How we bootstrapped our startup from $400 to $2,750 MRR in 135 days without ads
How we grow our startup without any paid advertising, affiliate marketing and other sponsorships. All the steps we took and our best traffic sources are included.
plausible.io
Congrats Marko and Uku, well deserved :)
Thanks Guido!
Thanks for this post! I was just searching Indie Hackers for posts and discussions about developing marketing strategies. There are several things here I'm looking forward to trying – in particular directly mentioning market leaders on the home page.
Happy to hear that Ryan and good luck with your marketing efforts!
Great work! Think it is even more impressive after reading the comparison to Google Analytics, and the cost / mo of the product.
Thank you!
Hey Marko, a few questions to help me define my own way forward. Do you have a strategy for posting to HN/Reddit? Any particular day of the week? Weekday or Weekend? Morning or night, and from which timezone? Do you target users from a particular region? If so, you post during their working or non-working time? Do you repost your links, or just once and forget about them (even if you believe it's the greatest content and nobody clicked on it)? Cheers!
Thanks Leonardo!
Aside of choosing the right platform for our target audience (think Hacker News) or the right subreddit (think /r/webdev), I don't think it's worth trying to overthink it too much and try to target anyone specific as they're huge worldwide platforms and if you do get a post on there that's shared widely the traffic keeps going on for more than a day or so.
So I would rather spend a lot of time on the post quality itself and the headline itself and then just share it whenever it is ready. There's no definite answer that can say you should post Monday morning CET and you're guaranteed to do well. I've seen same post being submitted on one day and getting 3 upvotes and then submitted again the day after and getting hundreds. Chance plays a role too.
Great article and I love how you pointed out as being a lean startup, resources are limited. Not every advice is the same. It's all relative but I can relate to this as a solo founder.
I just checked out TweetDeck and engaged for 1.5 hours on it and may have a paying customer. Thanks for that tip.
Your bounce rate is pretty high and time on page low. I have a similar problem with https://storycreatorapp.com what are your thoughts around that?
Thanks Michael, glad to hear that!
Bounce rate and time on page really depend on the referral source. Sources such as Reddit and Hacker News have high bounce rate and low time on page as they bring huge spikes in traffic and raise the awareness to more people. So I'm not really worried about it, it comes naturally alongside the spikes in traffic.
You can see here the split between different sources where it is evident that Hacker News who's number 1 source of traffic last month has the worse time on page and bounce rate which affects the total numbers: https://plausible.io/plausible.io/referrers?period=custom&from=2020-07-01&to=2020-07-31
Interesting SaaS business you have there. I will keep you guys in mind once my MRR starts to grow
Thanks James!
Amazing Stuff @markosaric Keep Going.
I noticed that you are using Netlify, Wondering if the frontpage of Plausible static. Would love to know the technology stack behind the landing page. Thanks and keep crushing it.
Thanks for the nice words! Take a look at TailwindCSS.
Interesting read. What kind of MRR are you planning by the end of the year?
Thanks Amin! Don't really have any plans or projections for what the MRR will/should be. We're taking it one step at a time. The first step would be to make Plausible Analytics sustainable. We do that by continuing with what we've been doing over the last few months: improving the product and getting it out to more people.
Just became a customer. Love the simple interface and where you guys are going with this!
that's great to hear, thanks Manuel!
nice!!
thanks Usama!
IMHO you would get more customers if you would offer free of charge trial. Like for example offering your full service for one website for limited time.
Thanks Bojan! We do have a free trial of 30 days. Unlimited use on unlimited websites during those 30 days. No credit card required either.
This is how it happened. I came to the site and clicked Pricing. Didn't see "Start free trial" button. Scrolled the page and left without knowing it.
https://plausible.io/#pricing
Sry, I just came from your website and somehow missed that fact. I was not aware at all that I can subscribe for a trial.
No problem. There's a button in the top right on any page that says "Start free trial".
Very interesting post, thanks for sharing!
Thanks Martijn!
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Thanks Simon!