I’m excited to announce that Bright is now live in beta.

What is Bright?

Bright is an analytics product to help subscription-based companies grow faster by surfacing valuable metrics and insights. We do this first by connecting to your company’s billing system and ingesting revenue data. This data is used to create a high level dashboard of key metrics, and a set of helpful reports to further dig in. You can setup Slack, email or text message notifications to receive real-time reports of important activity. Bright also sends helpful performance recaps at the start of each week and month to give you context to how your business is growing. Setup typically only takes a few minutes. We’ve added integration support for Stripe and Chargify, and will be releasing more integrations in the coming weeks.

You can get started with Bright for free today at bright.io.

Why Bright and why now?

The root of Bright came from the time spent building my last company. In short, we hit an inflection point four years in that changed the trajectory of the business and made us rethink everything. While I took pride in being transparent as the CEO, I was frankly communicating the wrong things. I’d send out monthly recaps to the team that included our financials along with my overlay of how things were going. The problem was, we had 2M run rate but didn’t have a clear grasp on where we were going. We eventually lost two large customers, losses that created a significant hit to the business. After the fall out, I was determined to find some predictability in our data. We spent several months building an internal dashboard with just enough baseline data to redirect our efforts and build a healthy, growing business (one that would ultimately become acquired a year later).

Post-acquisition, I started helping a friend with a business he recently joined post-bankruptcy. While digging into their revenue, I found myself disappointed with their ability to zero in on key metrics. Their billing provider was great but didn’t give them any visibility into core metrics like monthly recurring revenue. The sole analytics product that integrated with their billing system provided a nice snapshot, but not much depth. I started digging in to their data and having a lot of fun. Full circle, Bright is not only providing visibility into the performance of plans, add-on components, and discounts, but also layering in helpful context around key events like churn. Bright’s helping their team better understand their business, and that’s super exciting to me.

While I realize there’s no shortage of dashboards and BI tools in the market, there’s a gaping hole in visibility. SaaS and subscription-based companies need tools that will help them see how growth translates to revenue, and how that revenue translates to making decisions. We see an opportunity to help companies grow faster by giving them context, insights and recommendations vs. charts, tables and exports (though we have those too).

Who’s behind Bright?

I’m Jeff Judge, and I’m the founder of Bright Labs, Inc., the company behind Bright. I started working on Bright full-time this past August and have been lucky to get a bit of help from folks like Paul Maeda, Greg Reda, Jack Kent, Q McCallum, Tim Grace, Patrick Algrim, and Brian Peacock along the way.

What’s next?

We’re building a team and raising capital to tackle the opportunity. We’ll be releasing several more integrations in the coming weeks. There will be bugs! There will also be a lot of happy people as Bright frees up time by killing their internal spreadsheets one tab at a time.

If you’re interested in this mission, follow Bright on Twitter (@bright_io) and stay tuned! If you’d like to chat one on one, please reach out to me via jeff@bright.io.

🚀

This post originally appeared on the Bright blog