[HN Gopher] We bootstrapped our open source Google Analytics alt...
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We bootstrapped our open source Google Analytics alternative to
$500k ARR
Author : tacon
Score : 152 points
Date : 2021-11-05 16:33 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (plausible.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (plausible.io)
| ushakov wrote:
| Plausible is also great if you're an agency or a SaaS hosting
| pages for customers and want to add analytics to your offering
|
| you can add their script tag to the head and then use the API to
| get the stats for every site you track
|
| they also give you the possibility to embed their dashboard for
| each site via iframe, which made integrating their product into
| ours frictionless and easy experience
| omnimus wrote:
| Yeah 100% best integration. Lets embed secret iframe of or
| dashboard light or dark with backround you pick. It looks
| almost native everywhere
| andygrd wrote:
| Kudos to the team, and the market fit for this is more and more
| the fact that it's NOT Google, and therefore at least somewhat
| trustworthy. More power to you guys and here's hoping for 10x ARR
| this this 12 months.
| andrewaylett wrote:
| One of those happy customers here -- I've always shied away from
| having any analytics, because my websites typically set no
| cookies and make no third-party requests. I'd prefer to be
| privacy-preserving than to see how little traffic my site gets.
|
| Now with Plausible I _still_ have no cookies or third-party
| requests on my websites, but I get to see numbers too.
| ryneandal wrote:
| This is awesome, but I had no idea what ARR was. Perhaps it's not
| ideal to have that acronym in the article's title.
| Brendinooo wrote:
| It's okay if you don't know and it's definitely okay to ask!
|
| They do tell you what it means in the second paragraph, though.
| SCUSKU wrote:
| Annual recurring revenue. It is a term frequently used by the
| indie hacker community in addition to MRR for monthly recurring
| revenue.
| ryneandal wrote:
| I realized it's meaning once I read the article, but I don't
| think abbreviations should be used in article titles. Things
| like APA style guides state you shouldn't use abbreviations
| in titles, it should be accessible to non-experts.
| kfarr wrote:
| It's also used by publicly traded software companies, not
| obscure and easily researchable term IMHO
| skurtcastle wrote:
| I'm a big fan of bootstrapped. It's always nice to keep things
| our own for as long as possible.
|
| I like how you stated that you're not going to change much and
| continue with the same growth vs forcing results with an investor
| (without one is plausible of course). I'm always keen on what
| if's to forcing things with interesting outcomes, lol. Well done
| and congrats on the rising success.
| simonw wrote:
| This is such an inspiring story: building a business on an open
| source competitor to Google Analytics with a tiny team and no
| funding is one heck of an achievement.
|
| I'm a very happy (paying) user of the product, too.
|
| I LOVE that the script is less then 2KB of JavaScript, and that
| their privacy design is aligned with my values.
|
| I find their dashboard UI solves my needs just fine, whereas I
| still can't find things easily in the GA interface despite using
| it for over fifteen years!
| [deleted]
| tnolet wrote:
| I might be projecting, but this is another company doing well
| enabled by tech like Clickhouse. Tinybird is another. Timeseries
| and event metrics are just so snappy, and the API and product
| (Clickhouse this is) are enabling small teams to do crazy cool
| new stuff.
|
| (We're a Plausible and Clickhouse user at my company)
| jensneuse wrote:
| I'm very happy for you! Still a happy paying customer. I've
| recently upped my plan. =) One thing, could you please stop the
| "too many redirects" problems? It's annoying.. -_-
| tacon wrote:
| >If you hear about Plausible these days, it likely comes from one
| of our 4,802 paying customers. People who use and enjoy using
| Plausible help us spread the word to even more people.
|
| >We have a $0 paid advertising budget and we don't have an
| affiliate program either. We pretty much ignore all the best
| marketing practices.
|
| This is very impressive, but I am not sure it generalizes to the
| average bootstrapped startup.
| rp1 wrote:
| Marketing can help, but if people don't love your product
| enough to tell others about it, then it's going to be hard to
| get traction.
| tyingq wrote:
| I don't know what else they did, but smartystreets.com did a
| great job with word of mouth.
|
| They would find forums with questions about address correction,
| and provide great answers that DID NOT require using their
| software.
|
| Then just put their site in the profile or at the end of the
| post in a tactful way.
|
| I started using them based on the expertise in these posts.
| andrewljohnson wrote:
| That was my experience with boot-strapping too (B2C).
| Successful boot-strapped companies basically need to create
| customer love and word-of-mouth. We didn't spend anything on
| marketing until around a million annual revenue.
| skadamat wrote:
| +1 this, we bootstrapped at Dataquest and word of mouth
| played a big role
| paulgb wrote:
| > I am not sure it generalizes
|
| I guess the marketing best practices they ignore wouldn't be
| best practices if it did :)
|
| Still, it's nice to see that the model _can_ work. As a happy
| customer, I 'm pleased to see that the model is sustainable.
| When a product decides to stick to word-of-mouth alone,
| incentives are very aligned for them to make the user
| experience good enough to tell other people about (as I have).
| [deleted]
| poopypoopington wrote:
| Whats stopping someone from using your code and starting another
| cloud hosted competitor that's identical to you? Is that against
| your license?
|
| (Different from an entity downloading your software and self-
| hosting which you say is allowed)
| vanilla-almond wrote:
| They have a blog post about the open source license they chose:
| GNU Affero General Public License V3 (AGPLv3).
|
| https://plausible.io/blog/open-source-licenses
|
| From their blog post:
|
| > If you used AGPL-licensed code in your web service in the
| cloud, you are required to open source it. It basically
| prevents corporations that never had any intention to
| contribute to open source from profiting from the open source
| work.
|
| > It explicitly prohibits corporations from parasitically
| competing with an open source project. _They won't be able to
| take the code, make changes to it and sell it as a competing
| product without contributing those changes back to the original
| project_. [emphasise mine]
|
| The blog post above was discussed heavily on Hacker News back
| in Oct 2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24763734
| rustc wrote:
| > It explicitly prohibits corporations from parasitically
| competing with an open source project.
|
| Many projects are moving from an AGPL-like license to a
| proprietary license just to prevent this though. MongoDB,
| ElasticSearch, and just yesterday, Apollo Federation 2.
| sofixa wrote:
| That's not entirely correct. Elastic and Mongo weren't
| using AGPL in the first place, they had MIT/Apache type
| licenses. Generally we're seeing open core/source startups
| moving to AGPL or proprietary source available licenses
| (Grafana, Sentry to name a few more).
| rustc wrote:
| MongoDB was using AGPL before they created and switched
| to SSPL [1]. You're right about ElasticSearch, they were
| Apache-2.0 before creating and switching to the SSPL +
| Elastic License dual license [2].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MongoDB#Licensing
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elasticsearch
| charcircuit wrote:
| The AGPL has nothing to do with contributing back.
| rustc wrote:
| It seems like bug fixes and features are delayed 0-6 months in
| the open source version than the cloud hosted one [1].
|
| > We have a free as in beer Plausible Analytics Self-Hosted
| solution. It's exactly the same product as our Cloud solution
| with a less frequent release schedule (think of it as a long
| term support release).
|
| > Bug fixes and new features are released to the cloud version
| several times per week. Features are battle-tested in the cloud
| which allows us to fix any bugs before the general self-hosted
| release. Every six months we combine all the changes into a new
| self-hosted release.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/plausible/analytics#can-plausible-
| analyti...
| wcd-fyi wrote:
| I have been using plausible on my small personal site for about a
| year now. When I emailed their support to ask a question I got a
| helpful response from one of the founders within an hour. Good
| experience overall, and I appreciate their efforts to protect the
| privacy of visitors while still providing useful data for site
| owners.
| felixthehat wrote:
| Same, had an issue last week (which turned out to be my fault)
| and I also had generous help from the founders, and they were
| cheerfully gracious when I apologised for wasting their time. I
| have recommended them to several clients.
| devops000 wrote:
| Congrats, really!
|
| It's ridiculous that PR news (Tech crunch etc..) are always
| focused on funded-startup or fundind instead of bootstrapped
| startup which in mine option are way more interesting!
| skadamat wrote:
| Besides resources like Indie Hackers, I highly recommend everyone
| here read Small Giants (https://www.amazon.com/Small-Giants-
| Companies-Instead-10th-A...) which focuses on companies that have
| outsized impact feeling the pressure to grow.
|
| They profile companies that have 2 to 2,000 (or so?) people, but
| most focus on having an opinionated take (over growth for its own
| sake).
| necovek wrote:
| I am a bit perplexed at claiming an ARR (Annual _Recurring_
| Revenue) with not even a year of profits.
|
| Is it customary to use extrapolations/projections to measure ARR
| in the startup/business world? Even projections based on less
| than a year of data?
| ezekg wrote:
| The definition of ARR is MRR * 12.
| dchuk wrote:
| Very common, yes.
| number6 wrote:
| "To anonymize these datapoints, we run them through a hash
| function with a rotating salt.
|
| `hash(daily_salt + website_domain + ip_address + user_agent)`"
|
| Isn't this just PII with extra steps? OK it's at least better
| then the traditional approach. Keep in mind though that
| anonymizing is also a use of personal data in it self and
| requires a legal basis. https://www.insideprivacy.com/data-
| privacy/german-federal-co...
| y4mi wrote:
| You seem to be confused about what PII is (which I think you
| meant from context). None of the listed informations are PII,
| nor do they become that in aggregation.
|
| But if it was, it most likely would be enough anyway if the
| salt isn't stored anywhere. An irreversible hash of data is
| enough anonymization
| number6 wrote:
| You are right: PII. Sorry. So PII are Informationen that
| enable someone to identify a person as a unique person. On
| the homepage is stated: "This generates a random string of
| letters and numbers that is used to calculate unique visitor
| numbers for the day."
|
| Where the definition of personal data is:
|
| "(1) 'personal data' means any information relating to an
| identified or identifiable natural person ('data subject');
| an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified,
| directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an
| identifier such as a name, an identification number, location
| data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific
| to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic,
| cultural or social identity of that natural person;"
|
| So if the listed information isn't PII (an IP address however
| is PII) then it would become PII if you can identify a unique
| visitor with it.
|
| Am I wrong here? It sounds to me that this hash fits the
| definition of Art. 4
| bopbeepboop wrote:
| I give you the hash as described above.
|
| How do you identify me from that data?
|
| > an identifiable natural person is one who can be
| identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by [the
| data]
|
| Since you are not identified by the metrics and not
| identifiable by the hash, I'm not understanding your
| concern.
| rvnx wrote:
| This is equivalent of replacing the IP address with a
| pseudonym that is rotated daily per each IP address.
|
| Privacy improvements using crypto is somewhat marketing,
| but here the numbers show that they have a really good
| product, an impressive revenue model and a good marketing
| message so I think that's what we should look at.
|
| Technically, at the end of the day, they store utm_source,
| they store the IP address (just in an encoded form with a
| salt + day added to it).
|
| -> So yeah, you can be tracked, but in theory you will
| appear under a pseudonymised hash of your IP+UA.
| langitbiru wrote:
| The co-founders met each other on Twitter:
|
| https://microfounder.com/blog/cofounder-in-marketing
|
| They are remote co-founders, if you will.
| WORMS_EAT_WORMS wrote:
| Woah, the real question is what on earth kind of "marketing"
| did Marko activate? Astronomical switch for them. Would love to
| read more about the tactics.
|
| This image blows my mind. Basically from 0 to 50,000 uniques in
| month?! Congrats
|
| https://microfounder.com/storage/posts/originals/sjswkbxufvl...
| langitbiru wrote:
| He shared his marketing strategy here:
|
| https://www.starterstory.com/privacy-firendly-web-
| analytics-...
|
| The answers are content marketing and spreading words in
| niche tech communities.
| u385639 wrote:
| > We do miss out on getting featured in the tech media.
| TechCrunch published a story about our growth once (thanks to the
| VCs who were sharing a list of fastest growing open source
| startup) but otherwise, we get no coverage that VC-funded
| startups get.
|
| This isn't because you're bootstrapped, it's likely because you
| don't have a PR team pitching on your behalf. That's how stories
| get placed.
|
| Congrats!
| agustif wrote:
| http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
|
| +1
| 0898 wrote:
| Long time Plausible user here. They are the "good guys" of
| analytics.
| utdiscant wrote:
| I have been looking at Plausible and competitors like Fathom and
| others. It seems like there is limited room for innovation and
| differentiation when you almost can't store/track any data.
|
| How can you stay competitive long-term?
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(page generated 2021-11-05 23:01 UTC)