We just reached $5,073 MRR with 832 paying subscribers! We’ve gone from $415 MRR in April this year (1000% MRR growth in 6 months)!
Plausible Analytics is now installed on 4,070 websites and we’ve counted 59,566,185 page views in the month of August 2020. That’s 60 million page views fewer going to Google and the surveillance capitalism!
Thank you all for helping us reach this amazing milestone!
If you're interested in exploring our product, do take a look at this live demo which shows you our own website stats.
We're proud to say that we made it to $5k MRR without supporting Google and Facebook paid advertising duopoly.
Necessary ingredients to be able to grow a startup are a product that people love to use and share, and a product that serves an actual demand from the market. In addition to these, here's a summary of what helped us get traction over the last 6 months:
We made it clear what we do, what we don't do and how we're different from Google Analytics. This made everything else so much easier and consistent. From the way we communicate on social media to the topics we cover on our blog.
Plausible Analytics is a solution for site owners who want:
Be as upfront and as direct as possible in your elevator pitch. Don’t hide the fact that a market leader exists. People know. Rather than pretend they don’t exist, use their existence to make your pitch clearer. State why you believe your competitor is flawed and explain what makes your solution a better alternative for some people.
We publish blog posts regularly. Since I joined in March this year, we've published a new post approximately once per week. And these are not salesy blog posts. As examples, here are our two most visited posts (read by more than 100,000 people combined):
You never know which blog post will do well and get seen by tens of thousands of people so don't try to base your writing around that. What we do is we research our posts well and spend lots of time making them interesting / educational / useful / actionable to the people in our audience.
Our content is an introduction to Plausible Analytics for many people. Each blog post gives us a new avenue through which we can be discovered. People find our posts in social media, in different communities and in search engines too.
We spend a lot of time on Twitter engaging with people and searching for people who are looking for Google Analytics alternatives. We spend a lot of time on Indie Hackers as the niche community where we started. We share our posts in aggregators such as Hacker News.
The idea is basically "build or write it and they certainly won't come". You can have the greatest product ever or you can publish the most amazing blog post, but without going out there to spread the word, nobody would know about it. So that's what we do. Here's a list of our top referral sources of traffic.
This type of marketing is not an automated process. It takes time, effort and consistency. Do it day after day, reach a person or two with each action and over a period you will see the difference. More visitors, more signups, more subscribers and a slow but steady increase in MRR too.