We had 400k+ visitors in 2020 and these are our top traffic sources

We've grown the site traffic for Plausible Analytics by 1900% last year (411k visitors and 1.2M page views). All that with a marketing budget of $0. The only "budget" is our own time.

Poor distribution is the number one cause of failure for startups but it doesn't have to be so. Even for indie hackers like us who are self-funded and don't have a large budget to spend on advertising.

Here are our best traffic sources in 2020 and some lessons learned. Hope it helps you make 2021 the best year yet for your indie hacking project!

Hacker News

5 of our blog posts reached Hacker News front page. We submitted them all. Sometimes it took two or three tries before the post got trending.

You need some interesting content and some luck too but it's worth it for the feedback, social media buzz and links you'll get!

I'm really happy when I see all the recent Indie Hackers threads from others having success on Hacker News too! It may not bring you immediate ROI but the branding benefits it brings will be worth it!

Google search

Our content drives our organic search traffic too. 50% of the Google traffic goes directly to the content pages. Google organic is the top channel for trial registrations.

And Google traffic started growing as we started publishing regular blog posts. Our schedule is approx one post per week and has been so since late March last year.

And these posts are not simply us announcing our latest features or directly "selling" Plausible. They're focused on the different topics that our audience enjoys and they're educational and informational rather than salesy.

Twitter

We created an account and sent our first tweet on May 18th 2020. It's a great way to build a community.

What gets attention? Milestones, records, behind the scenes details, and in our case talking about Google 😜

The traffic we get from Twitter correlates with blog posts that we publish as people tend to share them on Twitter.

Indie Hackers

Indie Hackers is our favorite community. We're active daily and sharing all the latest milestones too. And it helps us drive traffic and interest to our product too!

Indie Hackers seems to be moving away from milestones as they're now placed less prominently on the home page so we'll see what happens this year.

GitHub

We're an open source project with all the development being open to the public on GitHub. We also discuss all the feature requests and share our roadmap there.

So all this activity naturally brings some attention too. It pays to be open source!

Facebook

We're not active on Facebook in any capacity and don't plan to be so in the future either.

Our Facebook traffic comes from people sharing our links with the big spike coming from DuckDuckGo sharing this blog post on their Facebook page.

Reddit

Reddit is a tough place to promote a startup. It does help when you have content that people like to read and share.

Similar to Hacker News, chances are you'll have to go explore, find some relevant subreddits, be a part of the community and occasionally submit your content when it makes sense.

Francesco Di Lorenzo

The best form of marketing happens when your product is so good that people naturally tell others about it: word of mouth.

So we're grateful when people share us in social media, in different communities such as here on Indie Hackers and on their sites like this post by Francesco Di Lorenzo. It made it into our top 10 referral sources for the year despite being published in late December 🙏

Product Hunt

We launched on Product Hunt with a delay. We already had an audience at that point which helped us make it to the 2nd spot without any "hacks".

While Product Hunt is useful (we got a decent spike in traffic and a good number of trial signups), it's not a long term solution to your marketing problems and not the end goal of your marketing efforts.

You cannot launch on Product Hunt every day so you'll need to explore something more consistent and I hope this post gives you some more options to try.

May 2021 be the best year yet for your project!

2020 was a great year overall for Plausible Analytics in which we went from $4,000 ARR to more than $100,000 ARR. And all that without any tricks or hacks. You can explore our traffic in detail on our live demo.

Build a great product, be active on the relevant communities around the web, explore all the options available to you and make sure to keep writing those blog posts! Good luck!