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@two_week_notice ·

post the real $340 mrr or keep it vague when my employer follows the account Public Metrics

Side project, $340 MRR, 22 customers, built entirely on weekends. My employment contract has the usual invention assignment clause but the product is nowhere near what the company does and I cleared it in writing with my manager last year, so the legal side is as settled as it gets.

The awkward part is that two people from my team follow the account, including my skip level. Posting "$340 MRR" feels like announcing I have one foot out the door. Posting "growing nicely" feels like the sort of vagueness that makes people scroll past.

Do you post the actual number in this situation or not?

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  • @maren_dowd · 3mo ago · 3 replies

    I did the opposite and do not regret it. Posted percentages and milestones - "first month over 20 customers", "churn down to 4%" - and never an absolute revenue figure while I was employed. It cost me approximately nothing in engagement, because the interesting part of a post is never the dollar amount, it is what you changed and what happened.

    Also worth remembering the number outlives the moment. It gets screenshotted, it turns up in a search result, and in eighteen months you may be in a conversation about acquisition or a new job where you would rather choose what you disclose.

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    • @two_week_notice · 3mo ago

      Do percentages not read as evasive when everyone else in the feed is posting dollar figures?

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    • @maren_dowd · 3mo ago

      Only if the percentage is the whole post. "Churn is 4%, here is the cancellation survey question that got us there" is not evasive, it is specific about something more interesting than revenue. People notice vagueness, not the absence of a dollar sign.

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  • @rollback_rae · 3mo ago · 2 replies

    Post it. $340 MRR is not a resignation letter, it is a hobby that pays for a couple of subscriptions, and everyone senior enough to matter knows the difference. The number that makes a manager nervous is the one that could replace your salary, and that is not this one.

    The thing that actually causes trouble is not the figure, it is tone. "Shipped a thing on Sunday, 22 people pay for it, here is what I learned about churn" reads as a curious engineer. "Day job is a prison, escape velocity soon" reads as somebody who has checked out, and that lands very differently in a performance conversation. Same number, completely different meaning.

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    • @two_week_notice · 3mo ago

      The tone point is the useful bit. Half my drafts do have a whiff of "counting down" about them and I had not noticed until you framed it that way.

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  • @cloze_kai · 3mo ago

    The written clearance from your manager is the whole ballgame and you are burying it. Make sure it is in an email, not a chat message in a tool the company can turn off the day you leave. Forward it to a personal address today. I have watched somebody lose that thread in a migration and then have a very unpleasant six weeks reconstructing what was agreed.

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  • @listening_lane · 3mo ago

    Small practical thing: whatever you decide, be consistent. The people who get burned are the ones who post the number in a good month and go vague in a flat one. That pattern is obvious from outside and it makes everything else you post look like marketing.

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  • @brinekeeper · 3mo ago

    Nobody at your job cares about your side project nearly as much as you think. I posted mine for two years, my director occasionally left a thumbs up, and it never came up in a single review. The anxiety is real, the consequences mostly are not.

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  • @desmond_ruiz · 3mo ago

    Depends entirely on the employer. If you are anywhere with a compliance team and a policy about outside business activity, the exposure is not "my manager saw the number", it is "someone in a different building found a public revenue claim and now there is a process". Check whether you have a declared-interests form before deciding this on vibes.

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