Plausible has 50 paying customers!
by Uku TahtToday Plausible hit two milestones that I’ve been looking forward to. I now have 50 paying customers in total with a combined MRR of $301.
The last update I gave was when I hit 25 paying customers in August. Since then I’ve been working to build passive traffic to Plausible so I don’t have to constantly hustle for eyeballs. My efforts are working: the biggest source of traffic in Novembers was organic search from Google. Plausible is now the number 1- 2 result when searching for ’Simple web analytics’.
SEO is actually simple in principle but really hard to execute. It’s all about building quality links to your domain. But how do you get links? I spent days writing a thorough article that was good enough to be featured on Hackernoon. I also took an interview with SourceSort, they reached out when I open-sourced Plausible.
Once you put in enough leg-work, you start getting links organically. Plausible was featured on TutsPlus and a very cool article comparing top 3 privacy-focused web analytics tools. I didn’t do anything to get these high-quality links.
A friend of mine, Makis, also helped set up an amazing source of passive traffic. Plausible is now listed in the Ghost integrations page under the analytics category. In total, this link has driven 174 highly qualified visitors to the landing page. Plus, I’m sure the link from ghost.org to plausible.io is a boost to our SEO.
Check out our open analytics: plausible.io/plausible.io
I’ll continue opportunistically building links to Plausible to rank better in Google. There’s a really high-traffic search term that I would like to rank on the first page on: ‘Google Analytics alternatives’. This will be difficult as the keyword is super competitive, dominated by sites with very strong domain authority. Realistically I think I’ll have to start with more specific keywords in that space, e.g. ‘open source google analytics alternative’.
Got any tips for SEO? Share them below.
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Showcasing your product through open analytics for your own product is a great move. 👏
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Instead of waiting months or years to rank, start by reaching out to all the websites on the first page of Google for "Google Analytics alternatives" (except your competitors obviously) and ask them to update their article adding Plausible to the list 😉
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That makes sense, cause these articles already have a bunch of authority and traffic for the keyword I'm targeting :)
I did try to reach out to some bloggers who had written posts about privacy-friendly analytics tools. I think I reached out to 4-5 but none of them actually updated their article. After doing a few I started wondering if I'm not doing a great job at reaching out or explaining why they should add Plausible to their list.
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I've been using the demo for a bit now and I love it. There were a few things I was concerned about and features I really wanted, but looking at the public roadmap it all seems to be coming in the future. I'll definitely be continuing past the trial.
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Thanks, that's awesome!
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That's awesome, Uku! I'm currently on the trial, using it for one of my sites, and I love the simple easy to use stats!
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This looks like a great product. Just what I have been looking for. I signed up today.
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Awesome! Thanks for signing up and let me know how it goes :)
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Yeah, it's in the works at the moment. You can learn more here https://docs.plausible.io/beta-goals-and-conversions
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Good job Uku
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This couldn't come at a better time! I was researching this exact thing.
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Awesome work!
As a freelancer, I often have clients that find Google Analytics too overwhelming so this could be a really interesting alternative for my smaller sites.
Email and PDF reports would be a really nice feature!
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Thanks! I do have email reports but not PDF yet.
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Congratulations, Uku ✨🎉👏
Keep up the good work!
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Thanks Nikola!
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Very nice @ukutaht. Congratulations!
Couple of points I'd like suggest
- Adding pages comparing Plausible with other tools (e.g. Plausible vs Google Analytics).
- Take a closer look at the keyword you are targeting - monthly search volume, competitors numbers, etc.
And best wishes.
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Thanks, these are good points :)
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What is the advantage of monitoring your sites analytics from an outside source when you could just build that into your admin dashboard?
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Could you explain the legwork involved with building quality links to optimize SEO?
I'm familiar with the concept, but I am curious as to your strategy principles in execution in building quality links to your domain - and how I should be applying it to my own ideas.-
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Honestly, I didn't have an overarching strategy, I just tried different things. Here are a few random tactics that worked:
- HARO. They send you briefs from reporters and you can send a pitch with your thoughts. I was interviewed once and wrote a blurb on functional programming that was included in an article. What do you get in return? A link to your website. So I got 2 good links from this. I'm not doing HARO anymore because it got a bit overwhelming for me, but it's a good tactic.
- Cross-post from my blog to dev.to automatically. They don't have a review process.
- Send a guest post to HackerNoon. They do editorialize so it's difficult to get published.
- Gave a free subscription to a customer in exchange for a link from their site to Plausible. I'm considering making this a public 'free for open source projects as long as you add a link ' offering. Still weighing the pros and cons of this...
- I also reached out to opensrouce.com to be included in their list of Google Analytics Alternatives. Unfortunately they didn't include me, but they offered that I write a guest post introducing Plausible. I haven't done it but this is an opportunity that's just waiting for me to take it :)
Like I said in my post, I build links opportunistically. I don't have a concrete strategy, I just spend a lot of time in the developer+open source+privacy community and I reach out to people when I think there's an chance to get a link. The biggest leg-work for me is writing blog posts. Guest blogging is the best way to build links but it's really hard for me to pump out quality articles. I can tap into some inspiration every now and then but I can't do it regularly.
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really informative man. So the more links you get to your site from outside sources, the higher your google search ranking? So the trick is just for us to figure out how to incentivize people to share direct links to our site?
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Wow nice! Congratulations!
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Thanks!
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Congratulations and thanks for the insight into how you've approached SEO!
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what is the MRR average from all 50 customers?
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Do you mean average revenue per user? That would be $6/mo per user. I think it's a bit low and I'm looking at ways to improve that.
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