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Jo Brennan

@jo_ships

solo founder. no VC, no cofounder, no employees. 3 tiny SaaS products, $38.2k MRR last month (I post the numbers every month, good and bad). ex agency PM. denver. dog: Biscuit 🐶

  • Denver, United States
  • English
  • Joined May 2026
  • Last posted Oct 23, 2026

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152
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Everything this author has published.

Jo Brennan2.7K
t/bootstrapped_and_broke2 min

september: $38,200 MRR. six months of numbers on one page, and the stuff i stopped doing

september numbers, plus a look back, because i've been posting here for six months now and you deserve one page with all of it. by product invoice PDF API : $21,480 (+$1,840). churn 2.1% shopify order tagging : $13,950 (+$1,170). churn 3.3% uptime monitor : $2,770 (+$210) total $38,200. august was $34,980. six months on one page april: $29,410 may: $31,060 june: $31,940 july: $29,760 📉 august: $34,980 september:…

september: $38,200 MRR. six months of numbers on one page, and the stuff i stopped doing
17

  • Achieng Owino
    From "one customer is 6% of revenue" to annual plans offered at the right moment. You took your own lessons seriously. That is rarer than a good month.
  • Camilo Restrepo
    40% using the import, bacano! thanks for the shout out Jo, pues
Jo Brennan961
t/bootstrapped_and_broke2 min

august: $34,980 MRR (+$5,220). best month ever, one month after the worst one. i don't understand this business either

last month i posted my worst month in 2 years. this month is my best month ever. if you're new here: this is normal, and nobody understands it, me included. by product invoice PDF API : $19,640 (+$2,730). churn 2.2% shopify order tagging : $12,780 (+$2,170). churn 3.4% uptime monitor : $2,560 (+$320) total $34,980. july was $29,760. why up the july post. 11 of you emailed me about the PDF API afterwards, mostly…

11

  • Achieng Owino
    What Tobi said. The July post was your best ad of the year. It cost you $6,412 and a lot of sleep, but it was the best ad.
  • Sam Whitaker
    breaking the no deploys after 6pm rule for a typo and confessing it publicly is the most honest thing on this site
Jo Brennan5.7K
t/bootstrapped_and_broke3 min

i logged every work hour for 4 weeks to answer dana's question. did AI 10x my output? (no. but.)

back in june i posted that AI tools 10x'd my output. dana (@dana_ml) asked what 10x meant. i said it FEELS like 10x. she said feelings are data with a very wide confidence interval. she was right and it annoyed me for two months. so. the setup 4 weeks, mid july to early august. 19 work days (i took one day off after the july mess) odd days: AI allowed (claude code, cursor, chat). even days: no AI except plain editor…

18

  • Sam Whitaker
    "half a person who never sleeps and is occasionally drunk" is also how i describe my last cofounder
  • Kenji Tanabe
    "Deciding what to build: 0x." I would like every executive who just laid off a team to read that line.
Jo Brennan179K
t/bootstrapped_and_broke3 min

july was my worst month in 2 years. -$2,180 MRR. here is all of it, including the part where i double charged 143 people

i almost didn't post this one. which is exactly why i'm posting it. the numbers invoice PDF API : $16,910 (-$1,510). churn 6.8% 📉 shopify order tagging : $10,610 (-$570). churn 5.2% uptime monitor : $2,240 (-$100) total $29,760. june was $31,940. that's back below april. part 1: my biggest customer left a payroll startup paying $1,100/month moved their PDF generation in-house. nice email, no drama, "we're…

40

  • Nadia Benali
    Small security note : if one tired person can run a billing migration in prod at 11pm, so can a stolen laptop. Billing changes should need two keys.
    1 reply
  • Arjun Mehta
    Unique constraint on (subscription_id, period_start) is the right fix. In payments we also keep a billing preview table: compute everything into staging, diff against the last run, a human approves if the delta is above some X. Boring, and it has saved us more than once.
    1 reply
Jo Brennan1.1K
2 min

june: $31,940 MRR. i raised prices 52% and the sky did not fall (mostly)

june numbers. this is the month of the scary price change, so let's start there. the price experiment on june 1 the starter plan on the invoice PDF API went from $19 to $29 for new signups. everyone already paying kept $19. may (at $19): 64 new paid starter accounts = $1,216 new MRR june (at $29): 51 new paid starter accounts = $1,479 new MRR signups: -20% . new MRR: +22% trial to paid: 14.1% to 12.6% support…

12

  • Sam Whitaker
    enterprise lead wants a vendor questionnaire for a $29 plan. next they want an SLA with penalty clauses and a shared slack channel with 14 people in it
  • Ayesha Siddiqui
    The usage email is genius. Kindly share what it looks like? Subject line?
    1 reply
Jo Brennan904
2 min

may: $31,060 MRR (+$1,650). the onboarding fix worked, the dog did not help

may numbers. short version: up $1,650, mostly from fixing something boring. by product invoice PDF API : $17,890 (+$650). churn 2.7% shopify order tagging : $10,880 (+$1,010). churn 3.8% uptime monitor : $2,290 (-$10). churn 3.1% total $31,060 , april was $29,410. what worked: the onboarding fix last month i said 40% of shopify installs never finish setup. i watched 12 session recordings (with the merchants'…

10

  • Achieng Owino
    Asking permission before watching session recordings deserves a mention. Most companies do not.
    1 reply
  • Dana Kowalski
    Genuine question about "4 days, would have been 2-3 weeks". Did you estimate the 2-3 weeks before you started, or after you finished?
    1 reply
Jo Brennan1.9K
2 min

april: $29,410 MRR across 3 tiny products (first post here, hi)

hi. i'm jo. solo founder in denver, 3 small saas products, no cofounder, no employees, no VC. one dog (biscuit, chief morale officer 🐶). i've posted my numbers publicly every month for 3 years. moving them here because my old feed is 90% "how i made $1M with AI in a weekend" and i can't anymore. april, by product invoice PDF API : $17,240 MRR (+$610). 412 paying accounts. churn 2.9% shopify order tagging app :…

15

  • Caio Nascimento
    headless chrome for PDFs at 412 accounts, how many PDFs a month? we generate boletos at work and chrome is always the first thing that falls over
    1 reply
  • Trey Robinson
    Real talk, why render AND hetzner? Not a gotcha, genuinely curious why you split it
    1 reply

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