How we launched Simple Analytics AI

5 years ago, Adriaan had a grand idea:

Google Analytics sucks. It's overly complex and sells visitor data. Let's build a simple, privacy-friendly Google Analytics alternative and compete with Google.

Google Analytics is still very much alive, but this odd idea turned into a business with 1200 customers and $25k monthly recurring revenue.

Now, we’re taking it to the next level. We launched Simple Analytics AI – Chat with your analytics

Here is how we did it.

My mom always told me: “Son, only work with 10x engineers in your career”. I didn’t take this advice lightly and ended up working with Adriaan.

We spent the last month in Bali building Simple Analytics AI.

How we built it:

You are not only a 10x engineer if you know how to build shit. It also means that sometimes you must push through when you’re onto something.

Adriaan working at BWork, Bali at 4 AM.

We normally don’t work crazy hours, but with Simple Analytics AI, we knew execution mattered and gave it a big push to launch fast.

How we launched it

When Adriaan builds stuff, I’m the one who's on the hook for the marketing part. Here is how I went about marketing Simple Analytics AI.

First, we created a massive brainstorm around launching this new feature. What channels do we have? Should we launch on Product Hunt? How can we make it more shareable? We came up with a plan that had two parts:

Product Hooks
The launch

Product Hooks basically refers to: “How can we build-in marketing hooks in the product itself?” - Think CTA’s, banners, shareable features, etc.

Product Hooks

Public dashboards

This one is quite specific for our use case, but important to mention. If you use Simple Analytics, you can decide to put your dashboard as public, like Nomad List by Pieter Levels. We’ve used these public dashboards in our product launch, so people can play around with the feature using Nomad List directly without needing to sign up first.

Like this

Live demo

The importance of a live demo cannot be overstated. You want your users to get this “aha” moment immediately. The little interactive test video and the option to play around with public data help our visitors instantly get to the aha moment.

Product

In the product, we used a couple of things to engage users. There is a waiting time to get an answer from OpenAI. We added a loading widget to show that the AI is working on the answer. Also, we added four placeholder questions to help you get started, and we created a list of questions to help you get the most interesting insights.

Banners

We added a banner to the product page when someone is playing around with it but not logged in. These are new users, and we want to convert those into trial users of Simple Analytics. We also added a banner on our homepage to direct visitors to play around with our AI feature.

Custom Events

All the questions asked using our public dashboards are saved. This way, we can see what our users are asking and create more use cases around interesting topics that will increase demand for our tool in the future.

The Launch

It speaks for itself, but here I’ll outline the different tactics I used to launch Simple Analytics AI.

Channels

I created a list of the channels we would use and indicated how. For this launch, we wanted to focus on the following: Twitter, Email, Product Hunt, LinkedIn, Reddit, Hacker News & Indie Hackers. For every channel, we crafted a different “launch post” that fit within the target audience.

Videos

We’ve learned from the past that videos work 10x better than just posting text or images. It gives it a personal feel, and you’ll deliver the ‘aha this is cool’ moment faster. We have created a launch video and a few other videos showing the different use cases.

Newsletters

This is one new tactic that, I hope, will work out. The idea is to reach out to several newsletters that might be interested in mentioning our new feature. I’ve created a list of newsletters related to AI or Indie hacking using Reletter.

These newsletters will receive an email showing our feature with a cool GIF. Hopefully, a few of them get the ‘aha this is cool’ moment instantly and pick it up.

Early users

Before launch, I reached out to a group of beta testers and gave them early access to our tool. In addition to the feedback we received, these people were really hyped about what we built and excited to get involved and spread the word.

Conclusion

Alright, that's it for now. Will report back to see how it went and whether we really blew Google Analytics out of the water.

For now, If you want to play around with it using Pieter Levels' Nomadlist.com public dashboard, feel free to give it a spin here

Oh and one little thing. We're live on Product Hunt now. If you liked this, please share some love: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/simple-analytics-ai