Anyone else quietly checking other makers' revenue screenshots and feeling behind?
Scrolled past another "$10k MRR in 3 months" post today and caught myself doing the thing I always do, opening my own dashboard right after just to compare, even though I already knew the number and knew comparing wouldn't change anything about my day.
My product's been live for four months. Small but steady group of users, a few of them genuinely rely on it, and I used to feel good about that until these posts started showing up in my feed constantly. Now every milestone I hit feels smaller the second I see someone else's bigger one, even when logically I know we started at different times, with different amounts of runway, different audiences, sometimes different definitions of what counts as revenue in the first place.
I know the screenshots are a highlight reel and not the full picture. Doesn't stop the comparison from happening automatically before I can catch it.
Does this fade the longer you build, or does it just get replaced by a new person to compare yourself to every time? And if you've found something that actually helps, not just "don't compare yourself to others" as advice, but something you actually do when it happens, Or does it motivate you more? I'd genuinely like to hear it.
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The thing that actually helped me was writing down the unglamorous version of my own last few months, in public.
Mine, honestly: four rejections on a single billing policy line in an app store review, and the listing ended up suspended. Nobody screenshots that. It doesn't fit the format.
That's the bit I'd push on in your framing. It's not just that the screenshots are a highlight reel, it's that the number has no denominator. $10k MRR over what period, from how many customers, with what runway behind it, gross or net, one enterprise deal that churns next quarter or 200 small ones. You can't know, so there's nothing real to compare against. You're comparing yourself to a number with the context stripped out.
So the concrete thing I do when I catch it: try to fill in the missing denominators. I almost never can, and the comparison dies there, because there's nothing left to compare to.
It hasn't stopped happening. It just gets shorter.