Bryce Adams spent his days at Automattic doing support for WooCommerce and its many extensions, and his nights building things of his own. In early 2015 he was also running a WooCommerce store, and he kept hitting the same wall from the other side of the counter: the reporting could not tell him what the store was actually making, and managing it day to day was worse. He registered a domain, called the thing WC Metrics, and after a few weeks of late nights and weekends had a rough version working. It was barely an app. It was a WordPress plugin that made API calls to his own store in the background, and by his own account it had purple everywhere.

He showed it to people inside Woo. They were into it, and it went no further. Automattic then acquired WooThemes, Adams stopped running his own store, and WC Metrics died on a laptop he replaced. Over the following year he pushed the idea internally again, suggesting the company build it as a product with a team behind it. Again nobody bit. What stuck with him was a line he quotes in his Origins post: if you do not build your dream, someone will hire you to help build theirs.

In August 2016 he left the job to build it alone. He was not a first time maker. He had already shipped Nomad SMS, Totals for Uber and a pile of WordPress and WooCommerce plugins, all of them built in a few days, all of them things he could walk away from. Metorik was the first one he would be completely dependent on.

The first month was invisible. Writing on 14 September 2016, a month after leaving Automattic, he described 26 days of non stop work before he showed the product to a single person. The secrecy was not strategy, he just had not got around to it. He was building the reporting and store management tool he had wanted as a store owner, and the assumptions were all his.

Metorik went into a public beta a few months later. It was free during the beta and hundreds of stores tried it. By late December 2016 more than 100 stores were using it daily, which meant the honest question was no longer whether people would use it but whether they would pay for it. Adams launched quietly in November 2016 and gave beta testers until mid January to subscribe as thanks for testing.

The dates in this story come from his own posts. He marked one year since leaving his job on 19 August 2017, so that is the start line used here. On 23 December 2016 he published a post titled "The first 10 paying customers", which puts the tenth paying store at day 126 and the first somewhere in the weeks before that. On 2 February 2017 he was past 30 paying customers and wrote that Metorik was paying most of the bills, though it was not producing tens of thousands a month yet.

The acquisition side was slow and free. Writing in July 2017 he listed everything he had been doing, some of it without thinking of it as marketing: tweeting from his personal account and Metorik's, talks at conferences, podcast interviews, blog posts about WooCommerce, the behind the scenes posts themselves, and answering people in WooCommerce Facebook groups. He also ran a public experiment where he built a WooCommerce store from scratch and blogged the whole thing. Cost per customer to that point was zero. What changed his mind about paid ads was not a bad month, it was arithmetic: his own time did not scale, and going from 100 customers to 1000 on organic reach alone would take patience he did not have. He started with Facebook retargeting rather than broad keyword buying, on the reasoning that Metorik only worked for WooCommerce stores and generic ecommerce targeting would burn money on Shopify and Magento users. The economics gave him room. Every customer paid at least $200 a year, most paid a lot more because pricing scaled with order volume, and churn was low, so spending $100 to win one was fine.

By 18 August 2017, one year in, Metorik had over 100 paying customers and its annual revenue was higher than his previous salary. That is the second milestone recorded here. He never published a monthly revenue number, but 100 customers on a $200 a year floor puts Metorik past $1,000 a month at the latest by day 364.

What he did next is the part most growth stories skip. He did not hire. He had set himself a private target of getting Metorik to a certain amount of monthly recurring revenue on his own, just to see if he could, and he only stopped when he realised another five or ten percent alone would not feel like anything. The first hire came in May 2019, almost three years in. The second came six months after that.

The rest reads as a straight line, which is the point. Writing in April 2024, 2809 days after starting, Adams said Metorik had become profitable a couple of years in and was paying him several times his old salary. Around that time the company received acquisition interest, and the three of them talked about it and said no. His framing is that profit bought optionality, and optionality is what let them keep the thing. Metorik today runs out of Melbourne with a team of four and reports serving more than 10,000 Shopify and WooCommerce stores, still with no investors.