Baremetrics killed Intros after zero investors would pay

The workload

In February 2019, Baremetrics founder Josh Pigford wrote a post shutting down Intros, a product the company had launched roughly three months earlier. Intros was a marketplace connecting Baremetrics' existing SaaS customers with investors and buyers, using the company's live financial data as the pitch. Building it required months of team work: mockups, a paywalled investor-facing product, roughly six to eight weeks of sales conversations with individual investors, and a further month spent trying to get any of them to pay before the decision to stop.

What the documents show

Self-reported: Pigford's own post, titled Sunsetting Intros: A post-mortem on shutting down a product we just launched, states that Intros “never made a single penny” despite “months of work,” and that the product charged investors $500 a month for introductions to up to 25 companies. Self-reported: the same post says that after about a month of trying to convert investors who had earlier given “universally positive” feedback in validation calls, “not a single investor was willing to pay,” at which point Pigford “decided we needed to pull the plug.” Verified: Baremetrics' own Open Startups page confirms the company's general practice of publishing operating numbers, of which this post-mortem is a separate, product-specific instance rather than a restatement of the company-wide financial figures that page reports.

The operating cost

Self-reported: the post states the direct cost only in time, “months of work” from the team, without a dollar figure, and describes removing the product from the marketing site and app and purging associated customer data as the concrete wind-down task once the decision was made. No customers had ever paid, so there was no refund or migration workload of the kind a live paid product's shutdown would create.

The stop condition

Verified in the post itself: the stated stop condition was zero monetary traction after roughly a month of direct sales attempts to a curated list of investors who had previously validated the idea for free. Pigford writes that the team “could have kept pushing forward and tried out some different pricing models,” but chose not to because the customer segment, investors rather than companies, sat outside what the team wanted to build a sales motion around.

• Did the positive feedback gathered during unpaid validation calls actually predict willingness to pay, or only interest?
• How long is reasonable to test monetisation before a “no one is paying” result is treated as final rather than a pricing problem?
• What does purging a shut-down product's data cost compared with leaving it dormant?

The post is a specific account of one product's month-long test and failure to convert free validation into paid usage, not a claim about Baremetrics' overall health, which the company's separate open-financials page addresses on its own terms.