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36 Comments

Hit $10,000 MRR! 🔥

We made it to $10,000 MRR and 1,619 subscribers with Plausible Analytics!

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This crazy journey started here on Indie Hackers with our public beta launch on January 24th 2019.

Sometimes people see our recent success and think that it came overnight. In reality we have invested thousands of hours of coding and writing to get to this point.

We got our first paying subscriber on May 14th and then it took us more than a year to reach the first $1,000 MRR which we did on May 27th 2020. And now it took us 15 days to go from 9k to 10k which is a new record!

We've documented the whole journey to date in our IH milestones so do explore and ask us anything.

Plausible is currently installed on 9,120 websites and we’ve counted 171,811,460 page views in December. We’ve counted more than 500 million pageviews in the last six months in total.

It's an incredible feeling to have achieved this! We want to thank all of you who use Plausible, who support us and who spread the word about us on Indie Hackers and around the web! 🙌

  1. 3

    congrats on the success! What was your biggest lesson on the journey?

    1. 4

      thanks Bryan! we've shared a few lessons in IH milestones along our journey but one that comes to mind as I see many indie hackers not follow is very clear positioning.

      you need to make it crystal clear and easy to understand immediately what you do, what you stand for and how that compares to whoever is the biggest name in your market (such as Google Analytics in ours). if you don't, chances are you're lose that visitor

      1. 2

        Well done! Any as to your main lesson 100% agree with you. I invest in software companies as an Angel, have been for over 5 years and honestly its amazing how many smart people do not do get positioning right.

        Part of it I have uncovered is down to a level of misplaced arrogance -
        "We are different to X" ...
        "We are better than X" ...

        Great then tell your potential prospect that, reference X (good from SEO at least), show a comparison chart, if you can get an independent 3rd party to shout about how much better you are than X then even better...

        1. 1

          exactly! i'm not sure why it's such a common problem for many startups but it really is. i see it all the time so i keep telling people you need to tell me immediately otherwise i'm hitting the back button.

      2. 2

        great advice, will definitely dive into your milestones, keep up the great work

  2. 2

    That's awesome, way to go! I hope you don't raise your prices too much so us indie hackers can still use Plausible!

    1. 1

      thanks Glen! you bet! i don't think we will ever increase the price on the lower plan as the idea is to give people starting out a fairly priced and affordable alternative to Google Analytics

  3. 2

    Congrats, really great achievement! 🎉

    1. How big is your team?
    2. What city are you located? Home office, co-working?
    3. What is your top three marketing channels? IndieHackers? Twitter? Google Ads?
    1. 1

      thanks Alex!

      1. it's just the two of us at the moment

      2. both based in Europe but we're working remotely, never actually met each other

      3. we don't do any paid ads. looking at our stats top 3 referral sources in last 6 months are Hacker News, Google and Twitter. And top 3 sources of trial signups in the last 6 months are Google, GitHub and Twitter.

      we're very open and transparent so you can actually see all of our stats in public here https://plausible.io/plausible.io

      1. 1

        Looks like HackerNews is going pretty well for you!

        Any tips on how to submit news there? I've tried a couple of times, and received a warning, lol. What do you differently than IndieHackers?

        1. 1

          i think you should not submit news or anything salesy to HN. your success there depends on the strength of the content you submit and partially on luck.

          we've had 5 blog posts make it to the top of HN last year (sometimes it took 2 or 3 tries to submit so that's more about luck) but they're more interesting posts, technical posts rather than simply news or salesy content.

          here they are so perhaps this can give you more ideas or inspire you:

          https://plausible.io/blog/remove-google-analytics
          https://plausible.io/blog/open-source-licenses
          https://plausible.io/blog/open-source-funding
          https://plausible.io/self-hosted-web-analytics
          https://plausible.io/blog/building-open-source

          1. 1

            Thanks for the list. I've checked these articles, but they sound too salesy to me. You keep promoting your Analytics tool throughout and trash Google.
            But thanks for sharing. Hopefully, we would be able to submit something worthy to HackerNews. It's 5 times more popular than this forum.

            1. 1

              not sure what to tell you. you asked what works and that works for us. HN is a very tough crowd and they don't like salesy content. the posts I listed were not considered salesy by them and they've got hundreds of upvotes/comments each.

  4. 2

    Hey Marko - grats on the success!

    Where did you get your logo done?

    1. 1

      thanks John! my co-founder @ukutaht did the logo!

  5. 2

    Congrats, really great achievement! 🎉

    Do you plan to expand the team to try to grow the product even further or do you prefer keeping the team small and more focused?

    1. 1

      thanks Cristian! there are no current plans as the workload is still manageable but I can see us hiring someone at some point maybe this year that can kind of be awake when we're not (night time European time and perhaps weekends too).

      Mostly to deal with any potential server issues and/or urgent customer queries. we like to act and respond fast to people but until now that means that we're pretty much on call at any time so would be nice to get some help with that.

  6. 2

    Good stuff, Marko! 🔥🔥🔥

    Now, let's make it twice that by the EOY 🕺

    1. 2

      thanks Nikola, we'll do our best!

  7. 2

    Congrats on the success! I installed Plausible on my hobby project Minnnis.com and I like that I don't need to bother with a cookie permission banner! Even though Minnnis is a free hobby project, you will shortly be getting my $6/mo (I doubt it will ever go above 10k view a month!).

    1. 1

      that's great to hear, glad you're enjoying Plausible! and thanks for your support!

  8. 2

    Thats inspiring. Am your small competitor. I started weblister.co to monitor my websites uptime, then I added traffic analytics. I have a lot to learn from you.
    So far i have only sold $300.
    Otherwise. Congratulations for that milestone.

  9. 2

    Congrats! Just checked out the github repo. .ex files are Elixir?

    1. 1

      thanks! yes, we're an Elixir/Phoenix application

  10. 1

    great buddy and keep it up, best wishes:)

  11. 1

    Hi @markosaric,

    Absolutely love this post. You are an inspiration for us at reviewhornet.com. Especially since we are going through the initial grind stage now. Good to meet others going thought the same journey ahead of us.

    I had a question about your pricing. We were thinking about doing some price testing, to see if acquisition will be easier at a lower price range. Wanted to ask, had you done some price testing? Have you seen traction to be easier at lower price range?

    We were also thinking about testing prices, but we don't yet know our CAC and not sure if at a lower price we would be able to acquire customers.

    1. 1

      Thanks for the kind words! We haven't done any price testing yet so cannot say much really. Some people have told us that we should raise the prices (just because that's the common advice) but our idea from the start was to price fair and affordable especially on the lower tiers as Google Analytics is free.

  12. 1

    You wrote that you and your co-founder never actually met. So how did you start this together and how did you workout that you were a good team?

    1. 1

      my co-founder @ukutaht started building the product in december 2018. i only joined in march 2020.

      Uku was looking for someone to help him get Plausible to a wider audience and reached out to me as he read some of the content i posted on my blog. he thought my view on things fit well with his own opinions and what he was trying to do with Plausible.

      i was already familiar with this market and saw great potential in what Uku built with Plausible. so we exchanged some emails, had some calls and took it from there.

      we have regular calls and regular communication via chat/email to discuss things and our roles are clearly split which i think helps a lot in terms of working together. Uku focuses on design/development, I focus on marketing/communication.

      we went on the Changelog podcast where we talked about these points in more detail. see https://changelog.com/podcast/396

  13. 1

    any newsletters?

    1. 1

      as in you want to subscribe to our newsletter? we have something that pretty much just sends out the latest blog posts. see https://plausible.io/blog

  14. 1

    Awesome work, I checked out Plausible a while back and used it as the base for a project I was working on the time (Logflume not functional/finsihed). It's crazy how many product you'll see on Product Hunt and the like that you can tell iterated off of Plausible because it shares a very similar UI.

    1. 1

      thanks Justin! could also be because of the rising popularity of tailwindcss which we use?

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