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34 Comments

We've reached $5,000 MRR and 800 subscribers!

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!

$5,000 MRR

If you're interested in exploring our product, do take a look at this live demo which shows you our own website stats.

How did we get to $5k MRR?

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:

Positioned ourselves directly against the market leader

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:

  • Simple to understand analytics dashboard
  • Lightweight script that keeps their sites loading fast
  • Privacy-first tool that respects their visitors
  • No cookies and no need to worry about GDPR consent banners
  • Indie product that's not part of surveillance capitalism

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.

Started publishing regular blog content

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.

Engaging with people in social media and niche communities

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.

  1. 3

    Congratulations man !!! More power to you. I really like the approach and noted as a reference for me.
    I'm using plausible analytics free version for my blog, https://www.boxpiper.com/.
    UI is simple and easy to understand.

    PS: Using Google Analytics as well though. :-)
    PPS: BoxPiper asks for cookie as well and show relevant message.

    1. 1

      that's nice! :) thank you!

  2. 2

    Really happy for you.❤️

  3. 2

    Thanks for keeping us uptodate. So interesting to watch you guys. good luck for the next 5K ;)

    1. 1

      Fingers crossed! Thanks Eugen!

  4. 2

    Thanks for sharing Marko! Definitely believe this is the way to grow for self-funded founders!

    1. 1

      thanks Marie! glad you agree!

  5. 2

    Hi Marko, Congratulations!
    Quick question - How do you track Unique visitors and Returning visitors without cookies?

    1. 1

      Thank you! Our session length is basically one day so for the single day we know how many uniques there are. Then we reset everything so there's no way to know whether the same person returns to the site on another day.

      This is one of the choices we made to make Plausible as private as possible while also the site owner doesn't need to get user consent to track. You can find a bit more detail in our data policy https://plausible.io/data-policy

      1. 2

        Thank you for answering my questions.

        All the very best for your journey!

        1. 1

          you're welcome and thanks!

  6. 2

    Fantastic progress - and I love the regular marketing updates here and on twitter 👍🏻👍🏻

    1. 1

      Thanks Jon, happy to hear that!

  7. 2

    Yes, dissipating your blog articles to niche communities such as hackernews and indiehackers is a good idea.
    However, could you elaborate how you did Twitter marketing?

    1. 1

      Thanks Alex! One tool I love is TweetDeck. I basically have it opened at all times, and use it to search Twitter for a wide variety of keywords and phrases. Then I engage and interact with people who talk about analytics or privacy or Google Analytics alternatives etc.

  8. 2

    Congrats! What font does Plausible use? I really like it.

    1. 2

      thanks Yaro! I think it is Liberation Sans?

  9. 2

    That is awesome, I’m so happy for you guys and thanks for sharing your numbers so we can follow your story!

    I’m happy to be a paying customer :)

    1. 1

      thank you for your support Joe!

  10. 2

    Congrats Marko!
    Are you working on this full time or part time?

    1. 1

      Thank you! My co-founder and I are both working on Plausible full time.

  11. 2

    Congratulations on the milestone, Marko.

    I really like your direct, no-nonsense approach to building and marketing your product!

  12. 2

    Hey, congratulations on the milestone, wow!

    Quick question: what tools do you use to organize your content schedule? Do you use anything like buffer or similar?

    Thanks!

    1. 2

      thanks Marko :) we don't really use any tools at this stage as we're a small team and we keep it simple. I take care of the social media and content (so I don't really need tools or a calendar to organize a schedule) while Uku does development and design.

  13. 2

    Congrats and all the best for $25k MRR. What you have done is not easy.

  14. 1

    I've just seen this! Thanks and great content. I got a few more detailed questions. Perhaps you can check your Twitter inbox ;)

  15. 1

    Congratulations! Glad you did it without paying Google and Facebook.

  16. 1

    That’s awesome. Thanks for sharing and inspiring others :)

    1. 1

      Thanks! And glad to hear you're finding the info useful!

  17. 1

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