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We've reached $4,000 MRR and 600 subscribers!

Our crazy growth seems to be continuing! Plausible Analytics is now on $4,159 MRR and 672 paying subscribers to be exact! Yesterday was our new record day with 14 new subscriptions (previous record was 13 subscriptions on July 18th)!

Every time we think that this fast growth cannot continue, we get surprised. We went from $3,000 to $4,000 MRR in 21 days (previous best was in 32 days) and from 500 to 600 subscribers in 14 days (previous best was 15 days).

Don't think it will be possible to beat this fast growth this time around but we will try to do our best and see where that takes us. There are no major changes in the way we do our marketing and communication. We will continue doing what's been working until now:

  • Product updates to make Plausible Analytics more useful and more competitive with Google Analytics. Our recent updates included visit duration, referral drilldowns and page drilldowns. You can see the current state of the product in our live demo. All these updates make Plausible a more viable GA alternative for an increasing number of sites.

  • Publishing the best content that we can on relevant topics including web analytics, privacy, startup growth and open source. And then we share and syndicate these posts to different communities. This is one of the main ways people hear about Plausible for the first time.

  • Explore any new avenues we can. We launched on Product Hunt last week and it was a success driving more than 2,700 unique visitors. There's a blog post here with our learnings. This got us in front of more people and even got us several interview requests.

Thank you for all your support and trust! Indie Hackers keeps being our main community full of great support and one of the sites always towards the top of our referral sources list (number 2 last month with more than 2,300 unique visitors).

  1. 2

    Congrats Marko!! Way to go! I love the traction and I've been able to follow the process here in IH which is great.
    If I may ask... I love your dashboard and charts, did you build them or are you using a third party to serve those, can you share which please?

    1. 1

      Thank you JC! We use https://www.chartjs.org/ for the top graph and otherwise it is all custom CSS.

      1. 1

        Congratulations! 6 months later, I see a lot of Tailwind UI on the landing page. Looks awesome.

  2. 2

    Congratulations!
    As an user of this tool, I must say I find the KPIs very intuitive and somewhat easier to understand than GA. I've two questions

    1. Do you count multiple visits (different sessions) from the same user as different users? If not, is it possible to track different visits from same IP without saving cookies?
    2. If I want to exclude my own visits to the website (for testing etc.) as a visit count, is there any way to do that?
    1. 3

      thank you for the kind words!

      1. our "sessions" are basically 1 day long. if you return to the same site several times during the same day you will be counted as 1 unique visitor but if you come back to the same site on another day you will be counted as a new unique visitor. we tested different methods and found this to be the best balance between user privacy, compliance with GDPR and other regulations and accuracy and usefulness. You can read more here: https://plausible.io/data-policy

      2. yes, do follow this process to exclude yourself from being counted https://docs.plausible.io/excluding/

  3. 2

    Thank you for sharing such a well-documented chronicles!

    1. 1

      you're welcome Fernando!

  4. 2

    Your MRR updates seem to come closer and closer to each other. Good news I guess 🙂

    1. 1

      :)

      let's see if we can keep up this pace!

  5. 2

    🚀🚀🚀 That is so exciting! Well deserved, Marko.

  6. 2

    Congrats man! I'm using another service but may switch

    1. 1

      thanks and sounds good Travis! looking forward to hearing what you think!

  7. 2

    Congrats! I recently switched my analytics over from GA to Plausible, so it's cool to see you here on IH. I'm a big fan of the product so far.

    1. 1

      happy to hear that Zeke, thanks for your support!

  8. 2

    Congratulations! What platforms are you syndicating your posts on?

    1. 4

      thanks Maeva! we're sharing and/or syndicating content to all the tech communities including Indie Hackers, Hacker News, Reddit, Dev.to, Webdesignernews and Lobsters. here's a look at our top 10 referral sources of traffic and a bit info on each: https://plausible.io/blog/startup-marketing. you can also see the full list of our traffic sources here https://plausible.io/plausible.io/referrers?period=6mo

  9. 2

    Hey Marko, Congrats!

    Also quick question:

    Publishing the best content that we can on relevant topics including web analytics, privacy, startup growth and open source. And then we share and syndicate these posts to different communities.

    Can you please tell me what communities you are talking about and whom you syndicate these posts to? Does this help beyond one-time traffic by getting you some backlinks in the process too?

    1. 1

      thanks Karthik!

      we're in tech so for us the best communities in terms of traffic other than Indie Hackers have been Hacker News, Reddit, Dev.to, Webdesignernews and Lobsters. we've also been very active in open source communities such as GitHub and Opensource.com.

      There may be some benefits in terms of SEO in the long run as you'll get some links and people will get to know your brand but I'm mostly focused on these in terms of awareness we can raise immediately and attention we can get.

      here's a look at our top 10 referral sources of traffic and a bit info on each: https://plausible.io/blog/startup-marketing. you can also see the full list of our traffic sources here https://plausible.io/plausible.io/referrers?period=6mo

  10. 2

    Hey,
    Conratulations on such a growth! Also, your blog is so good. It does not have generic "insights", but a very specific knowledge backed by numbers. You've just got another subscriber.
    I have a question though. I'm working on a bootstrapped product myself and I'm currently at the stage when I'm installing a payment system into my product and choosing the pricing model. Most likely it will be a monthly subscription. However, I still don't know whether to do a freemium (have a free version that you can use for as long as you wish and an extended version of product that you need to pay for) or a "free trial" (to have only paid version of the product and give people access for a limited time).
    Seems like you've chosen the latter. May I ask why? Aren't you going to loose some people that simply can't commit to paying in 30 days? There is a chance that if, say, a company is using you for a few months for free and it's growing, at some point it will be so used to your product that it will buy the paid version for sure. Of course while they are using it for free, you need to pay for infrastructure out of your pocket. But maybe you had some other reasons to go with Free Trial?
    Thanks in advance

    1. 2

      thank you for the kind words!

      I think it really depends on the nature of the product and how much a new user costs in terms of server/hosting and other costs. For analytics, that cost can get very high for each new user depending on how much traffic their website gets (counting millions of visitors and storing all those stats for unlimited amount of time can get expensive).

      so it is really difficult to have a freemium version without restricting the main feature which is counting pageviews and having access to the data from previous months.

      so we decided to go unlimited use trial for 30 days without asking for a credit card. this is enough time for most site owners to try Plausible and decide whether our level of stats and insights is enough for them to replace Google Analytics or whatever they are using right now.

      if we do manage to scale with a lot of paid subscribers, we may be able to open up a free tier on the lower end but for websites with lots of visitors the only way to offer this service for free sustainably would be to use their data for other purposes such as what Google does and why it's possible for them to offer all their products for free (and this is what we don't want to do).

      if you have a product where your costs barely change with the amount of users you have, then it's worth considering freemium model too. and then get people so used to your product that it becomes such a valuable tool for them in their lives that they'd want to upgrade to premium to have access to additional features or services.

      1. 2

        Makes sense, thanks. Will try to do the math to decide!

          1. 1

            Really cool product but I think this ☝️ is going to be your #1 objection - may be worth calling out and addressing on your site?

            Keep talking to your new customers and focus on keeping them ❤️

            1. 1

              thanks Martin! we have the FAQ section at the bottom of our home page where we address this in the "Why is Plausible not free like Google Analytics? " question. what do you think?

  11. 1

    Congratulations! looks like an awesome product 😁

  12. 1

    Congratulations! We use Plausible and are happy with it!

  13. 1

    congrats marko! well deserved.

  14. 1

    Congrats Marko,
    We are also looking for an alternative for GA because of GDPR compliance. But we are heavily using "Events" and "Funnels".

    As I see "Plausible Analytics" supports events but I couldn't find a documentation about migrating GTM events from "GA" to "Plausible Analytics" in order to send my team mates.

    Also one more question; Does "Plausible Analytics" catch full referrer url or domain only?

    1. 2

      thanks Karen!

      we support custom events and we plan to add funnels at some stage too. funnels will be based on the custom events so basically all the main data is there already on your dashboard. we just need to build a nice visual to showcase it and display the percentage drop offs between the different steps.

      we have docs here on how our goals and events work https://plausible.io/docs/goal-conversions. and here are custom events: https://plausible.io/docs/custom-event-goals. i'm not sure now if our events are 100% compatible with the way GA does it so you may need to do some tests and tweaks to your current GTM/GA setup first before they're all working with Plausible as well.

      Plausible catches the referrer as the browser sends it. The issue is that last year all the major browsers stopped sending the full URL with the referrer header and now they only send the domain name. So in most cases we only show the domain name itself. this affects GA the same way as Plausible. you can read more here: https://plausible.io/blog/referrer-policy

  15. 1

    Congratulations, Marko, on such a brilliant result. It's a good example of what a marketer should be.

  16. 1

    Marko - congrats on the big milestone! What were the biggest learnings that you had on how to do a successful Product Hunt launch?

  17. 1

    The site looks cool and legit. I have always been finding alternatives from Mixpanel and GA, to adjust all the events on my product. Mixpanel was perfect to track and modify all the events tracking, but the price has crashed the rational budget. Your product has a very reasonable price plan. Nice 👏

  18. 1

    Congrats that is awesome! It's great to read these stories as we're just beginning our own journey. Very excited for you!

    1. 1

      thanks Marty! and good luck on your journey!

  19. 1

    Congratulations man, its really a great job on such a growth! Also, your blog is so good. It does not have generic "insights", but a very specific knowledge backed by numbers.

    I must say I find the KPIs very intuitive and somewhat easier to understand than GA. You've just got another subscriber.

    1. 1

      that's nice to hear Sophia, thank you!

  20. 1

    Wow, its really great

  21. 1

    Awesome! Congratulations!

  22. 1

    Bom dia, meu nome é Amauri Passos e primeiro quero parabeniza-lo pelo excelente serviço prestado. Gostaria de lançar esta ferramenta no Brasil?

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