Plausible Analytics

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

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! 🙌

Christmas came early to the two of us at Plausible Analytics!

18 new paying subscribers this Tuesday is our new record day. And it pushed us over $8,000 MRR too.

Plausible is now installed on 7,651 websites and we’ve counted 107,251,707 pageviews in the month of November alone.

We’ve counted more than 360 million pageviews in the last five months in total.

The sweet thing is that we took most of this market share directly from Google Analytics. So that’s pretty much 360 million pageviews fewer going to Google and the surveillance capitalism.

Thank you to all of our 1,338 subscribers!

Plausible Analytics just hit $6,050 MRR from 974 paying subscribers! Thank you all for your trust and support!

We also got a nice surprise: a mention in TechCrunch as "the fastest-growing open-source startup". This will hopefully bring more new trial signups and more subscribers.

Here's a feature update and a lesson learned:

You can now filter the dashboard by any metric you click on

We just released a brand new feature: you can now go granular. Drill down into mobile users, Chrome browser users or visitors from France and analyze your stats that way.

You can now filter your Plausible Analytics dashboard based on whatever metric you click on. You can mix and match filters too.

• Country
• Browser
• OS
• Device
• Referral source
• Page visited

Drill down in our live demo.

Have a clear and informative about page

If there's something I've learned from the TechCrunch experience and the subsequent mentions on several other websites is that you should have a clear and informative about page with all the important facts and details you'd like journalists to know.

TechCrunch never reached out to us and neither did the other sites that covered us but they all wrote accurate information about us and facts that we would have wanted them to share.

This is because they all seem to have checked our about page which features facts about the project, who we are, what we work on, what we believe in and other things that are important to us. There were no mistakes in their coverage and no need to ask us questions. It's a win win!

It's been a busy month in the world of Plausible Analytics. We just reached 900 paying subscribers milestone. We're on 904 paying subscribers with the MRR of $5,586 as of right now. Thank you all for your support!

In September, we've had more than 50 page views per second at peak so we've just doubled up our capacity yet another time. Plausible is now running on 5,185 websites and we've counted 180 million page views in the last 3 months.

Here's our development recap for the month of September:

We now fully support UTM tags

UTM parameters can help you get more insights into the dark traffic and identify specific marketing campaigns or pieces of content that deliver the best conversions. Plausible Analytics now has full UTM tag support out-of-the-box to help you in this process.

You can see how it all looks like on our live demo (you can find the UTM tags in the "Top Sources" report) and read this introduction to UTM tags.

Plausible Self-Hosted is out of beta

We released the stable version of Plausible Self-Hosted. Both our Cloud and our Self-Hosted products are completely equal. There’s no premium and exclusive commercial version with a better or more complete feature set.

The difference is that for the Plausible Cloud, we manage everything for you so you don’t have to worry about anything. We take care of the installation, upgrades, server, security, maintenance, uptime, stability, consistency, loading time and so on.

For Plausible Self-Hosted, you do it all yourself. You need to get a server and you need to install, maintain and manage Plausible on that server. You are responsible for installation, maintenance, upgrades, server capacity, uptime, backup and so on.

First salaries

While Plausible Analytics is an open source software that you can self-host for free, we also sell a hosted, plug and play solution as a SaaS. We’re growing a sustainable open source project funded solely by the fees that our subscribers pay us.

On September 10th we paid out the first proper salaries for ourselves. Even though our salaries don’t match what we could command on the job market, it makes us incredibly happy to see a green entry on our bank accounts, paid from our open source project.

We can now say that we're paying rent with an open source project. Pretty wild. Feels good and hopefully we can continue the progress.

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.

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):

• Why you should stop using Google Analytics on your website
• How to pay your rent with your open source project

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.

We're now on exactly 700 paying subscribers for Plausible Analytics!

It took us 364 days to reach the first 100 subscribers, and we've now gone from 100 to 700 in 120 days. We went from 600 to 700 subscribers in 15 days. Crazy and unbelievable! Thank you all for your support!

My co-founder Uku has now published our August development recap. Here's what we added to the product over the last month:

Page drilldowns

We now have the page drilldown feature. It gives so much more depth to the dashboard, especially when combined with the referrer filter. This sort of analysis is required for more advanced use-cases.

Hash mode for SPAs

Plausible works with most modern SPA frameworks out of the box. Our tracking script listens for the pushState event and triggers a pageview automatically. However, some front-end frameworks use the hash part of the URL for navigation. In that case, the tracker should listen to the hashchange event to trigger pageviews. If you're using a frontend framework that uses the URL hash for routing, you need to take an extra step to install the hash-based tracker instead of the default one.

Other details from our changelog

• Added a quick switcher to make it easier to jump between sites when you have more than one. The dropdown also includes a link to site settings to make navigation easier.

• Added metric to see total conversions alongside unique conversions.

• Show real counts alongside percentages (applies to screen sizes, browsers, operating systems and countries).

• Fixed an encoding issue with page URLs, goal names, and utm_source.

• Added direct traffic and other dark traffic sources as “Direct / None” in the Top Sources report.

You can view our live demo with the latest additions.

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).

Wow! 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:

• 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

• 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

• 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.