly with your revenue. At $50k MRR with the same transaction size, you're handing Stripe $1,750 every month.
Hosting costs scale in ways that catch people off guard. Your $20/month DigitalOcean droplet works great at 100 users. At 1,000 users you're looking at $100-200/month. At 10,000 users with proper redundancy, load balancing, and managed databases, you're easily at $500-1,000/month depending on your architecture.
If you're on AWS or GCP with autoscaling, your bill becomes a function of traffic spikes you can't always predict. I've seen founders get surprise $2k bills because they didn't set up billing alerts.
Then there's the SaaS stack that accumulates like technical debt. Let me list what a typical bootstrapped SaaS might be running (these are the starter prices):
- Error tracking (Sentry): $26/month
- Transactional email (Postmark): $15/month
- Email marketing (Kit): $39/month
- Analytics (Fullres): $0/month
- Customer support (Intercom): $39/month
- Uptime monitoring (UptimeRobot): $8/month
- Log management (Papertrail): $5/month
- CDN and asset hosting (Bunny): $10/month
- Backups (Vultr): $18/month
That's $160/month in infrastructure and tooling alone, before you've paid yourself a cent.
And I'm being conservative here. Add in domain renewals, SSL if you're not using Let's Encrypt, any premium APIs you're hitting, and the random tools you forgot you subscribed to. The actual number is probably 25% higher than whatever you think it is.
I've seen founders with $20k MRR and $15k in monthly expenses. They're working harder than most people with jobs, taking on more risk, and keeping less money.
he MRR screenshot looks great. The reality is exhausting.
The Lifestyle Math
The whole point of bootstrapping is supposed to be freedom. You trade the potential of VC scale for the certainty of owning your own time. You build something smaller so you can live something bigger.
But $20k MRR with $15k in costs gives you a job with added anxiety on top.
You've built yourself a position where you can't take a vacation, can't get sick, can't slow down. One bad month and you're underwater.
Meanwhile, $5k MRR with $500 in costs is $4,500 in your pocket every month with almost no overhead. That person can disappear for two weeks and nothing breaks. That person can say no to features they don't want to build. That person actually achieved what bootstrapping promises.
We've somehow convinced ourselves that the first scenario is more impressive than the second. I think we're measuring the wrong thing.
What I'd Actually Like to See
Imagine if founders started sharing different numbers. What if we saw "I made $30k and kept $24k"? What if people shared their profit margins alongside their revenue? What if we calculated the actual hourly rate of our businesses by dividing profit by hours worked?
That last one is uncomfortable.
I know founders clearing six figures in revenue who, when you do the math, are making less per hour than they would at a regular well-paid job. The MRR screenshot doesn't show that. The P&L does.
Maybe someone should build trustmrp.com. Monthly Recurring Profit verification. That's the number that actually matters.
The Uncomfortable Truth
I've seen some impressive MRR screenshots from businesses that are one or two bad quarters away from collapse. High revenue, high costs, no margin for error. They look successful. They feel precarious.
The boring business making more modest revenue with minimal expenses? That's the actual flex. That founder can weather a downturn. That founder can experiment without risking everything. That founder built something sustainable. That founder can live a good life on that $10k/mo.
We roasted VCs for celebrating growth over sustainability. We mocked startups for burning cash to chase metrics that didn't matter. Then we built our own version of the same game with different numbers.
Maybe it's time to change what we celebrate. Maybe it's time to flex the fucking P&L. Maybe the real screenshot worth sharing is the one that shows what you actually kept.
Show me the profit. That's the only number that matters.