In reply to MattReport.

Here are two primary reasons (with many more subtle reasons) that people share numbers:

1. To boast about how well they're doing. These are the people looking for praise and admiration.

2. To be transparent and help remove the questions so many people have about business.

The businesses that fall into the first group are the ones that will inflate their numbers to make them look better. They do this because they want to seem bigger, they're hoping to be acquired, or one of many other reasons. This, unfortunately, happens all the time. I've been told face-to-face that a particular business had over 100,000 customers/websites, only to discover within 5 minutes or less that it wasn't even remotely possible for those numbers to be close to accurate by looking at publicly available data.

The businesses that fall into the second group have no reason to inflate their numbers because that's simply not the purpose of sharing them.

Stay within the second group and share all you like. Join the first group and no one will be surprised (or sad) when the business fades away.

I know that Matt and I differ on our opinion about sharing public stats (and that's okay!), but I for one love them, and I applaud those that choose to take that route. I would urge, however, that anyone who wants to share numbers listen closely to what Matt is saying. Just sharing numbers isn't enough because numbers alone don't mean anything. What does have a lot of meaning, however, is sharing the numbers AND the journey it took to get there. Did you build a business up to $1,000,000 per year? Magnificent! Now tell us how you got there and how long it took and all the heart ache you went through, not just that you reached 7 digits. The same goes for businesses that don't succeed. How far did you go? How long did it take and what did you give up to try and get there? What will you do different next time?

TLDR: numbers by themselves are just shiny objects. Numbers combined with the journey involved in getting those numbers is pure gold.