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Plausible now has more than 100 paying customers!

This week Plausible Analytics hit a major milestone: we now have more than 100 paying customers! The month of May has been pretty crazy with 3 paid conversions per day on average so far!

How did we accomplish this?

This major growth resulted from our Why you should stop using Google Analytics post going "viral" since published on April 8th.

We've had 62.8k visitors (+2.5k%) and 272 trials in April (6x more than March and more than the previous 9 months combined). All trials got free 30 days to test us and these are now slowly expiring with a certain percentage of them deciding to de-Google-ify their websites and convert into paid customers.

What did we learn?

  • Don’t hide the fact that a popular competitor and a market leader exists. People know. Rather than pretend they don’t exist, use their existence to your advantage. Promote reasons why you believe that your competitor is flawed and explain what makes your solution a viable alternative for specific use cases.

  • If you’ve put a lot of effort into creating great content and you’re proud of it, make sure to share it with the world too. We shared the post on our Twitter and Mastodon accounts, we shared it on Indie Hackers, Lobsters, Hacker News and Reddit too. And we got lucky!

If we didn't put that effort into promoting the post, the chances are it would have gone unnoticed and it would not have made a difference. Do not be afraid to go out there and tell your story to a relevant audience in a relevant community.

  1. 6

    Congrats Marko! Just curious, how is Plausible different from simple analytics or https://usefathom.com ?

    1. 0

      Thanks Mantas! One aspect we want to focus on is open source. Our code is on Github and the process of making a Docker container for easy self-hosting is in progress there. Otherwise I recommend you explore our live demo to see the actual product and check the public roadmap to see what we're adding next.

  2. 4

    Don’t hide the fact that a popular competitor and a market leader exists. People know. Rather than pretend they don’t exist, use their existence to your advantage. Promote reasons why you believe that your competitor is flawed and explain what makes your solution a viable alternative for specific use cases.

    This is a very good copywriting practice. You don't want people to leave your website to search for alternatives. So it's better to show your shortcomings and your strengths compared to your competitor.

    Could you send me an invite for Lobster?

    1. 1

      Exactly. Too many times startups don't do this though which I think is a mistake.

  3. 3

    That's awesome to hear. It's well deserved.

    I just converted my free trial and couldn't be happier.

    Thanks for being so open about your company and for such a great product.

    1. 1

      thanks very much for your support Curtis!

  4. 2

    Awesome, Marko!

    What difficulty, if any, have you had around onboarding, specifically on how to use the tool?

    1. 2

      Thanks Raffy! We haven't had any major difficulty. One that comes to mind is the fact that we had some interest from larger sites that go over our current capacity (they're having several million unique visitors per month per site...) so we're working on scaling our back end to accommodate those levels. Hoping that they are happy to wait for a bit until we're ready.

  5. 2

    Congrats!
    How did you promote that post?
    I remember I saw it here on IH

    1. 1

      Thanks! There was no paid promotion involved. It was simply about us going to the different communities that we're a part of and that we believe would be interested in the post and then sharing it there. Then it was up to the community. I wrote about the whole process a bit more in detail here if you're curious to read more.

      1. 2

        Great post! Thanks!

  6. 1

    Excellent work, Marko!

    Content is king! I would call this long-form content, i.e., flagship content.

    I have a client who repurposes his long-form content, especially his keynotes and videos, into micro-content that can be shared across a variety of platforms.

    There was one keynote in particular that his team repurposed to create more than 45 pieces of social media content, which resulted in more than 15 million views. Business owners are busy, so taking the time to create quality content can sometimes be challenging. By repurposing content, however, they can save both time and effort.

    1. 1

      Good point about repurposing, thanks Tony!

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