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You can grow your startup without being annoying

How much funding did you take for your startup? $0

What's your marketing budget then? $0

You must have a great sales strategy? We don't do sales

You must use tons of sneaky website elements to trick people? We use none

You can grow your SaaS without being annoying and without supporting the adtech / surveillance capitalism.

I really enjoyed the thread the other day on: "What do you hate most about modern websites?".

And I understand why site owners introduce those annoying elements to their sites as they believe they are necessary to grow or it's the best practice that everyone else does.

But it is possible to grow the other way too. Plausible Analytics has had an incredible growth over the last few months (from $400 in April to more than $8,500 MRR now) and we are proud to say that our growth happens even though we try really hard to ignore and say no to all the best marketing practices.

Hoping to see more indie hackers saying no to some of the "best practices" too so we all can have a little bit better and less annoying web.

  1. 17

    I kind of miss learning more about what did you guys do to grow Plausible Analytics then? Can you share some of your 'less annoying' growth strategies which helped get you to where you are today?

    BTW, congrats on your work so far 🥳

    1. 15

      Marko linked to a nice blog post with specific strategies but I also wanted to give my perspective when zoomed out a little bit.

      In a way what we're doing is so boring that there isn't much to talk about. Everyone loves hearing about growth hacks and 7-minute abs but in the end what matters is doing quality work and staying consistent with it.

      We focus on a small number of things but we try to do them really well.
      1 Build a great product that people will recommend sponatenously
      2 Stay active on Twitter, Mastodon, IndieHackers, Hackernews and to a lesser degree Reddit.
      3 Publish quality content, a mix of current topics that might do well on social and more SEO-optimized stuff on the other end. See https://plausible.io/blog

      That's pretty much it. I handle the product and Marko does content. We are both active on social but Marko way more so than myself.

      I've been building the product for 2 years. Marko has been building the brand, content and social presence for 9 months full-time. Most of my time is writing code and most of Marko's time is writing content and interacting on social. No tricks. Just putting one foot in front of the other every day and focusing on the marathon not the sprint.

      Sorry if this is obvious. Sometimes people see our recent success and think that it came overnight. In reality we have invested thousands of hours of coding and writing to get to this point.

      1. 2

        Makes so much sense and in a way I'm glad you said this! If everyone could just apply some magic formula and get $$$ it wouldn't be much fun at all, would it? 😉

      2. 1

        This is exactly the kind of thing I needed to hear. We're in the middle of the marathon and doing very much what you've outlined. It's good to know that this approach worked for someone else! Thank you.

      3. 1

        Interesting that you guys use Mastodon, have you found a lot of success there?

        1. 3

          thanks Jordan. we have our official profiles both on Twitter and Mastodon. Mastodon is much smaller but is very popular with a more open source, privacy first audience.

          We may not get much traffic from there compared to Twitter (you can compare the stats on our live demo https://plausible.io/plausible.io), but we like to support products with similar principles and philosophy.

          Mastodon is an open source response to mainstream social media such as Twitter similar to how Plausible is a response to GA.

    2. 3

      thanks Tomi! one good blog post to get you started is: https://plausible.io/blog/startup-marketing

      1. 2

        🙏 bookmarked!

  2. 7

    I think you played your cards right. It seems Plausible Analytics caters to devs (which, according to my research, despise the channels you mentioned you ignore). So even if you wanted, you'd prob find paid ads ineffective when targeting devs vs. doing content marketing on dev[dot]to or HN, for example.

    If you were targeting a less technical audience (restaurants owners, for example?) I don't think you'd be "annoying" to them by using channels like paid ads simply because the audience doesn't find them (that much) annoying.

    "Annoying" is a function which largely depends on how often you're exposed to a stimulus IMO, so devs are much more likely to be annoyed by ads because they've seen them 43204320 times vs. a restaurant owner.

    1. 2

      thanks! i think an increasing number of people is annoyed at these practices. and not only techy people. and an increasing number of regulators have got enough of it as well. so definitely something i see becoming a more common approach in the future for more startups.

    2. 1

      100% agree with this. Posted something very similar just before reading this, but now upvoting yours.

  3. 3

    Oooo, while I agree with the premise. I would like to see more Indie Hackers do more things that they personally don't like and stepping out of their comfort zone.

    Just because things like newsletter pop-ups annoy us on IH (a developer heavy audience), doesn't necessarily mean they significantly annoy a different audience and potential customer base.

    Much of what you've said here works because you're a low-cost solution aimed at privacy conscious developers. So it makes sense not to do sales as it's low cost. It makes sense not to use ad-tech, as you're privacy conscious. And, sorry, you do have a marketing budget (you're just not counting your own time as a cost). You choose to use that budget hanging out exactly where your audience is.

    Now... if you were in a completely different industry or market I'm almost certain your approach would need to change.

    1. 1

      not so sure about that. i think respecting your audience and being upfront and honest about what you are doing without trying too many tricks works for more than tech savvy audiences.

      and it is becoming more of a norm thanks to all the regulations in place such as the GDPR. currently, many of the growth hacking practices that people complained about in the IH thread i linked to are illegal and i would not recommend them even when promoting to a less tech savvy audience.

      1. 5

        Sorry, I disagree here. Displaying a newsletter pop-up is not disrespecting your audience. Conducting sales is not disrespecting your audience. Taking funding is not disrespecting your audience. Paying £ for ads is not disrespecting your audience.

        How many illegal practices were in that thread? In fact one of the most annoying is required by law – the cookie consent popup. I'd never advocate doing something illegal so it's important we draw the distinction between illegal and annoying.

        There are people here struggling to grow their business because they aren't able to reach prospective customers. This advice, if taken as gospel, is not going to help. For Enterprise businesses sales (and at times, coldcalling) is necessary. If you need to grow quickly then paid advertising is almost certainly necessary. And if you're conducting paid advertising you need to get a ROI on that ad spend, at which point being able to market to them in the future by getting an email address , with consent, is necessary.

        Conventional marketing and sales should not be looked down on so we need to acknowledge that the advice here is covered in significant amounts of bias based on the very specific sector that you're in.

        1. 1

          the only reason cookie consent popup is necessary by the law is if you want to track people's personal data for non essential purposes. if you're not doing that, you don't need it by law. you don't see any cookie consent popups on our site.

          i would recommend you consider to give a shot to some more unconventional ways to do marketing or sales. they may turn out to work even better than the best practices in my experience. also for non-tech savvy audience. that's basically the point of this post.

          1. 2

            We're a little bigger now but did all the less conventional things, partly because we had no money when we started out! We started out a v similar way to you, proud of our £0 marketing spend.

            Our growth did hit a ceiling as we exhausted the communities we were in – new competitors also were beginning to take the space we were in. This is why we needed to accelerate out of it with things like paid marketing to new audiences we couldn't previously reach.

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              i understand and it makes sense. let's see what happens with us. will we hit a ceiling too? will we be able to grow still while having strong principles about what we believe or don't believe in? remains to be seen :)

  4. 3

    Gotta say man, after reading through the whole article, I am impressed. I love how much effort you guys put into maintaining your users' privacy. I thought that there was nobody left on this planet with these values, but to my pleasant surprise, I was wrong. I will definitely try plausible when I am ready to launch my product. Good luck for the future, you guys are going a great job here. 👏🏻

    1. 1

      that's very nice to hear, thanks! and all the best luck with your product too!

  5. 3

    I agree. I reflect on this from an abundance mindset. There is enough space in our world for many businesses to coexist, provided that each business bring something unique to the table.

    For Plausible, I consider this to be "calmness," expressed internally by forgoing looking for "hacks" and externally by being a trustworthy and privacy-focused product in a sea of sharks.

    What this boils down is understanding not just the problems of your customers, but also their "vibe." As an indie founder who is embedded in the community that they serve, you and Uku get it. You don't like the annoying popups and the "fake individualized marketing" — so you don't do it.

    It's show, don't tell. And you're doing a great job at it. That is a bootstrapper's superpower. We know that we don't have to chase every single customer at all costs. So we are deliberate and chase those who we really, truly want to serve.

    1. 3

      Well said! I've been following the journey of Plausible for long and have always wondered how long their differentiation would last, given the fact that everything the product does can be done by Google Analytics for free except for privacy.

      But to maintain privacy one can't just shun GA. They have to shun the entire Google ecosystem which is very difficult if not impossible.

      But for a large product's customer base there will always be unhappy customers and we only need to be "deliberate and chase those who we really, truly want to serve."
      Thanks for clarifying this.

      1. 1

        thanks Subro. there's more than privacy / privacy regulation compliance that differentiates us from GA though. some of the main things people tell us are the simplicity of our metrics, the ease of use of our dashboard and being lightweight both as a script and for the dashboard experience. GA doesn't do any of these either. so there's a real market here for which Plausible is a better solution.

        1. 2
          1. Your script is definitely lightweight but IMHO it doesn't translate much into gain in page loading speed (I've tested it).

          2. Simplicity is there, but if people invest a little bit into a custom GA dashboard they can make their dashboards as simple as they want with a lot of added benefits like event tracking, audience insights, funnel tracking etc. Filtering unwanted traffic is another crucial feature GA offers (not sure if these features are available in Plausible now- last time I checked they weren't there)

          3. GDPR guidelines can be met by GA customers if they choose to deactivate GA for European visitors which needs a little bit of customization through tag manager. For 99% businesses this shouldn't be a problem as they can still track everything outside Europe.

          4. With GA4 a lot of additional customization and presentation will be available which will makes the data even more actionable. In addition cross-device tracking will be a complete game changer.

          FD: I'm an analytics tool consultant and I'm talking from a utility point of view. My clients prefer GA only because it's free and there's no comparable tools with equal features.

          1. 1

            thanks for your comments, appreciate hearing from someone deep into analytics!

            Perhaps we're hitting two different audiences: your audience doesn't seem to be too worried about Google / privacy / regulations perhaps because it's less european based.

            Our audience (which includes many small and large companies these days) tells us different things.

            GDPR and Schrems II are definitely a big problem for GA. many companies that have europeans in their audience are starting to properly implement GDPR (with a 2 year delay). so they need to ask for consent for GA and then some 30-90% of people say no. which makes something like Plausible a much more interesting choice despite not being free.

            on average our customer saves about 10 seconds for each individual view of their dashboard. GA is so slow while our one loads instantly. that counts for many people who'd like not to be afraid of opening up their analytics dashboard.

            I guess if people hire an expert like you to help them simplify it etc, they could improve their GA experience a bit but it's definitely not the norm out of the box for the average GA user.

            1. 1

              I'd love to continue this debate once GA4 is fully operational and maybe on a wider platform.

              People who max out their analytics usage at tracking pageviews, session duration and bounce rates are not doing analytics. They are just chasing vanity metrics and it won't last beyond a certain point.

              I appreciate what you guys are building but I'd love to see you guys compete on features rather than just privacy.

    2. 2

      so nice to read this Arvid, thanks for sharing!

  6. 2

    Congrats on the growth @markosaric and @ukutaht!

    This is some solid execution of a good strategy. I think it's working particularly well because you nailed some other fundamentals, like pricing and timing. A few years ago GA was just a no-brainer. Now, we're willing to pay for privacy and simplicity to be part of the shift away from big ad-tech, especially at the indie/new-company level. And your price points, I feel, hit the value we place on that and the amount we can budget towards it.

    Personally, shifting my messaging focus to be more about privacy has really resonated with folks this year. It seems like a big trend. Let's hope it sticks!

    For those tackling tougher markets at higher prices, don't be afraid to be a little more aggressive if you need to be! Just, when you get there, maybe don't be annoying to squeeze out every little half a percent of micro-growth :)

    1. 1

      thanks Angus! that for sure works in our favor too. and glad to hear you're seeing good thing from a similar approach in messaging!

  7. 2

    Good product also helps which certainly applies to Plausible.

    1. 1

      for sure Tommi. marketing and communication in whatever shape or form can only do so much in the end. you need a good product if people are going to stick to it and help you spread the word about it

  8. 2

    Huge fan of your work @markosaric. I'm a firm believer that best practices should be tested and that alternatives to them do exist. Thank you for your work in the ethical marketing space!

    1. 1

      thanks very much for your support, Stephanie!

  9. 2

    Thanks for sharing about your growth. I will investigate your platform for the business that I'm a part of. It's nice to hear more about privacy-centred analytics. We're trying to market to people who care about wellness and an alternative to conventional social media (which exploits your data), but we haven't been as bold as you (like saying we're the "alternative to X") which maybe we need to do!

    1. 1

      thanks Kenneth! I think comparing yourself to a popular product that everyone knows helps communicate the differences and what you do better for specific use cases. It definitely helped us position ourselves better in this market

  10. 2

    Yes! This is why you are one of my favorite indie hackers Marko. Thank you for sticking to your principles and setting a good example for the rest of us starting out!

    1. 1

      thank you Levi, appreciate the kind words!

  11. 2

    And I understand why site owners introduce those annoying elements to their sites as they believe they are necessary to grow or it's the best practice that everyone else does.

    Those "annoying" tactics are used because the value proposition most of the time is not as strong as these startups like to believe.

    1. 1

      perhaps that plays a part. the product definitely needs to be strong to make it work

      1. 2

        I agree with this too. As Paul Graham from Y Combinator says, "make something people want".

      2. 1

        It's an overgeneralization I stated, but it's hard to know every factor for a product or startup's annoyance or reliance on dated marketing methods. So the easiest thing to assess first, was your product even any good or a market fit or a niche?

        1. 1

          true. marketing can only do so much in the end

  12. 2

    I love that mentality, it's very refreshing. My project is still in it's infancy so I often feel I should promote it more, but really if I really focus on improving the quality it should promote itself. In fact I think that's the main reason I created something people really like, for the first couple of years, I didn't do any promotion, just focused on the quality and solving the main problem as well as I could. I also like that you are a team of two, one focusing on the code and the other on promotion/social. I'm trying to do both and it's stressful, if I could focus on the code/design and find someone to do promotion, social, YouTube videos, etc well for me in exchange for a percentage of my company if and when I make it big, that would be awesome.

    1. 2

      thanks Felipe! that type of split worked well for us. i focus on marketing and communication while Uku focuses on design and development. it makes for a good balance.

  13. 2

    Haha, the headline made me think of at least one guy here, I saw recently :)
    I agree that it's a thin line sometimes between promoting your product and being annoying.

  14. 2

    Great job Marko.

    Totally and completely agree with you.

    Have worked in the marketing industry for 8 years and know all too well about these annoying elements, but the truth is that in most cases they work.

    A few years ago we did a test in the agency I worked for. We tested pop-ups, chats, banners, etc. against pages without these elements. 58 sites in total.

    The result was a convincing 233% higher conversion rate, 127% higher revenue, 458% longer time on site and surprisingly 22% lower bounce rate.

    That being said, I hate these annoying pop-ups myself, which is why we do not use them in our startup and we also have gained over 200 sign ups for our beta waiting list without spending a penny.

    So there is definitely hope ahead, but in order not to cheat yourself you could at least try to test the effect on your own site. I had actually completely forgotten about the study we were doing at the time. Definitely thinking we should start testing some of it ourself.

    Good luck with everything.

    1. 1

      Thanks Jay!

      There may be exceptions to the rule but in most cases people forget to count a huge increase in bad reactions they get by introducing all these pop ups and such. The IH thread is a good evidence that most people hate that stuff.

      You may boost some metric by a certain percentage but in my opinion you are boosting the metric you are not following (making people angry at your brand and closing your page) by a much higher percentage.

      For me personally growth is not worth everything and I'd like to do a little bit to set a more positive example and make the tiny part of the web that I control a little bit better.

      1. 2

        Yes exactly, that metric is missing in the equation, which is also the one should concentrate on.

        You can also put it this way: you boost your short-term growth by using irritating elements and you win on the long-term strategy by not.

        1. 2

          exactly! which is why I included the point about not taking any funding too. you can grow without VCs and it actually allows you to grow in a better way as you don't have their pressure on you to grow at any cost.

          1. 2

            You know, the entrepreneurial way is the best way to start a business and I see two things to it:

            1. Without a budget, you are forced to deliver quality and creativity. With a budget, it's just too easy to push instead of actually listening to what's needed.
            2. You get validated that your solution really covers a real need, nice graphics and influencers do not smear your real value proposition.

            The truth is that we have raised $100K in pre-seed but we have no intention of spending even a single penny on marketing or sales and the reason is as described above.

    2. 1

      Wow, those were some high numbers. Have even used an email popup on my site and it only gave 10 emails over two weeks, so for me, it was not that helpful.

      1. 1

        I think it depends on which site you run and two weeks is not very long. Have you tried testing the communication, graphics, etc. in your mail pop-up?

  15. 2

    I'm a happy user of plausible because your product is super straightforward, does what it should do in a very elegant and simple way and leaves me alone otherwise.

    I don't get why so many products are trying to solve so many problems at once before solving the main problem really well.

    And I'm yet to subscribe to a service because of an intercom widget or a stupid pop-up banner. I have never even used such a chat widget and I really don't see the value in it. If I have a question I can write an email to the founders or reach out to them on Twitter. That's more than enough for me.

    Anyway I just wanted to say I like your unobtrusive way of doing SaaS :)

    1. 1

      thanks Marius for the kind words, I appreciate that!

  16. 1

    Ah, that's a man with a vision, goddammit!

  17. 1

    I just read your post about Best Marketing Practices and I did enjoy it I liked reading about why you made the decisions you did.

    The only point that I wanted to respond to is the comment about confusing marketing with advertising. I agree that it isn't absolutely necessary but it works for a large number of businesses and it is a viable marketing technique. And it meets the definition of what marketing is: promoting and selling products and services.

    I recommend "Traction" by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares. It gives great explanations on a wide range of available channels and how to test them. What works for one business and founder may not work for others.

    I think it's super cool that you're using marketing as a differentiator.

    1. 1

      thanks Steve! for sure. the point there was more that there are so many marketers who think that paid advertising is the only way to grow while it is not the case. but it is certainly a message that facebook and google like to promote.

      1. 2

        I completely agree with you. My hope is that those people do research or get into an accelerator program. Startup School (SUS) is fantastic because it's free, online, and it isn't burdensome.

  18. 2

    This comment was deleted a year ago.

    1. 2

      thanks Mick! you've definitely made some good progress recently too!

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