Tracking MRR in Slack: putting your most-cited number where your team actually looks
Every SaaS founder can recite their MRR. Most of them check it monthly when it should be weekly. The fix is not better discipline. It is putting the chart in the channel.
Tracking MRR in Slack: putting your most-cited number where your team actually looks
MRR is the single most-namechecked metric in SaaS. It is also the one most teams check the least frequently, because the tool that owns it (Stripe, ChartMogul, Baremetrics, the CFO's spreadsheet) is a tab nobody opens unless the question is already on the table.
The fix isn't "remind yourself to look at it more." The fix is: stop relying on remembering.
Where MRR actually lives
In practice, one of three places:
- Stripe or your billing system. Raw, accurate, unmodeled. Net new MRR is sitting there but you have to fight for it.
- A dedicated tool. ChartMogul, Baremetrics, ProfitWell. Stripe plus the new/expansion/contraction/churn breakdown, with a dashboard you paid for.
- The founder's spreadsheet. Stripe export pasted in, plus the manual adjustments for annual deals, that one big discount, the customer who's paying invoice-by-invoice. Surprisingly common, surprisingly fine.
Any of these can be the source of truth. The question is what gets posted to Slack.
Three charts worth pushing
MRR over time, with the breakdown
A stacked bar of monthly MRR with the four components — new, expansion, contraction, churn. The most informative SaaS chart there is, full stop. Tools like ChartMogul produce it natively. In Sheets, it's not hard to build either. Whichever way: post it.
Net new MRR, weekly
A bar of net new MRR per week for the last 12 weeks. The monthly version is for boards. The weekly version is for operators. You see trend changes a month earlier.
ARR with a sparkline
The "vibes" version. A single number, a tiny line, posted in #metrics. Less analytical, more cultural. Keeps ARR in the team's peripheral vision without requiring anyone to do anything.
Cadence
The pattern most SaaS teams converge on:
- Weekly to
#metrics— net new MRR last 7 days, plus the 12-week trend. - Monthly to
#leadership— the full new/expansion/contraction/churn breakdown, month-over-month.
The weekly post is the operating cadence; it's the one that changes behaviour. The monthly post is the storytelling cadence; it's the one that shows up in board decks.
How Chartcastr fits
If your MRR chart already lives in Google Sheets, you're done. Connect the Sheet, pick the chart, pick the channel, pick the schedule. The Sheet refreshes via whatever you already use (a Stripe connector, ChartMogul's export, manual paste); the chart re-renders on schedule.
If you're working out of BigQuery, the path is via BigQuery connected sheets or SQL views to Slack via BigQuery.
Either way, the principle is the same: the chart lives in Slack, not in a tool nobody is currently logging into.
Why this actually matters
There's a feedback loop nobody talks about: founders who can see MRR weekly act on it weekly. Founders who only see it monthly act on it monthly. The information cadence sets the decision cadence.
A chart in Slack is a small forcing function. It doesn't make the strategy better. It does make the strategy get revisited more often, which over a year is the same thing.
Setting it up
- Decide which source feeds the chart (Sheets is the most common).
- Add it as a source in Chartcastr.
- Pick the chart. Pick
#metrics. Pick the cadence.
