Insights

Haven't made an update in a while, so it's time to start again. It used to be the case that Insights had a pricing model that was logical to us - but to nobody else. We've made a change on how we count events for billing: even if an event is counted twice, we only use the lower boundary. This should make the app cheaper for users and, most importantly, more transparent.

I woke up to the best news I could expect for at this stage: an e-mail from Stripe saying that we have received our first paid subscription! This is important to us because we've managed to do it while keeping one of our main tenets: respect the little guy.

We built Insights (https://getinsights.io) partly because we found other analytics platforms to be almost disrespectful to non-paying users, and even to "start-up level" customers. Paywalls, arbitrary limits to using the app, complicated pricing. (The worst case for me, personally, was being asked to upgrade from the first paid tier to a version that costs a few hundred dollars more per month, in order to create a fourth funnel). Even our direct competitors in privacy analytics, which only support a few metrics, offer only paid tiers for their solutions.

We wanted to create something that could be used for free for any Indie Hacker like us, and that would bring them value. Our free plan is very generous, and so far only one user had gone over our monthly limits. We have had returning users for a few months now, and we were growing a bit worried about having been too generous with pricing. Just like everybody else here, we wanted validation that we were building something people would pay for.

But holding on to our tenets is paying off: we have other developers happy to be able to use the tool for free on smaller websites without giving data to Google, and now we are starting to get users which get enough traffic on their website to justify paying for the tool. This is only the beginning, of course, but it's something I'm very glad to see validated: there is no harm in being generous with your users.

This is it, everybody. There is no coming back now. After over a year of developing products that failed to get traction, we finally got a product that is being used in real-life scenarios. Insights (https://getinsights.io) receives bug fixes requests which are both urgent and coming from a different time zone. This one happened to be an easy fix, luckily, so everything was good to go for Monday morning.

I know this is a weird milestone to celebrate, but here's the thing: I've been interested in the startup lifestyle for a while now. Reading about it I knew it was often romanticized - late nights, fixing a product right before a presentation, coding on the airplane on the way to meet an investor...

But for me, since quitting my job a year ago, none of that was really true. Yes, I would work late on a weekend, but I knew it was only because I wanted to do so - there was no reason for me to push myself. No users, no companies, no urgency would drive me. I would end up telling myself: I could keep pushing myself to finish everything now, or I could do everything tomorrow. Or the day after. It didn't make a difference.

Things are different now. There is a sense of urgency, a weight that I can't quite explain. I'm still doing everything from my living room, and I don't feel that anything is different with me. But things have changed.

May they continue to do so.

There is still work to be done in terms of usability, but now we've got people coming organically to the page and registering. We keep in close contact with the ones who reach out to us with suggestions, in order to make Insights as easy to use as possible.

The most important part was having a product that fulfilled all of our needs. After some time considering our options, we created Insights, an analytics platform that required 0 cookies and tracked all of the metrics we cared about. At this point, we were ready to use this tool for our own purposes, but design and usability still needed improvement.

It seemed simple enough: I wanted to add analytics to a side-project I was working on, but I didn't want to infringe on the privacy of my users. Not share their data with Google, nor ask them to consent to be tracked. But I also wanted to have as many insights as possible and not have an overhead to deal with self-hosted analytics. Seemed simple enough, but no tool available fit all of these criteria. That's when we thought we could do better and create our own tool.