Joining a technical cofounder and growing the product to $45k MRR
Iron Brands quit a short-lived career in finance to start indie hacking. While networking, he met Adriaan van Rossum and joined Simple Analytics as a late cofounder. Today, it's bringing in $45k MRR — and he's working on two more products to boot.
Here's Iron on how he did it. 👇
A very short career in finance
After I graduated from university with a degree in finance, I felt very confident about my career. This all changed when I got an internship at a financial consultancy. I got all suited up for work, but that only lasted a few weeks. I decided it was not for me.
So I started dabbling with my university mates to start our own thing. That became Fiks, a marketplace for internships. We grew Fiks to 100K ARR before I decided to make a change. It's still going— my old cofounder still runs it.
I realized that I liked building so I decided to continue on the path. I moved to Amsterdam and tried to meet other founders and builders. It was at a developer meetup that I met Adriaan, who had founded Simple Analytics a few years before as a solo founder. We decided to partner up, and today, Simple Analytics is at $45k MRR. Here is our open page where we share metrics. We should update the graph, but other than that, everything is up to date.
Launching new projects
While building that, we also launched another company called UniHosted. And two years ago, Adriaan and I decided to partner up with Dries to build a managed-hosting service for UniFi Controller (what? yeah I know).
We've run into some nasty feuds in the industry, so we're a bit more cautious about what we share. Let's just say it's less than Simple Analytics, but still substantial.
And finally, last month, we acquired Leadsontrees.com, which is designed to give alerts about funding announcements. It's a great project with a lot of potential that we are going to rebuild and rebrand together with a third cofounder who can't be named yet.
Leadsontrees had customers when we acquired it, but it was lifetime deals. We quickly changed our pricing to monthly and are now around $250 MRR.
Unlocking the potential of his cofounders
I think my role in creating Simple Analytics and UniHosted is to help unlock Adriaan and Dries' potential. Simple Analytics was already functioning well without me, doing 10K MRR, but in order to grow, a lot needed to be done — in the product as well as on the distribution.
UniHosted was a half-baked product when I met Dries. Together we turned it into a real business with revenue, customers, etc.
I hope the same will happen for Leadonstrees.
Iron's marketing stack
I can't really say a smart thing about our stack. I know we use Vue and Node at Simple Analytics, but that's about it. Here's our marketing stack:
Simple Analytics for analytics
Semrush for SEO
Seogets for organic traffic insights (it's like Google Search Console on steroids)
Substack for newsletters
Mailgun for emails
Nano Banana for visuals
Firecrawl for feeding LLMs
Loom for videos
Hustle and SEO
Going from zero to one is a hustle. You manually start engaging with potential users. Go on Reddit, Twitter, LinkedIn, or even Facebook groups and engage. Talk to them. Help them. The goal is for people to give your product a try.
You'll get feedback from them and improve your product. Getting your very first customers in the door is super important and you should employ every trick in the book to make this happen. Do things that don't scale.
Once that happens, you move to part two. Now, you have to do things that scale. So, instead of manually pursuing users, you need to figure out a sustainable and repeatable growth channel that brings in new users without you needing to push every day.
For us, that channel was SEO:
Answering questions in our niche
Writing "Alternative to" pages
Getting backlinks
Doing programmatic SEO
And focusing on quality
I wrote everything down extensively in two articles:
Reverse trials
We employ a reverse free trial, meaning that when users sign up for Simple Analytics, they can use a full version of our product for 14 days — regardless of which plan they choose.
This is a free trial of our full product with all the features available. After 14 days, we ask them to make a decision. Based on their usage in those first 14 days, we recommend a plan, but they can still opt for any flavor (free, simple, team).
They need to pick a plan to continue using Simple Analytics.
Start as early as possible
Starting as early as possible is actually an advantage.
Some people say that you need to be more experienced before starting your own business, but I disagree. I have a lot of friends who want to start their own businesses, but they are handcuffed. They have a cushy job, drive a car paid for by their employer, just bought a house, and are thinking about having kids. No way are they going back to earning nothing and possible failure. There is just too much at stake now.
Whereas, when I started, I was a student earning nothing, and I continued to earn nothing for a couple of years. My life was basically the same in my first few years of business vs. student life. Sometimes I got a bit jealous of my friend earning a great salary at Deloitte, but now looking back, I'm really happy I picked this route instead of the career ladder.
Make mistakes
You can't just start a business and be good at it. You'll make some really stupid mistakes.
For example, in my first business, we started a marketplace because we didn't have the technical know-how to build a SaaS. Also, we didn't validate anything; We just took a plausible-sounding idea and decided that it would work.
I would change the whole setup for my first business if I could do it over. But I learned a ton.
As long as you look back on what you were doing a year ago and think, "Man, I really was an idiot," you're on the right track.
You're a legend — stay in the game
First, you're a legend for starting the indie hacking path. Most aspiring entrepreneurs and indie hackers never even get to this stage.
Also, I'd say you will probably fail the first time and that's okay. I had a very hard time with my first startup, but I learned so much from it. If I had given up after my first failure, I'd not be where I am now.
So don't give up! Stay in the game!
What's next?
I'm product agnostic, meaning Simple Analytics doesn't feel like my child. It's more Adriaan's child.
The same goes for my other business, UniHosted. I just get a lot of energy from helping technical founders like Adriaan and Dries succeed. That's something I really feel passionate about. So my goal is to help a lot more technical founders bring their ideas to life and turn them into profitable businesses.
Here's my newsletter where I share our business updates (including numbers, etc.). You can also follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn.
And check out Simple Analytics, UniHosted and Leadsontrees.
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