From $400 to $22k MRR in one year with Plausible, a Google Analytics alternative. AMA!

thank you Wilbert, appreciate that!

Last time I did the calculation few months ago, somewhere around 80% of subscribers are on the first two tiers (up to 10K and 100K pageviews/month).

I was a bit worried about customer support as we're growing very fast and having thousands of customers and hundreds of new trials every month but until now we manage it fine. Here's how it works:

Customer support is my responsibility. I aim to answer all emails and messages as soon as possible and pretty much every day I am able to empty the inbox before logging off for the day.

Sometimes if the question is too techy so that I don't know how to answer it, I get Uku involved as he can answer those questions better. We switched to HEY for Work few months ago to make this process easier/faster. It allows us to talk privately within an email thread without forwarding emails or needing to use a chat app etc.

Some things that have helped reduce the number of questions:

1. We have a very detailed documentation and I now recommend to every startup to have the docs. I put a lot of effort into our docs, spend a lot of time on them and make sure to keep them up to date with any new questions we are getting. Then we prominently share the link to docs to our logged in users and we also place the docs link on the top of our contact page. It is a fast and simple way for people to get answers to their questions. It also gives me easy answers that I can copy/paste into emails in case someone doesn't check the docs.

2. When I notice a similar question pop up often, we act on it by fixing things and improving the app itself. If several people struggle with something, it kind of becomes our development priority. We may communicate better in app, we may link to the docs or we may even improve the feature to avoid the same issue in the future.

And the product itself being minimal and easy to use definitely makes it possible for us to serve thousands of customers and trials without being overwhelmed with customer support. So acting on feedback and improving things is one of the principles behind the development of Plausible.

One of the really big decisions Uku made and that has really helped a lot was to pick the right technology. Less than a year ago our dashboard started getting slow even with tens of thousands of visitors so we switched to Clickhouse as the database. That has enabled us to grow to where we are now. Clickhouse just runs crazy fast and we're now serving sites with tens of millions of monthly pageviews (even one site with 150 million monthly pageviews) without any issues.

3. The tasks I spend my time on over the last 6 months or so since we got all this traction has completely changed. I used to spend 80% of my time on writing blog posts and doing marketing outreach trying to get people to talk to us but now I spend 80% of my time responding to people that want to talk to us. So be flexible and understand that this is normal and your role may change as you progress.

Thank you and thanks for building the dailytics.com integration! Hope it works well for you! I ended up talking about it in an interview I did last week so you got a nice mention from WP Tavern :)

And the next big milestone? At the moment things are moving so fast and we're doing so well, that it's more about taking it one day at a time and one step at a time trying not to get overwhelmed with all the work and ideas.

I'm really happy that in the last two of months we can finally pay salaries at levels we used to have in our "real" jobs. I'm personally looking forward to the milestone where I can pay back all the savings I lost during the last year and I can start saving again. Fingers crossed it will happen later this year!

About the new features: You found us thanks to the stats API and Uku is now busy finishing the sites API which allows you to create sites, shared dashboards etc. Should be ready in the next couple of weeks. We have some issues with adblockers targeting our script even though we're a privacy first analytics tool that's compliant with the regulations so we plan to look at how we can improve that aspect so our users continue getting much more accurate data than when using GA. It's something we'd prefer not to need to focus on but it is how it is unfortunately. The next actual metric we want to add is city/state level data. So many people have asked for it and it would be amazing to provide those insights.

About the team: There's no current plan to expand the team but we did start talking to three different contributors earlier this week about something. They've been voluntarily contributing to Plausible in different ways on GitHub and we reached out to see if they could help us a bit more with some features we'd like to build in upcoming weeks. It's a bit of an experiment so let's see how it goes. If it all works out well, our idea is to take all the money we get from GitHub sponsors and allocate extra funds from the revenue to put it into our community of contributors and get extra help from them. Hopefully it could help a few more people to be able to put more of their time into working on open source software. Let's see!

Thank you! User acquisition and growth is my responsibility so happy to discuss! :)

1. I joined Uku in mid-March 2020. Before that, Plausible was a one-person startup and Uku did all the development and marketing on his own for about a year. So what you see there on that graph around April 2020 is the result of me joining to be able to help Uku with marketing and communication side of things. Now our responsibilities are very clear with Uku doing design/development and me doing growth.

The first thing I did was to change the positioning of Plausible and put Plausible directly up against Google Analytics on our website. Before, our home page was a bit more indirect and vague in terms of how we differ from GA. Now it's very clear to understand within a few seconds.

And we got lucky that the first blog post I published in early April 2020 made it to the top of Hacker News, got us tens of thousands of visitors and dramatically raised the awareness of Plausible product/brand. This first few weeks changed the traction for us and I wrote more details on that process here: How one blog post changed the traction for my startup.

2. We have a bit of a boring marketing strategy which doesn't really have many growth hacks and other cool tricks. In terms of what works well, I think it's a mix. I believe that marketing has to start from the product. If people love the product, it makes the marketing job so much easier. I think we wouldn't have been as successful if the product wasn't as good as it is. I can drive as much traffic to our site as I want but if people don't like the look of the product or if they try it but it doesn't really do what they need, they just close the browser tab and never return. Not even to talk about them recommending it.

What we did was pretty much write a lot of content (we're on about 50 different posts and countless docs pages in the first year) and then do our best to share that content around the web including in communities such as Indie Hackers. And this work continues to this day.

I said we got lucky for the first post to go "viral" but we have repeated that lucky move multiple times in the last year including one more viral post couple of weeks ago. If you look at our blog, you can see that the posts we publish are not simply selling Plausible. Instead, they're well researched, detailed, informational and educational posts. They take a stand, they're opinionated, they're actionable. I find that this type of content makes a difference in getting people to read, enjoy and share.

We have some SEO focused posts too such as those focused on product itself for instance that Plausible is open source analytics, or that Plausible is privacy first analytics. Pretty much every important aspect of Plausible has a dedicated post to that specific aspect of the product. These posts will never make it to the top of Hacker News or get a lot of Twitter shares but they have a different purpose. They're there to help us get discovered in search results.

I find that the more opinionated posts are great at getting people to talk about us, mention us and link to us and this work then helps get the more keyword based, SEO posts to show up and rank in search results too.

We don't have any referral program and have never paid anyone to promote us so any people that you see sharing Plausible on Twitter etc do it because they use/enjoy the product.

There is no short term plan to introduce a referral program either unfortunately. Not that we're against referral programs (I've worked in the affiliate team of a large gaming company for a few years so I'm familiar with the industry), it's more that we are a small team with limited resources so need to focus on more important things first such as product development and making Plausible an even better alternative to GA.

Introducing a referral program would take a lot of effort in several ways:

Because of data privacy reasons we wouldn't want to use an external service for this and we would want to keep it all in-house so it would take development time to build it.

It would also create extra work such as making sure that partners/affiliates prominently disclose the relationship. It should be obvious to people that the link is a referral link and that the partner is being paid for recommending us.

We’ve been in situations where someone would choose not to include us in a post after we tell them we don’t have an affiliate program. They end up promoting alternative tools that pay them (despite telling us that they prefer Plausible) and often it’s not disclosed.

We would also want to prevent affiliates from using paid ads on Google and Facebook to promote us as we don't want to support Google and Facebook in any way.

So if we were to do a referral program, we'd like to be able to put enough effort into it to make sure this is clear and at the moment we just don't have those resources unfortunately. Perhaps we'll be able to do it in the future. Let's see.

Thank you!

I'm not sure what the norm is in other startups in situations like these (it's the first time being a co-founder for me) but in our case we've split the ownership equally. Uku has 51%, I have 49%. I think for some legal reason one had to have a tiny majority (I don't have much knowledge on the legal side of these contracts as it's not really something that interests me much as you can see).

I didn't really do much research on what is the best practice either as I was too busy trying to grow Plausible. The MRR was at a bit under $400 when I joined and the growth over the previous 2-3 months was pretty stagnant and not really going anywhere. I was able to make a difference in terms of growth fairly quickly after joining (my first blog post went on top of Hacker News) and Uku offered that we split the shares equally.

The main difference is that Uku's vesting starts about a year and a half earlier than mine as he spent that much longer working on Plausible than I did. Seems fair to me. Time spent on a project is obviously an important factor but being able to grow it is just as important so feels fair to consider both.

Thank you!

I've never had to build a system with these sorts of characteristics so it's super interesting for me. I just checked, yesterday we processed 278 requests per second at peak load.

The approach is more or less the second one. YOLO and figure things out. I don't make plans too far out in terms of scalability. Most of the time it's very difficult to predict where the next bottleneck will be. We just work to get more customers and solve the scalability issues as they come.

With this project there's a lot more behind-the-scenes sort of work than I've had with previous projects. Normally I was able to spend the vast majority of my time working on actual user-facing features. But on Plausible spend more time than usual on the infrastructure side of things. Optimizing the database schema, building support for data sampling, we'll be doing materialized views in the future etc.

None of these are immediately obvious features to the user but I'm spending quite a bit of time to keep everything running smoothly.

Let me know if you have any more questions. Happy to chat!

Glad to hear that, thank you!

I'll tag @ukutaht here so perhaps he can answer this for you. We've split our responsibilities into development/design for Uku and marketing/communication for me so Uku is the one that knows the infrastructure numbers best.

From my side, I can tell you that we've been growing like crazy and scaling our infrastructure fast. This month alone we're already at 400 million pageviews while it took us about a year and a half to go from 0 to 700 million in total.

Few weeks ago we got our largest site by far at 150 million monthly pageviews and at that time they single-handedly doubled our bandwidth. At their size, the dashboard got a bit slow (more like what you see on GA) while speed for us is an important feature so Uku improved some things including the introduction of lazy loading and sampling at those huge levels.

It really helps that Clickhouse is a database built for analytics and built for scale. Not sure if all this would have been possible without Clickhouse. But again, hopefully Uku will be able to add some more details at some point.

Thank you for your support!

About the legal docs: luckily there are some open source legal docs including these made by Basecamp that are written for real people so I would recommend you take a look at those and perhaps adapt those for your needs when starting out. For us, that's what we wanted as we didn't want something like traditional legal docs and something that nobody would read / nobody could understand. Funnily enough, later when we spoke to a legal team they mentioned that this is very common - many startups use some template or adapted template at first and later on get it checked/approved by actual lawyers.

About growth: For us the blog posts and other content we started publishing in late March 2020 was crucial and made the difference in getting the word out. We get so much feedback on the different blog posts and people keep saying that they discovered us through one or another post of ours. We have published about 50 posts and many more docs pages since I joined Uku in mid-March 2020. And these are not simply posts that directly promote Plausible but more educational or informational blog posts that are talking about relevant topics to web analytics. This helps them being spread and we've had 5 or 6 front page entries on Hacker News in the last year thanks to that.

About adblockers: When I joined Plausible, I never imagined that adblockers would be one of the main challenges we face. I assumed by us being privacy first and compliant with the privacy regulations we would also get a pass from blocklist maintainers but that's not the case. Until now, they prefer to block everything and they don't want to have the responsibility to decide what's good and what's bad unfortunately. We've been in many conversations with adblock maintainers including some earlier this week so I do hope we get to some agreement on some type of acceptable tracking but until then we're kind of playing a cat and mouse game with them. They block us and we find a way to unblock us. It's sad and something we would prefer not to focus too much on but it is what it is for now.

thank you! hope you find it useful and good luck with the launch!

I believe you should consider getting rid of GA and using an alternative for sure. Every site should consider it.

There's a lot of privacy baggage that comes with using Google Analytics (cookie banner, user consent needed, the fact that it is made by Google and their business model...).

In addition to that GA is a complex tool and most sites don't need that level of complexity. Those sites would gain the benefit of having easier access to important insights and having a faster loading time by switching.

But obviously it is your choice and something you need to consider for your own situation. I have published a post on why you should stop using Google Analytics on your website which could help.

In terms of data accuracy and trust: Thousands of sites now use Plausible without any issues in terms of data accuracy.

And you don't necessarily need to trust us but can verify us instead. Plausible is very lightweight so it's simple to install next to Google Analytics and you can compare the stats you're getting. We have a completely free 30 day trial with no restrictions nor credit card required. That should give you enough data to make a decision whether Plausible is as accurate/trustworthy as GA.

You may even find Plausible more accurate as many sites experience that a lot of people don't give them consent to be tracked by GA so they don't get much data using GA.

Thank you!

1. My co-founder Uku found me! Uku is a developer so he started working on Plausible on his own. He launched the product after about 6 months of development and took the first steps in raising the awareness here on Indie Hackers.

After some 8 months of marketing he felt a bit stuck and that the growth was going a bit too slow (Plausible was at about 400 MRR at that time). He is a developer so not too experienced in marketing and was looking for help. He sent me an email as he read/liked some of the blog posts I published on my personal blog and we started talking.

I come from the marketing world and cannot do any coding so I am completely focused on the marketing side of things :)

2. Uku actually used Indie Hackers to announce the beta version so that alongside a few of his friends was the first bunch of beta users. This is also where the first customers came from. You can follow Uku's progress if you look at the older posts of Plausible here on Indie Hackers.

There is a big competition in the analytics market but the market is also huge (and growing quickly) so there is space for many players. What helps the growth is the fact that the market leader (Google Analytics) is a tool that is slowly becoming incompatible with the modern world we live in (privacy-first, GDPR/user consent needed, third-party cookies going away...) which creates a new and growing space for upstarts who can focus on things that GA is bad at. Plausible is one of those upstarts.

That's exactly right :) it's a big beefy DO droplet running Clickhouse.

Thank you! Seems hopeless going up against Google Analytics with a simple and paid analytics tool but it can be done! The times are changing :)

Like I mentioned in another response I am responsible for non-technical things such as marketing and communication while my co-founder @ukutaht is responsible for the technical aspects such as development and infrastructure.

Uku can perhaps share more details on this but from my understanding we're running one instance of Clickhouse to serve everything. And as we've been growing fast, we've had to upgrade the server several times to be much more powerful and handle the hundreds of millions of pageviews we're dealing with every month. There are some ideas and plans on how to make this even better as we scale even further but in general Clickhouse is an amazing tool and I don't think it would be possible to do what we're doing without it!

thanks for the kind words and for recommending Plausible! it's this type of word of mouth that helps us get the message out to more sites so we're grateful to everyone who's sharing!