How Intruder gains perspective with ChartMogul
“Singular events can distort reality, but ChartMogul helps us see the bigger picture”, says Patrick Craston, Intruder’s CTO. We sat down with Patrick to learn about how Intruder gains perspective on the bigger picture with ChartMogul.
What is Intruder?
Intruder provides ongoing monitoring to find security weaknesses in networks, websites, APIs, and cloud setups. Their system helps businesses spot and fix security problems quickly. It makes managing vulnerabilities easier by giving clear, prioritized results, so organizations can keep a strong security posture without too much hassle.
Recently, Patrick told us about how they use ChartMogul at Intruder.
The challenge: the limitations of home-grown reporting
When Intruder was just starting out, they were only using Stripe for billing. Back then, when they had less than one hundred customers, their reporting was straightforward and easy to manage. But, that all changed as their customer base grew. They introduced more billing methods to support their customers, and reporting pains started to kick in.
“Before hitting the hundred-customer mark, we could manage by just checking our Stripe and bank accounts. But as we grew, especially with the introduction of manual invoicing, it became nearly impossible to keep track of our performance.”
Every time investors or senior stakeholders requested performance data, it took days or even weeks to provide answers. Even then, the team often felt unsure if they were calculating metrics correctly.
“Whenever someone asked for data, we’d hit panic mode and start fiddling with spreadsheets.”
Patrick initially attempted to build a custom solution for reporting. However, he quickly realized the challenge was greater than anticipated, especially as their data continued to expand.
“People underestimate how hard it is to build a system that aggregates, normalizes, and visualizes this data. You have to reconcile different currencies, deal with fluctuating conversion rates, and convert annual payments into monthly revenue. It’s far more complicated than it seems.”
Patrick realized that they were diverting engineering power from their main product to their internal reporting solution, which was not the product they had set out to build. This was eating into plans for their own product, sucking up a lot of Patrick’s time and was not paying the dividends they needed the engineering team’s time and energy to bring.
The solution: ChartMogul’s ready-to-use Subscription Analytics
Seeking advice from seasoned founders, Patrick decided that buying an off-the-shelf solution was the best route. The team eventually found ChartMogul, which could do everything and more of what Patrick imagined they needed.
“You want to spend your time analyzing the data and making decisions based on the data. You don’t want to spend your time organizing the data and thinking about how you need to save it and how to clean it and all that kind of stuff.”
Implementing ChartMogul early in their journey turned out to be a smart move. Patrick acknowledges that doing so later would have made data migration much more difficult. Now, Intruder benefits from access to a wealth of historical data, which helps them see the bigger picture.
“If you’re an engineer at a startup and you’re getting a lot of data questions and you’re constantly running database queries to answer revenue and customer questions you should look into ChartMogul and do so sooner rather than later. If you start migrating all the data into a tool like ChartMogul when you have a thousand customers, it’s going to be a big job.”
The result: big picture clarity and taking real-time action
The team at Intruder love the perspective they gain with ChartMogul. Like many SaaS companies, their growth rate fluctuated throughout 2020 to 2023, and it was challenging for them to understand what they should do about it. Using ChartMogul Benchmarks, Patrick and the rest of the leadership team saw the growth slowdown was affecting the entire SaaS industry, and could compare their performance to other similar startups. This insight gave them crucial context understanding their growth and confidence when speaking with investors.
“We were worried we were making strategic errors or needed to change direction. But with Benchmarks, we could compare our performance to industry standards and other companies in similar positions. We realized that others were struggling too.”
The leadership team also relies on ChartMogul to keep their decisions grounded. It’s easy to get wrapped up in the narrative created by smaller events, but ChartMogul keeps their decisions based on the big picture.
“Individual events, like customers signing up or churning, can distort the bigger picture and lead to poor decisions. ChartMogul gives us the full story. For example, we recently had several customers churn in quick succession, which triggered concerns internally. But a glance at ChartMogul showed us that we were still growing, and churn hadn’t spiked.”
Today, Intruder’s team uses ChartMogul daily, both in the app and across other tools. The addition of real-time Slack notifications keeps the team in the loop about when customers sign up or churn, making it easy to either celebrate or troubleshoot right away.
“You’d be surprised how often credit cards fail. When we see a cancellation in Slack, especially from a customer that’s been happy for some time, we contact them and so often it’s just a failed payment. We get it resolved and we save the customer. Without the Slack notification, we could be losing happy customers.”
