What we learned on our crazy journey to $10,000 MRR
We’ve made it to $10,000 MRR with Plausible Analytics! Several indie hackers asked about our lessons learned, so I wanted to share some in a blog post.
https://plausible.io/blog/growing-saas-mrr
It took us about a year to reach the first $400 MRR and we've now gone from $400 to $10,000 in about 9 months. The whole journey has been documented step by step on IH too.
We're a bootstrapped team of two people (one focused on development, the other on marketing) and we're now running a startup with 1778 paying customers. We've spent $0 on paid advertising. And it’s still only the two of us doing all the work including all the customer support.
The post is long and it took way too much time to analyze and reflect on all the things that made the biggest difference for us. We do some of the things a bit differently compared to the more common startup advice so hope you find our lessons useful on your own journey!
Plausible launched on my. birthday, that's why it's a success!
Kidding...honestly thanks for the updates, I've really been enjoying seeing the progress, especially in the past few months.
Bravo!
Sorry, it’s not that. It’s because Plausible has been my first Zero to Marketing case study! 😂
ahahah if we ever reach a bigger mrr number, i'll have to add these two key milestones in our recap post!
ahahaha that's pretty cool!
thanks Rosie, appreciate the kind words and the tweets!
and a (few days late) happy birthday!
Hmm. We may use this for my project - hintsystem.com . I want to support this type of work.
thank you! hope you find Plausible useful!
Great article! Out of curiosity, what did you use to generate that MRR graph?
thank you! it's just a screenshot from our payment processor Paddle.
A really great article. I love your approach to building out the home page (language etc). I'm in a position of trying to identify my marketing channels to use. So this helped challenge some of my assumptions.
glad it was useful and good luck!
Congrats here as well @markosaric 🥳
thanks for your support! 🙏
Cestito Marko from Darko :)
An extremely valuable post.
Had a question: Most of your SEO traffic seems to be from branded search terms (people typing your name onto Google, instead of typing it in the browser bar). Have you done any research on where those people find about you in the first place?
hvala Darko!
haven't done any research. i assume an increase in branded searches comes naturally with increased brand awareness.
brand awareness mostly comes indirectly as a result of our content/messaging being spread through places such as twitter and hacker news. and word of mouth from happy subscribers who are talking about their experience.
Congrats on hitting that milestone! Well deserved. Goes to show that a great product, great pricing and great messaging goes a long way.
thanks Tony!
Awesome, happy new customer here! Look forward to contributing to the growth :) Congrats!
that's great! thank you for the support!
Hey good story, clear structure and route foe indie hackers, thanks a lot. Can you pls tell what stack do your startup use?
thanks Aidar! we're a standard Elixir/Phoenix application backed by a PostgreSQL database for general data and a Clickhouse database for stats. On the frontend we use TailwindCSS for styling and React to make the dashboard interactive.
great article. Your experience is such a motivation. Keep doing the great job
thank you Ibrahima!
Really good and inspiring read and following your project!
This is really the only pretty successful product that I can recall that has had some success and I have watched grow, with frequent posts/reports etc here on IH since I started reading these pages around end of 2019.
thanks for being on this journey with us Ton!
I really enjoy your posts @markosaric - particularly inspired by your previous post on how you approached SEO/content marketing. It has helped me drive a lot of organic traffic to my site also.
How do you handle the fact there are a bunch of competitors/copycats in this space now?
thanks Glenn! yeah, it's a bit of a silly market we are in. i make a bit of fun about all the copycats on my twitter occasionally.
otherwise we just ignore all the competitors/copycats. the only one we personally consider a competitor and that we target/care about is Google Analytics.
You do an exceptional job writing long articles and distributing them on hacker forums! Good job, man!
Your speed of growth is staggering. 1,800 paid clients is a lot. How many free clients do you have and what's your conversion free to paid?
thanks for the kind words Alex!
i don't actually keep track so don't have more concrete numbers but as our stats are public i just had a quick look at recent numbers:
in december we had 810 new trials (we have a 30 day free trial) and in january until today 313 converted into a customer. seems pretty accurate to what we've seen over the last 6 months or so. about a third of trials convert.
30% conversion rate is impressive.
How did you raise it so high? Did you chase churning members and solicited advice?
similar to our boring marketing strategy, we also have a boring conversion rate strategy.
so i have no smart tricks or advice about it. we don't do any conversion rate optimization, we don't do any sales, we don't do anything to "warm" our trials or anything like that either.
we just focus on making the best product experience we can and we try to be as simple/consistent/direct/straightforward in our communication as possible. there are no tricks and hacks at all.
Hey Marko! Been using Plausible for a few months now and love the product! Just wanted to say keep up the great work!
thanks for the support Jon!
Great to see the project's progression, out of interest - what CMS did you use for your blog?
thanks! we use Netlify CMS for the content. perhaps my comments in the post are a bit harsh but coming from WordPress it is a bit difficult to work with. i did learn how to use markdown since starting to write in Netlify so there's that :)
I am imagining how many times you must have thought in the first year that this isn't going anywhere. Was that the case?
thanks Akash! my co-founder @ukutaht started developing Plausible on his own like described in the post so he may be able to share more details. i know that it was going a bit slow in terms of marketing/mrr and he was unsure whether it could become sustainable and pay the bills so he reached out as he wanted to get things moving a big faster. since then it's been going crazy good so now things are much clearer.
Yeah I can imagine that because right now my product is in the position where Plausible was in Jan 2020. Walking the endless flat desert and waiting to reach that mountain of MRR that looks so far.
hope it works out for you! good luck!
Thanks for the detailed post Marko.
you're welcome Michael!
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just checked and we have 1798 customers right now.
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thanks Mick! 🙏
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thanks for your support Mick!