We've just hit 200 paying subscribers!
by Marko SaricIt took us over 1 year to go from 0 to 100 and now in just 1 month, we went from 100 to 200 paying customers! Our recent growth has been amazing! Thank you to all who support and trust us!
Why did we grow so fast recently?
Affordable pricing, open source and a lightweight script (679 byte) are important aspects that make us stand out in this market but our fast growth can also be contributed to a change in the communication approach.
Starting in April, we positioned Plausible Analytics directly against the market leader (Google Analytics). We made it clear what we do better than Google Analytics. We were upfront by saying we don't try to replace Google Analytics for everyone but that we cater to these use cases instead:
- Those who care about the privacy of their visitors and users
- Those who care about fast loading times
- Those who want a simple dashboard that they can quickly review and understand
- Those who don't want to worry about cookie consent and GDPR consent
- Those who don't want to support Google in their control over the web
Many website owners have some or all of these issues with Google Analytics. For them, Plausible Analytics is a much better solution. That's not all Google Analytics users (many are more than happy to use Google Analytics) but a decent percentage of them. This is our market and it helps communicate to that market when we are clear and upfront about our positioning.
Marketing activities that work for us
We will continue doing the marketing activities that are working so far:
- Writing blog content about topics that are of interest to our target audience. Here's our content marketing approach
- Not just write but also spread the word and promote our content to different channels. If we don't promote the content that we publish, chances are it won't be seen by many
- Communicate and engage with the relevant communities including Indie Hackers and on our new Twitter account
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What an amazing growth Marko. I always find your articles interesting to read. I have been thinking a lot about signing up for plausible since Google is missing a lot of my traffic. I only have one condition, I need a paying customer before I take more paid tools to build my startup. So see you soon😉
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Thank you Sjors! Yeah, we see a difference in stats between us and GA often especially with more techy audiences who use adblockers and more privacy-friendly browsers.
Seems like a wise and sustainable way to approach your startup! Hope to see you very soon! 😁
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Congratulations Marko as I have seen how challenging it is to get first 100 customer when you are in to SaaS product.
Wishing you great success ahead.
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Thank you Jignesh!
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Congratulation @markosaric and @ukutaht. Good to hear this success story. 👏🎉
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Thank you Csaba!
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Amazing!
What is the current MRR now?-
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Thanks Vikas! Just checked Paddle to answer your question and it says $1305 MRR!
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Curious why you decided to go with paddle and not stripe? does it do anything differently or better?
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They help with VAT and all that stuff. See https://paddle.com/features/saas-sales-tax-software/
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Liked the product! Keep up the good work!
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Thank you Suibin!
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Congrats, @markosaric - that's super exciting :)
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thank you Michael!
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Congrats man! Looks like you've finally made it past escape velocity.
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thanks Shane, let's see what happens next!
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Congrats! It looks like you are well on your way to at least 1000 users by the end of the year 😀 All the best!
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Thanks Lincoln, fingers crossed!
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Congratulations, I remember seeing some of your posts a year ago in HackerNews :)
When you say not just write but also spread the word and promote content, what channels do you use and suggest for that?-
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Thanks Loftie. It really depends on the audience you are targeting. So think about them first. Who are they? Where do they hang out? Where do they go when they have issues to solve? Whom do they ask their questions to when they need help? And then go to those places.
In our cases, our audience are people that have websites or people that help people build and manage websites. So we go places where they are. Hacker News was the biggest sources of traffic as we had one post hit front page there couple of months ago.
You can actually see all of our traffic sources directly on our live demo. Over the last 6 months the list goes:
- Hacker News
- Facebook (happened organically as some big Facebook pages shared our content)
- Google (organic search)
- GitHub (we're open source)
- Indie Hackers 😁
- Hacker Newsletter (happened organically as they shared our post that went well on Hacker News)
- Dev.to
- Web Designer News
- Google Discover (Google highlighted our post in their discover app)
- Lobsters
- Reddit
and so on...
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I am so glad to see that an alternative analytics tool can make money! I wish you could retain such a rapid growth.
I just started evaluating your analytics for https://moonkit.io (free business growth toolkit). I really liked that I didn't have to include a cookie consent dialog, and I think the available metrics will cover all my needs at least for some time.
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Thank you Andy, I'm glad to hear that!
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Hi Marko, great service! What's your tech stack?
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I remember reading about Plausible a while ago. I'm delighted to hear that you're doing well. Your website and copy as spot on as well! Awesome job! 👏
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Super work! Congratulations!
FYI - Spotted some basic copy changes on the website. Get someone from the team to do a basic english check - should get the job done.
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Hey @markosaric, congrats for the milestone. Have you designed and coded the website from scratch? If not do you mind sharing the source so I can buy it? Thanks.
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Thanks Rick. We're using this: https://tailwindcss.com/
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First of all congratulations Uku and Marko :)
I’m currently using Matomo and I’ve seen your comparison page https://plausible.io/vs-matomo which is good to know.
There’s another service called Simple Analytics (SA) https://simpleanalytics.com by a fellow Indie Hacker.
How does your PA differ from SA?
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Thanks Alexander! Matomo and GA are the two most popular names in this space and there are big differences between us and them so I wrote those comparisons.
For SA, we're both starting from a similar idea of making analytics more simple. Right now, probably the most obvious difference is that fact that we are open source software which some people prefer. There are other differences in pricing, size of the script, metrics available etc. and I assume we will diverge more and more over time as we focus on our different ideas and priorities.
You can get a better idea of the direction we're taking by looking at things our community has suggested we focus on in terms of feature additions on our public roadmap. And our live demo shows you our current product as it is.
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Congrats Marko! Plausible is killing it 🎉. I definitely look up to you guys as I build Letterbase 😄
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thank you Richard!
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Hey Marko! Congratulations!
That's some incredible growth, and it's always nice to read a detailed review.
Also, I want to offer https://abtesting.ai for your landing page, but more important, if you are interested, we can work some kind of integration. Since Google Analytics offers Google Optimize for its users, our tool might fit well on your proposal.
Thank you in advance,
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thank you!
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This comment was deleted 4 years ago.
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Thank you Simon for the kind words!
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