A fake MRR dashboard for videos, and how to film it

First, the line you don’t cross

A revenue dashboard is the screen people who build apps are trained to believe, which is why it works in a skit and does harm anywhere else. This one is a prop for skits, parody, film scenes and product mockups, where the audience knows or is told that the numbers are invented. It must never be shown to investors, buyers, customers or anyone else as real revenue, and never used to ask for money: not in a pitch, not in a listing for an app you’re selling, not to sell a course about how you did it. That is fraud whichever tool drew the screen. Our acceptable use policy prohibits it, and accounts that do it are closed.

Why an app beats a screenshot on video

Search for a fake MRR generator and you mostly find chart makers: type a starting figure and an ending one, pick a growth curve, download a picture. On video a picture gives itself away the moment a hand comes near it. It can’t open, scroll or change range, so whenever the founder in your scene checks something the edit has to cut away.

Pozer’s RevenueCat-style subscription dashboard is an app instead. The template is called Recurring, an original design with no RevenueCat name, logo or mascot. You fill it in in the editor, publish it and get a link; added to a phone’s home screen it opens fullscreen from its own icon, under the name you gave it. Every card opens a chart, the chart drags back through time, each transaction opens a customer, and a sale can arrive as a real notification while the camera rolls. Building it, installing it and filming it are free.

What the dashboard shows, and which field sets it

The app opens on Overview, a stack of cards with a number and a small chart on each: Active Trials, Active Subscriptions, MRR, Revenue, New Customers and Active Users. Below them, under the heading Charts, are seven more: Active Subscriptions Movement, Paid Subscriptions, ARR, Churn, Conversion to Paying, MRR Movement and Trial Conversion Funnel. Four tabs run along the bottom: Overview, Projects, Transactions and Ask.

The editor’s fields come in six groups: App, Revenue, Customers, Changes, Charts and Transactions. These are the ones the camera sees:

• Monthly recurring revenue and Revenue · last 28 days set the MRR and Revenue cards. Both print a bare whole number, so the default $18,652.41 reads 18,652.
• Active subscriptions, Active trials, New customers · last 28 days and Active users · last 28 days set the four count cards; Churn % and Conversion to paying % set their own and feed the movement charts.
• The change fields print no badge anywhere. Four of them (MRR, Subscriptions, Trials and Active users change %) decide which way those lines run: at 12.8 the MRR line climbs into today’s figure, and at a negative number it falls into it. Daily activity, a row of bars you drag, gives every line its texture.
• Recent transactions holds up to twelve rows for the Transactions tab, each with an Event (Initial purchase, Renewal, Trial started, Trial cancelled, Trial converted or Refund), a Store, a Country, Days ago (0 = today) and a Time shown. Subscription products is the list a sale alert buys from.

The three dots at the top right of Overview hold Add metrics, which offers four ad cards (ARPDAU (Ad Users), Clicks, CTR and Fill Rate), and Edit overview, which gives each card a handle to drag. Both last only while the app stays open, so arrange it just before you roll.

Numbers that agree with each other

Anyone who has run a subscription app does sums on a dashboard without meaning to. The template does some for you; the rest are yours.

• ARR is twelve times MRR, always. There is no ARR field. $18,652.41 a month puts $223,829 on the ARR card, so no line of dialogue can claim another figure.
• MRR divided by Active subscriptions has to look like a price. The defaults come to $13.86, between a $16.99 monthly plan and an $89.99 annual plan worth $7.50 a month. Type an MRR of 50,000 beside 300 subscriptions and each is paying $166.67 a month for that same plan.
• Revenue and MRR measure different things. MRR counts a yearly plan as a twelfth of its price each month; Revenue counts the whole payment in the 28 days it arrived. So Revenue can sit above MRR, as in the defaults (21,687 against 18,652), but the two belong in the same range.
• Churn % of Active subscriptions is how many leave. 4.2% of 1,346 is about 57 over the 28 days, which the Active Subscriptions Movement page shows as two or three in its Churned row each day.
• Three cards under Charts have no field. Paid Subscriptions, Active Subscriptions Movement and MRR Movement are worked out from New customers, Conversion to paying %, Churn %, Active subscriptions and MRR: 198, 141 and $1,960 on the defaults. Recheck them after changing any of the five. If more subscriptions end than start, both movement cards stop at 0 while their charts draw the Movement line below zero.
• The Revenue page adds up. On Month, the 28 days on screen sum to the figure you typed, so Daily Average is that figure over 28: $775 on the defaults.

Five things to film

1. Open a card. Tap MRR on Overview and its page opens: the date range under the title, the chart with values down its right edge, a table of the last four days with today’s column hatched, then Best Day and Daily Average.
2. Drag the chart through time. Drag the chart to the right and the window slides back; the date range, the dates under the chart, the table and Best Day follow the finger. Each range keeps three more windows behind the one you open on, so Month goes back 84 days and Year about three years. A given day always draws the same value, so takes match.
3. Switch the range. Week, Month, Quarter and Year sit above the chart, and every switch returns it to today.
4. Open a transaction. Transactions groups its rows by day, each day with a total. A row carries the product, the time and store, a pill such as Purchase, Renewal, Trial or Refund, and a country flag. Tap one for the Customer page: a masked App user ID with an eye that reveals it, Customer details that unfold to Country, Store, Total spent and Transaction, and a Grant entitlement button that works.
5. Let a sale land. A notification arrives on the lock screen and the purchase is in the app when you open it, as set up below.

The sale that lands mid-scene

Sale alerts are real notifications, sent to the phone that turned them on, at random moments in a rhythm you choose. In the installed app, hold two fingers still on the screen until Edit appears and tap it; on iPhone the first hold asks you to sign in. Under Alerts, set the Amount, Every for the gap between alerts and For for how long they run, then tap Turn on alerts and allow notifications. The first arrives within seconds, so lock the phone and film it landing. On iPhone, alerts need iOS 16.4 or later and the app on the Home Screen. Free alerts end in SIMULATED, like the mark on the app, and Pro removes it.

Each one is titled with your app’s name and reads “New subscriber · $16.99”, and its transaction counts on from your Latest transaction number. Nothing changes while the app is on screen. When it next comes to the front, opened from the notification for instance, the sale is the top row of Transactions, a Purchase marked Just now, and Revenue, MRR, Active Subscriptions, New Customers and Active Users have each gone up. A yearly plan adds a twelfth of its price to MRR.

The Amount boxes start on your first plan’s price, 16.99 and 16.99, so every alert is exactly one Plus · Monthly. Widen the range and amounts become random inside it, each sale filed under the product nearest in price: a range of 24 to 129 produces rows like Plus · Annual at $84.37, a price nobody charges. To clear what the alerts added, open Edit and tap Reset to published values.

Skit ideas for founders

• The founder who checks. A day in the life where every scene ends on the phone: in bed, in the lift, under the table at dinner. No figure moves while the app is open, so the MRR card reads the same every time. That is the joke.
• The first paying customer. Set Monthly recurring revenue to 16.99 (the card rounds it to 17), Active subscriptions to 1 and New customers to 4, which leaves Paid Subscriptions at 1, and cut the feed to one Initial purchase. The founder opens the Customer page and solemnly taps Grant entitlement.
• The refund. Give one day a $16.99 purchase and an $89.99 Refund and nothing else. The refund row prints -$89.99, the day’s total reads -$73.00, and that customer’s page shows the entitlement as Expired.
• Ask the dashboard. The Ask tab answers three set questions from your figures. Type one of your own, “are we a unicorn yet”, and it replies with the same flat summary of MRR, subscriptions, trials and revenue whatever you asked.
• Launch day. Alerts every 10 to 20 seconds for 15 minutes, the phone face up on the table in a meeting, and a founder keeping a straight face while the lock screen stacks.

What gives a fake dashboard away

1. Round numbers. An MRR card reading 20,000 looks typed; type 19,847.63 and it prints 19,848.
2. A feed of nothing but purchases. The defaults mix in a Trial, a cancelled trial and a Conversion; keep that mix.
3. Time shown disagreeing with Days ago. The date over each group of rows comes from Days ago and the text on the row is whatever you typed, so a row can say Yesterday under today’s date.
4. Sums that fail: MRR over Active subscriptions that no plan explains, a transaction amount no plan charges, or an ARR in dialogue that isn’t twelve times the MRR card.
5. A wander into the corners. Projects holds one row, your app, and it opens an empty Paywalls page. The share icon opens a Public page whose Publish button only switches a label to Live. On your own phone, Settings ends with an “Edit this app…” row that only the owner sees.
6. A browser tab instead of the installed app: an address bar across the top, and an Edit button that never hides.

So install it before the shoot: on iPhone, open the link in Safari, then Share and Add to Home Screen; on Android, open it in Chrome and choose Install app. Free apps carry SIMULATED · POZER.COM in fine print near the top of Overview, Transactions and every chart page, which in a skit tells viewers the dashboard is a prop; Pro at US$12.99/mo removes it.

If your character sells products, not subscriptions, the store dashboard is the right screen, and the guide to choosing a sales dashboard for a scene covers sizing numbers to a character. For a subscription app and a camera that gets close, start with the template.