[HN Gopher] Lessons from building Plausible Analytics to $1.2M A...
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Lessons from building Plausible Analytics to $1.2M ARR in public
Author : trulykp
Score : 119 points
Date : 2023-03-12 15:43 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (buildinpublichub.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (buildinpublichub.substack.com)
| trulykp wrote:
| Here's an interview with Plausible (an alternative to Google
| Analytics) co-founder Marko on the journey of going from 0 to
| $1.2m in ARR and building as much as possible in public
| skilled wrote:
| I like what Plausible is doing, and they definitely know how to
| make content marketing work, but I'm going to be honest - the
| pricing model they're using is a bit out of this world. On top of
| everything else you have to pay (subscribe for) on the web these
| days, paying $500 a year for 500k monthly pageviews is _insane_!
|
| Now, obviously, my opinion doesn't hold a lot of weight by itself
| because it seems that they're quite profitable, but I will never
| understand that kind of pricing for something so basic.
| preinheimer wrote:
| I think it only looks insane because Google is "free". I've
| been running a SaaS profitably for about a decade (and with
| employees for half that time), we're still well below that.
|
| We're plausible customers for our new thing because we wanted
| to take a privacy first approach. No need for a cookie banner,
| no weird permissions or opt out. Just a functional website. I
| understand GA is crazy powerful, but for what I'm actually
| using Plausible is so much easier to use.
| pembrook wrote:
| If you've got 500,000 monthly pageviews and $42/month isn't a
| rounding error to you, I think there's something wrong with
| your business.
|
| And if you're not running a business, why do you care about
| analytics at all?
|
| Most medium-large sized companies will pay people $150,000/yr
| just to translate the data from tools like plausible into ugly
| powerpoint presentations for management.
| jehb wrote:
| Two assumptions there I'd challenge.
|
| 1) Pageviews do not equal revenue. The purpose of every
| website isn't inherently to make money.
|
| 2) The purpose of analytics is to understand your visitors
| and their interaction with content. There doesn't need to be
| a profit motive to want to do this. I've worked on plenty of
| nonprofit, informational, and discussion sites where we use
| analytics to discover what content is resonating with what
| kind of an audience, how people are discovering the site,
| what paths people take through the content, where errors are
| occurring, or just congratulate authors for writing things
| that got a lot of reads.
| pembrook wrote:
| Why not free Google analytics? _"...but evil big tech and
| data privacy "_
|
| Why not use Plausible self hosted (it's open source and
| free)? _"...but it 's not actually free if you have to
| spend many hours setting it up and maintaining it"_
|
| Forgive my snark, but that's usually how these
| conversations tend to go.
|
| Even if you're a non-profit, if your website analytics on
| 500k monthly views isn't helping maximize donations by more
| than $42/month, you're doing something wrong.
|
| Ultimately, the main takeaway is, it doesn't matter how low
| or high the price is. Some people just believe they're
| entitled to a world where everything works perfectly for
| their needs and they never have to pay for it. I suggest
| ignoring those people--because you'll never make them
| happy.
| adxmcollins wrote:
| Inspiring read! I used Plausible back in the early days and it
| was a great product, I'm not surprised they made it big!
| tiberriver256 wrote:
| Recently switched to Plausible from GA for my blog. Analytics are
| way easier to use compared with GA4. Probably would not have even
| considered switching if they would have left universal analytics.
| Privacy stuff and performance we're secondary bonuses. Worth
| every penny.
| sccxy wrote:
| Same here.
|
| I went with self hosted version for my personal sites.
|
| Simple features and nothing too complex. Mostly I watch real-
| time stats, monthly page views and daily 404 pages.
| encoderer wrote:
| If you aspire to run an indie software business like this, you
| might want to take note of how absolutely _boring_ most of the
| success in this space is.
|
| Web analytics is boring. Cron job monitoring is boring. Running a
| backup service is boring. These businesses (the cron one is mine)
| are all doing great, making millions. But in this space the vast
| majority of devs are chasing fun and cool projects in web3 and AI
| that are more tied to cool ideas than actual business problems.
|
| Businesses are, mostly, boring things. They have boring problems.
| If you're doing something too interesting there's a good chance
| you're just playing around
| tootie wrote:
| Web analytics isn't boring to me. I also think it's a really
| hard area to break into. There's no shortage of competition and
| none of them seem very differentiated.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| Cronitor.io is his business in case anyone is interested.
| dottedmag wrote:
| How to find these boring problems? Every time I look at a
| boring problem in tech there is a pretty okayish solution, so
| I'm discouraged to even try to make something, as I know that
| okayish solution will be even better when I get mine to work.
| encoderer wrote:
| Riffing..
|
| Take one of those ideas. Make a site that reviews all the
| current competitors in the market.
|
| Put the one with the best existing seo strategy in first
| place.
|
| Contact them and let them know and ask that they link to it,
| offer to write a guest blog post about how you reviewed every
| tool in the space and this one came out on top, and why.
|
| Share the site all over where you can find people talking
| about the niche.
|
| if the niche is not too big, this will often get you ranking
| for that term. Google loves "best ___ in 2023" content.
|
| You are building a traffic source.
|
| Then you can build a product and put your product in 1st
| place or even above the list entirely. Write a blog post
| about how you took the best of the other tool you reviewed
| and created the perfect tool for <certain persona>.
|
| Ok, end riff, i have no idea if that will work but it seems
| repeatable and not too difficult. It really is all about
| getting traffic.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| Just for clarity, is the product you build in the same
| category as the products you initially reviewed?
| gumballindie wrote:
| > Every time I look at a boring problem in tech there is a
| pretty okayish solution
|
| Congratulations. It means your ideas are good and there is a
| proven market for them (assuming the solutions you find are
| generating revenue).
|
| The fallacy that "there already is a product" out there doing
| something and as such you shouldnt would imply that we'd all
| wear identically looking jeans and there would be one car
| design and one type of phone.
|
| Differentiate a bit. The only questions to answer are: can
| you execute on your idea, is there a market large enough to
| achieve your target revenue and is it overcrowded?
| maxilevi wrote:
| How do you find out if it's overcrowded or not? Supposedly
| with a good enough differentiator it doesn't really matter
| if it's overcrowded right?
| marcopicentini wrote:
| If you want an idea: A SaaS to host product guides with good
| i18n.
|
| - Gitbook.io doesn't support i18n well. Not SEO friendly and
| not language detector. - Readme.io is too expensive for just
| product docs. - Hosting with NextJS etc.. is a pain if you
| need to support i18n and edit content using markdown.
| hoofhearted wrote:
| I'm working on something now that solves just this.
|
| I had to build out a Next app last year with a seamless
| looking blog and docs site. I struggled to find real
| solutions, so I ended up getting in touch with Marco from
| Plausible to get some advice. He helped me to figure out
| their stack, and I replicated it to my project. I released
| a dope next app with a markdown powered blog and docs site
| that looked amazing.
|
| I'm working on releasing a free cli tool for frontend devs
| based off this work. I'd love some feedback and watches on
| GitHub if anyone is interested. Link is in my bio.
|
| SHOW HN and IH coming soon :)
| achempion wrote:
| document360 support i18n
| stuartjohnson12 wrote:
| Mintlify are probably the guys who will close on this one
| first. Great team, moving very fast.
| marcopicentini wrote:
| They do not support multi language.
| vsareto wrote:
| AI will probably be boring eventually since it's a large
| umbrella. Even if you scope down to LLMs and NLP, gluing those
| to work with your stuff in interesting ways will still seem
| boring compared to publishing papers.
|
| What I never got about businesses doing technically boring
| things is that only the marketing/sales layer is adding value,
| so it's interesting people would chose a newer business over an
| older one. If you have a defining feature that sets you apart,
| that's not boring, it's innovative and interesting. So maybe
| web analytics/cron job/backups are still not boring because
| something is keeping major companies from crushing those
| specialties.
|
| Web3's always been shit though.
| encoderer wrote:
| I think the important thing with AI is to start at the
| customer and work backwards to AI. If you are trying to think
| of cool things you can build with the new AI APIs you are
| probably doing it wrong.
|
| One thing to remember about having competition is that most
| customers are not doing a "bake off" and they probably are
| not even aware of your competitors. If they found you, and
| you seem reputable, and you do what they need, and the price
| seems worth it, you can probably close the sale.
|
| Of course the first one is key. That's the hardest thing
| about starting from scratch. They have to find you.
| huhtenberg wrote:
| > the cron one is mine
|
| It did stood out from the list actually.
|
| Web analytics is very interesting from the UI/UX perspective.
| In fact that's exactly what make Plausible notable - their
| super-polished wonderful UI.
|
| Backup service is no less interesting, but from the technical
| perspective, especially around hardware reliability issues.
|
| Cron monitoring - yep, boring as hell.
| granshaw wrote:
| Not sure if it's touched on but one cofounder focuses on product
| while the other focuses on marketing. Cannot stress enough how
| much of a winning formula this is
| altdataseller wrote:
| And one or both focuses on sales.
| trulykp wrote:
| so true!
| marcopicentini wrote:
| I used plausible and it was great. Then I found Beam analytics,
| which is a copycat with a better free plan. I switched in no time
| to Beam Analytics now.
|
| I would be more worried about copycats. When you share your
| success, other developers want to have it too.
|
| Even if you believe you are for the long run you lose money in
| the short term because of your ego.
| ents wrote:
| Not possible to self host though.
| spapas82 wrote:
| Actually it definitely is possible to self host plausible
| analytics! It's an open source project with an AGPL license.
| You can even find instructions for self hosting here:
| https://plausible.io/docs/self-hosting
|
| Please notice that although they recommend docker for self
| hosting, it is very easy to self host an a bare RHEL server
| (you need to be a little familiar with Elixir though but not
| so much, you can take a peek at the docker entrypoint scripts
| to see what's going on) ; I'm doing exactly that for some
| months now and I'm happy with the results.
| huhtenberg wrote:
| GP was referring to the clone (the Beam thing), not PA.
| capableweb wrote:
| One huge selling point of using Plausible is that you can self-
| host it and it's FOSS. If the company disappears, you can
| continue using what got developed so far, and maintain it
| yourself. Beam Analytics doesn't seem to feature any of those
| two things, making it less of an alternative, at least for a
| sub-section of the users of Plausible.
| mtlynch wrote:
| There are offsetting effects from building in public. There's
| the downside that it encourages copycats, but sharing numbers
| and strategy also wins positive public attention.
|
| I personally pay for Plausible because I like how much they
| share. They frequently pop up in discussion on HN, and I think
| their openness drives a lot of that mindshare among the crowd
| here.
|
| If it's a service I care about, I don't want to be on the free
| tier because I want a mutually beneficial relationship with my
| service provider. It's cheaper for me to pay a few hundred
| dollars per year than to have to scramble and switch platforms
| when my vendor folds or drops their free tier.
| trulykp wrote:
| Well said!
|
| I've been a paying customer for over 2 years and their
| transparency and overall a strong "sharing" culture played a
| big role. It's just easier to trust.
| paulgb wrote:
| Wow, I thought by copycat you meant that they went for a
| similar feature set, but from screenshots it looks identical
| down to font and color choices. Are they just running a white
| labeled instance of Plausible's OSS?
| flurly wrote:
| Hi - co-founder of Beam here. Appreciate the discussion about
| our product in this context. We've tried to differentiate our
| product from the other GDPR compliant web analytics by also
| focusing on product analytics proxies which are easy to
| implement and interpret. We think our funnel analysis and
| cohort retention tools can be very helpful. To learn more
| about why we built Beam, check out this blog post -
| https://beamanalytics.io/blog/why-we-started-beam
| chronicom wrote:
| It's not white labelled Plausible. The creators of it are on
| Twitter if you are interested in following their journey
| (i.e. twitter/TheBuilderJR). It's built on Tinybird,
| Supabase, and Next.js, while Plausible is built in Elixir
| using plain Postgres and Clickhouse, and Phoenix.
|
| A lot of relatively new analytics services tend to have
| similar looking frontends these days I've noticed though.
| zX41ZdbW wrote:
| Just in case, Tinybird is built on top of ClickHouse. If
| you look deep enough into any analytics service, you'll
| find ClickHouse inside.
| chronicom wrote:
| Yeah, I was actually looking at the idea of using it to
| make a little analytics site for my hobby projects last
| week :). The reason I mentioned it separately though was
| that I would assume Plausible has written a lot of code
| to deal with things that using Tinybird means you don't
| have to worry about.
| jacooper wrote:
| Doesn't seem to be actually a clone though, at least not of
| current Plausible, because if it is, they are currently
| breaking the AGPL license.
|
| But Plausible was MIT licensed until 2020, so maybe a clone of
| early Plausible?
| rubenfiszel wrote:
| But in the end, they grew it to $1.2M ARR. That some very cost
| sensitive people are finding other ways is not much of a loss
| because it's very hard to get money from those people anyway.
|
| We are building windmill.dev this way and fully open-source,
| I'm less worried about copy-cats than about the project not
| taking off because of too much friction.
| ecuaflo wrote:
| Nice job with Windmill! Would you be interested in listing
| Windmill on https://starter.place?
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(page generated 2023-03-12 23:00 UTC)