Groove printed its exact revenue at the bottom of every 2013 post

The workload

Groove, a help-desk software maker, ran a public blog series in 2013 built around a single number: the monthly revenue printed at the bottom of nearly every post. Founder Alex Turnbull wrote the series himself rather than assigning it to a communications role, turning routine internal reporting into a public habit that had to be kept current with each post. The 19 December 2013 post frames the habit explicitly as forcing himself to overcome “an instinctive gut reaction to keep their private data private.”

What the documents show

Self-reported: in the post published 19 December 2013, Turnbull states Groove's monthly recurring revenue as $35,167, with seven full-time employees at 26 months into the business, a churn rate of 1.6 percent, down from 4.5 percent, an average revenue per user of $40.51, and an 8 percent trial-to-paid conversion rate. Self-reported: an earlier post from 17 October 2013, part of the same “Journey to $100K a Month” series, puts revenue at $30,000 a month at roughly the one-year mark, showing the trajectory between the two dates. Both posts are the founder's own account, not an audited figure, and neither states whether the revenue is gross or net of refunds and processor fees. This is a materially earlier example than the site's other founder-transparency entries, predating today's “open startup” dashboards by several years and using a blog post rather than a live page as the format.

The operating cost

Estimated: publishing one number at the bottom of each post costs little beyond the minute it takes to check a dashboard and type it in, but the December post went further, answering a full conversion survey publicly, a heavier one-time disclosure than the routine monthly figure. The documents give no hours figure for either task; this is an editorial estimate based on the scope of what was published, not a stated cost.

The stop condition

Neither post states when Groove would stop this practice. Editorially: a weekly public accounting of revenue is the kind of habit that tends to end quietly rather than by announcement, typically when a founder's attention moves to a later stage of the business or the company changes hands; the cited posts do not address Groove's later history, so no claim is made here about when or whether the practice ended.

• Is the revenue figure quoted before or after processor fees, refunds and taxes, and does the post say which?
• What did the 4.5-to-1.6-percent churn improvement actually require operationally, beyond the number itself?
• Would a solo founder gain more from replicating the specific numbers, or from the discipline of a fixed monthly reporting habit?

Read in 2026, the 2013 posts document one founder's one month, not a benchmark; the useful takeaway is the format, a small number of figures reported on a fixed schedule, not the dollar amounts themselves.