MetricVault
A SaaS metrics dashboard that spent five months integrating tools before proving anyone would pay
MetricVault was built for SaaS in Analytics. It died primarily from poor execution, but the useful signal is the lesson: Building for 5 months without shipping, charging, or talking to users beyond our own assumptions. Every integration we built past Stripe was a guess. We should have launched with Stripe-only in week 2, charged $9/month, and let paying users tell us which integration to build next. Instead, we guessed wrong 5 times and built things nobody used.
Poor Execution
What worked
What to avoid
Building for 5 months without shipping, charging, or talking to users beyond our own assumptions. Every integration we built past Stripe was a guess. We should have launched with Stripe-only in week 2, charged $9/month, and let paying users tell us which integration to build next. Instead, we guessed wrong 5 times and built things nobody used.
Timeline
The story
The useful part is not that it failed. It is where the founder saw signal, where the bet broke, and what a second builder should avoid.
What was built
MetricVault was a SaaS dashboard that aggregated metrics from multiple tools into one view. We built integrations for Stripe (revenue, MRR, churn), Plausible and Google Analytics (traffic), Mailchimp and ConvertKit (email subscribers), GitHub (stars, issues), and Twitter (followers). The dashboard showed everything in a clean grid with sparkline charts, trend arrows, and customizable date ranges. We also built alerts (notify me if MRR drops 10%), a team sharing feature, and a weekly email summary. We built all of this before launching publicly.
Why they built it
My co-founder and I both ran small SaaS projects and were tired of logging into 6 different dashboards every morning to check numbers. We wanted one screen with everything. We also saw that tools like Baremetrics focused only on Stripe, and tools like Geckoboard were expensive and enterprise-focused. We thought there was room for an affordable, indie-hacker-focused metrics dashboard that pulled from all the tools a solo founder actually uses.
What worked
The Stripe integration was solid — MRR, churn, and revenue charts were accurate and fast. The UI was clean. Beta users who connected Stripe said the dashboard was better-looking than Baremetrics. The weekly email summary was the feature beta users mentioned most positively — they liked getting a snapshot without logging in.
What failed
We spent 5 months building 7 integrations, alerts, team features, and email summaries — without charging anyone or validating which features mattered. When we finally invited beta users, most connected only Stripe and sometimes Plausible. Nobody used the Mailchimp, GitHub, or Twitter integrations. Nobody set up alerts. Nobody used team sharing. We'd built a feature-complete product that addressed our imagined needs, not actual user needs. Meanwhile, ProfitWell (free), Baremetrics, and ChartMogul all shipped AI features and better onboarding during the same period. By the time we launched, we were behind the market despite months of work. We also never established pricing. We kept saying 'we'll charge once we have enough integrations,' which meant we never charged. After 5 months of evenings and weekends with zero revenue and no clear competitive advantage, we both burned out.
Failure analysis
Failure chain
- The founders felt a real dashboard pain from running small SaaS projects themselves.
- They translated that pain into a broad integration roadmap instead of a paid wedge.
- Beta users mostly connected Stripe and ignored the extra integrations and team features.
- Competitors improved while the product was still waiting for one more integration before charging.
- The team burned out with a complete dashboard, zero revenue, and no validated decision-support use case.
What the signals looked like
The Stripe integration was solid — MRR, churn, and revenue charts were accurate and fast. The UI was clean. Beta users who connected Stripe said the dashboard was better-looking than Baremetrics. The weekly email summary was the feature beta users mentioned most positively — they liked getting a snapshot without logging in.
Where it actually broke
We spent 5 months building 7 integrations, alerts, team features, and email summaries — without charging anyone or validating which features mattered. When we finally invited beta users, most connected only Stripe and sometimes Plausible. Nobody used the Mailchimp, GitHub, or Twitter integrations. Nobody set up alerts. Nobody used team sharing. We'd built a feature-complete product that addressed our imagined needs, not actual user needs. Meanwhile, ProfitWell (free), Baremetrics, and ChartMogul all shipped AI features and better onboarding during the same period. By the time we launched, we were behind the market despite months of work. We also never established pricing. We kept saying 'we'll charge once we have enough integrations,' which meant we never charged. After 5 months of evenings and weekends with zero revenue and no clear competitive advantage, we both burned out.
Lessons
What the founder learned
If you're building for 'people like me,' that's a sample size of 2. Your own needs are a starting hypothesis, not a validated market. Ship the smallest useful version in 2 weeks, charge immediately, and let customer demand (not your roadmap imagination) drive what you build next. Also, 'one more integration and we'll launch' is a trap — it's the SaaS equivalent of perfectionism. Each integration cost us 2-3 weeks, and most were unused. Finally, the SaaS metrics space is dominated by tools with free tiers (ProfitWell) and deep integrations (ChartMogul). Competing on breadth of integrations as a 2-person team is a losing strategy. Compete on insight, not data aggregation.
What they’d do differently
Launch with Stripe-only in 2 weeks. Charge $9/month from day one. Add one integration per month, only if paying users request it. Skip alerts, skip team features, skip email summaries — just the dashboard. Prove that people will pay for a cleaner Stripe dashboard before building a multi-tool aggregator. And set a 'kill date' — if we don't have 20 paying users in 3 months, shut it down and move on.
Editorial scorecard
How viable is rebuilding this today?
Did real users or customers want this?
How well was it built and shipped?
Did they have a path to reach users?
Was the business model viable?
How useful is this postmortem for other builders?
Scores are assigned by App Graveyard editors after review. They are directional, not scientific.
Rebuild opportunity
3/10Rebuild thesis
A plain metrics aggregator is commodity software. A revival should start with one painful decision, such as diagnosing churn, pricing, or funnel leaks, and turn raw metrics into a specific operating recommendation.
Best operator fit
A SaaS operator or analytics founder who has felt the weekly-metrics ritual and can sell insight, not dashboards.
What to avoid repeating
Launch with Stripe-only in 2 weeks. Charge $9/month from day one. Add one integration per month, only if paying users request it. Skip alerts, skip team features, skip email summaries — just the dashboard. Prove that people will pay for a cleaner Stripe dashboard before building a multi-tool aggregator. And set a 'kill date' — if we don't have 20 paying users in 3 months, shut it down and move on.
First 30-day revive plan
Sell a manual weekly metrics teardown to 10 indie SaaS founders, identify the repeated insight they value, then automate only the data needed for that report.
Major risks
Data integrations create maintenance drag, analytics buyers compare against free tools, and AI insight claims can become hand-wavy without benchmarks.
Revive this app
The founder is open to revival interest. App Graveyard has not verified ownership, asset claims, pricing, or availability yet. This is an interest signal, not a transaction.
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