As a founder, my go-to question for all candidates is: “Tell me about a time you did something other people thought was impossible.” I want to see ambition (where’s their line of impossibility?) and resourcefulness (doing impossible things naturally requires some creativity).

Today, I want to celebrate the Metronome team for doing 4 things that should have been impossible.

Building a GTM engine from scratch to 2x growth

We started 2025 with effectively no sales team and a barebones marketing team. We also didn’t have leaders in most GTM positions. In spite of this, we were confident we could 2x the business.

Q1 we hired the leaders.

Q2 we hired the marketing and sales teams.

Q3 was our best quarter ever.

Q4 will be even better.

The result is that we over-doubled ARR this year from a standing start. This was truly remarkable work from sales, marketing, and product.

Putting monetization and billing at the center of growth strategies

Our second goal for the year was to ‘make monetization happen.’

Billing is a famously boring and inertial category—we wanted to make it hot by focusing on helping companies grow faster. This is the core insight at the heart of Metronome: doing billing correctly enables you to move faster and monetize better.

Marketing got to work. We threw a killer user conference with < 2 months of planning. We ran two super successful webinar series: the Future of SaaS Pricing and the Monetization Operating Model. Every month we surpassed website traffic and top-of-funnel records.

We're still early in reshaping how companies think about monetization, but it’s clear we’ve hit a nerve, and I’m stoked to continue the work in making monetization infrastructure a centerpiece of every business that sells software.

Controlling our destiny

Metronome is a core system for our users: if we fail in any way, our customers don’t get paid. So, we take pains to run our business in a way that optimizes for long-term success.

We hire deliberately, we don’t do margin-negative deals, and we obsessively focus on always having many years of runway in the bank.

At Metronome's current revenue scale, even small improvements in gross margin translate to meaningful dollars that can be reinvested in hiring.

The results were frankly staggering: Infrastructure gross margin doubled and is now in the healthy SaaS range. Amazing work by finance, product, and engineering!

Creating a category

Most years I would settle for merely growing 120%, introducing the world to a new category of software, and extending our runway by years through gross margin–improvement.

But this year, we aimed a little higher and also announced our intention to be acquired by Stripe.

This acquisition is a major step in advancing monetization infrastructure as a category, and a validation of all the hard work and success we’ve had to date. Can’t wait to continue this work in the new year!

Have a great holiday, and thank you to everyone who helped us have an amazing 2025.

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