We've hit $3,000 MRR and 500 paid subscribers!
by Marko SaricWow! Plausible Analytics is at $3,182 MRR and 509 paying subscribers! Thank you to the Indie Hackers community for your support and for helping us reach this huge milestone!
To showcase our crazy journey to data, here are our other milestones:
- May 14, 2019: Got our first subscriber
- May 27, 2020: But then it took us more than a year to reach $1,000 MRR
- July 6: And then things shifted quickly. $2,000 MRR in 40 days
- August 7: And now $3,000 MRR in 32 days
Similar numbers for subscribers. It took us one year to reach the first 100 but we went from 400 to 500 paid subscribers in 15 days!
How do we grow?
Our fast growth kick-started when this blog post went "viral" and changed the traction of our startup.
You need to pick your spots, choose a selected few marketing tactics and ignore everything else. Here are all the "best marketing practices" that we say no to at this moment:
- We don’t do paid advertising
- We don’t do A/B testing
- We don’t have spy pixels from Facebook and Google so we can retarget you
- We don’t have a podcast, we don’t do videos
- We don’t have a fancy email sequence where we try to “nurture” you into paying
- We don’t do any intrusive popups
These tactics can be very successful but they all take a lot of time to be implemented properly. That’s difficult to achieve if you’re just starting out or you’re bootstrapped with limited resources. If you try to follow all the best practices and do everything, you may very well end up not doing any of it well enough.
Here's a complete look into our marketing efforts.
Here's what we've been up to recently
We've worked hard to introduce a new level of detail and depth into your Plausible Analytics dashboard. Over the last month, we have introduced:
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Referral and page drilldown that allow you to see the breakdown of traffic from an individual referral source or to a particular post. You can even mix these two
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Introduced visit duration on site level and referral level so you can see how long people spend on your site and better judge the quality of referral sources
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Added a realtime dashboard so you can see what's happening on your site in the moment which helps you figure out what's going on in case of sudden traffic spikes
All this without changing the simplicity of the dashboard, without adding extra weight to the script (still way under 1 KB), without invading the privacy of your visitors and while still keeping the affordable subscription levels.
Our goal is to reduce the number of sites that use Google Analytics and the only way to do that is to make our plans as affordable as possible while having a product that can compete with Google Analytics for many site and business owners.
Here's the full recap of our activities in July.
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Well done! 3k is awesome
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thank you Pete!
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Hey just wondering what's the biggest USP that you try to sell over GA? Is it just the light size? It's amazing what you guys are doing. Just trying to understand how you beat free stuff from google with a paid product?
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Thanks! It depends on the person. Here are the main differences from GA:
- Simple to use (we have one page, GA has hundreds of reports)
- Lightweight (45 times lighter script)
- Compliant with the different privacy regulations (no need for cookie/GDPR consent banners)
- Independent, privacy focused (disconnected from the big tech, adtech and surveillance capitalism)
Take a look at this comparison too https://plausible.io/vs-google-analytics
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Amazing stuff @markosaric! 🙌
I read your article about your marketing efforts. I wish more startups would focus on just a couple of platforms and really give them their all.
That's been my strategy and it's worked extremely well. I just passed 10K connections on LinkedIn and it's become my primary prospecting and outreach platform.
And the bonus of reading your article? I'm now going to check out PA cause I'm so sick of Google Analytics. 😁
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thank you Anita and glad to hear LinkedIn works for you! I'm looking forward to hearing your feedback about PA!
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Congratulations! Your revenue milestones are very encouraging to others. I must ask, why is your pricing so cheap? Especially on the higher end it does not make sense. A website with 10M visitors should pay more than $150/month IMHO. All of your price tiers, excluding the first one or two, could be bumped for new customers and your profitability picture will look a lot better.
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thanks Phil! we're competing with free (Google Analytics) and our main goal is to get more sites to remove GA so the idea is to keep all plans as affordable as possible (for instance we recently made improvements to our database that allowed us to be more efficient so we immediately introduced new plans, lower prices and 33% discounts on annual plans).
most site owners (even the big ones) are still unfamiliar with the idea of paying for web analytics so we want to help people make this shift in thinking as there are negatives with "free" such as that their user data is being sold as the actual product. this is a slow cultural shift but it is happening and affordable prices do help with that.
other analytics being more expensive doesn't necessarily mean much either as for instance we have chosen not to have an affiliate program as we focus on organic marketing. this means that we can keep the 25%+ lifetime revenue that our competitors pay others to do their marketing for them and we give that 25%+ as a discount to our users instead.
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Great breakdown of some of the strategies that worked for you.
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thanks Greg!
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I know you've said you don't do a podcast as marketing, but if you ever found the time to do one just to document your journey I'm sure a ton of us would love to follow it. Congrats on the success and best of luck from here upward!
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thanks Levi! doing our own podcast is something we will consider if we can find some time.
we've joined the Changelog podcast recently (see https://plausible.io/blog/changelog-podcast) and are looking to get on some other podcasts too (know someone?) which is an easier way to tell our story in the short term.
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May 27, 2020: But then it took us more than a year to reach $1,000 MRR
You folks have the patience and perseverance of a God.
Congrats on hitting $3k MRR!
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thank you Jayber!
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This is actually really inspirational. As I just launched my saas this week. And was planning on focusing on just one thing as well such as SEO and content, since I’m a one show . Glad to know that this exact same strategy does have great opportunities. Thankssss
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Great to hear Johnny and good luck on your own SaaS!
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Congrats, guys! Great to see that effort over an extended period of time really adds up.
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thank you Radek!
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Congratulation 👏👏👏
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thank you Fandy!
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Congratulations on the milestone! I've added Plausible to my curated list of startup tools - https://startuptoolchain.com/#analytics.
Btw, do you get visitors for that 'particular' blog post from Google Search? You know, why I'm asking!
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This is cool. GA is a pain and clunky, your design feels clean and reliable. Going by the market you are after, you will be way beyond 3000 MRR in no time. If you need growth ideas, hit me up.
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thank you!
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Congrats! Reaching $1000 MRR is the most difficult. I see a lot of hard work and determination going into that 1 year. Takes a lot of believing in the product and industry.
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thank you Amin! true, you never know when that big break will happen.
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Congratulations and keep on growing 🚀
@markosaric what have you used to build the website and blog? Super clean :)
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thank you Preetam! Take a look at https://tailwindcss.com/
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Congratulations Uku and Marko :-)
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thank you Richard!
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Congrats @markosaric & @ukutaht, you both really deserve it! Loving the recent updates and am proud to be an early subscriber 💪🏻
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thank you Tobias!
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This is great. Congrats Marko :)
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thank you!
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Thanks for sharing @markosaric
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you're welcome Mihir!
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Congrats guys! Awesome stuff 👏
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thank you Richard!
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When it comes to analytics, there is a huge amount of friction in the system. I personally use Google because it is still free. They don't charge me a penny and that is awesome.
Managing another paid subscription is a burden. Yea, I get it. You want to make money for your SaaS business, but it is a hard sell, dude. Simplicity and privacy doesn't not go along with analytics. It's a conginitive dissonance. Analytics relies on non-privacy. You can't reliably grow business without knowing who your users are.-
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Some people want to run GA and want full integration with Google Ads, advertising and the rest of the Google ecosystem. Plausible may not be the best solution for those use cases.
We designed Plausible more for use cases where people want to de-Google-ify their sites, or where people want more privacy to their visitors or people don't want to deal with all those cookies and GDPR consent prompts etc. And there's an increasing number of those people too.
This is without considering that tracking personal data without getting consent is illegal so when GDPR and similar regulations get enforced and everyone needs to comply with them, studies show that 90%+ of people will say NO to being tracked.
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We've hit $3,087 MRR and 63 paid subscribers last night 🎉
Congratulation!
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nice one! congrats!
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Glad to hear that Jasraj, thanks!
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happy to hear that Paul! thanks for your support!
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thank you Gonzalo!
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thanks!!
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