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.