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Simple Analytics hits $4k MRR (showing numbers)

From this month on I will start a monthly update on the progress of Simple Analytics. It will include profit, revenue, costs as well as updates on product level.

January. In this month we hit $3999 in monthly recurring revenue. Almost 4k. We also started to put other metrics on our open page. Since then we did hit the $4k.

See simpleanalytics.com/open.

We are very happy to have Dave on board. He is helping out with our never ending roadmap. In the graph you'll see a big chunk of red in our last month. Most of it is directly going to Dave a.k.a. to new features!

In the month of December we also had quite some freelance expenses, this is because we paid our candidates for their projects they needed to do as part of our hiring process.

Last months we moved our servers from Iceland to Amsterdam. We paid $382 for hosting last month. This is because we have bare metal servers now and we still have some servers running in Iceland. We are moving them away (most of them are already), but we didn't turn them off yet.

We paid $273 to services. We use the following services to monitor our websites: Hyperping, M/Monit, Browserstack, and Twilio. We never want to loose any of your data.

We use Helpscout for customer support and GitHub for code collaboration. MoneyMonk for our Dutch tax administration.

We added reminder emails for expiring subscriptions and when trials are ending. We expect a higher subscriber churn rate. At the moment it's 4.9%. We do think it's fair as an ethical business to inform your customers upon renewals and ending trials.

Since mid January we opened our doors for students. We welcomed 302 students in those days alone. We didn't expect much extra work because our tool it self-explanatory and we have our documentation, but you never know. For now it seems very doable.

Our newest feature with live page views in your dashboard has to wait a little bit. We saw a drop in page views with the that script. We were forced to rollback.

We are writing heavy browser tests to find the problems in that version plus all future versions. It feels way more mature how we work with our critical code now. With more and more customers, those parts get more critical every month.

Speaking of customers, we now have 322 paying customers. We connected quite some cool ones in the last few months including banks and governments and some extra customers from the UK because of PECR.

Take a look yourself on our new /open page and let us know what we should add for next monthly update.

Have a good one!

  1. 3

    I'm sure it's an amazing+scary feeling to see more and more code become "critical code" :) It's a good problem to have, for sure. Good luck with the browser testing---we know from experience it's involved, but worth it!

    1. 1

      Thanks a lot, yes, it's a lot of work. Having the tests producing green check marks now!

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        Nice! From the PR, looks like you need physical devices for your tests. Curious: is that based on the distribution of devices that your users are using when visiting their account dashboard? Or is this the marketing/landing page?

        Follow-up: this must be motivated by users finding bugs that only manifest on specific devices, right?

        Sorry, I could probably dive into the PR and figure this out ;)

        1. 1

          Happy to explain this. Not all following browsers are part of the test yet.

          I want to test all latest version of evergreen browsers and IE10 and up and last few versions of iOS and last few versions of android. I can't test other browsers on mobile yet, but that's coming according to BrowserStack.

  2. 2

    Congrats Adriann! What is your biggest growth channel?

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      It's organic search, twitter, hacker news, blogs, indie hackers. In that order. I think.

  3. 1

    One comment about the current view (https://simpleanalytics.com/simpleanalytics.com as an example):

    How come as a user I don't see a way to 'work backwards' to find out why the traffic is up?

    Example: Feb 12th, 12am is a huge spike of 15k views (congrats)
    When I mouse over the peak, I only see the total. When I go through the referrals I do see a peak of just over 6k from hackernews, but that's less than half. Google shows 1.4k, but there is no peak (assuming that's cumulative over the whole month). One can assume that the unaccounted-for views are people who didn't send referrers, but it's hard to verify that.

    I can understand as a founder who's very intentional about where you post and who's focused on the results of that work when you look at your own stats you probably intuitively know exactly where the traffic is coming from, but for clients with a lot of marketing channels, or ones who suddenly get unexpected peaks (say from an Instagram post by a happy client), I don't see how to clearly analyze that peak to find out what worked.

    1. 2

      Yes, we love this as well! It's on the roadmap: https://github.com/simpleanalytics/roadmap/issues/19. We should prioritize this because it's super cool.

      1. 1

        Awesome. Keep up the good work!

  4. 1

    Thanks for sharing all of your stats and being so open. This is awesome as I am inspired by your progress. I like the way you are so practical about everything. Really enjoyed your blog on "What is wrong with developers and why Simple Analytics is my first successful project". It totally makes sense. Im a developer and I fall into the very same pitfall you mentioned. I just like playing with new frameworks and tools =) but that is not really the point in building a business.

    I do have a question here. How did you end up going with this tool? I love the idea of going simple while everything else like Google Analytic is super complex. Did you think this tool was too simple (obviously not now given your MRR) when you first thought of it? Im asking these questions because I am a DevOps guy and have some tools in mind that is simple that I can sell but just wondering if people would pay for it.

  5. 1

    what do you use Twilio for? US lines to receive calls?

  6. 1

    Your promo video is dope, carry my regards to the person behind it

    1. 1

      I will, thanks! It was a lot of fun making it!

  7. 1

    Outstanding! How did the partnership with GitHub come about?

    1. 1

      I'm offering the Starter plan for free for one year. In about a year I will know ;)

  8. 1

    Thanks for sharing. Thumbs up for a dark mode on your website :)

    1. 1

      No problem! Love to not burn people eyes at night.

  9. 1

    Congrats man, good stuff! 👍

  10. 1

    Consider using HetrixTools for monitoring, it's cheap and reliable, using for years without a single issue.

  11. 1

    i am so inspired by this

  12. 1

    I love your open business model! Congrats!

    1. 1

      Thank you, happy to be open. Love when people get inspired!

  13. 1

    Fantastic work Adriaan! I think Simple Analytics is one of those Indie Hacker businesses that everyone looks to as a role model 🙌 I know I do.

    Would you be able to share some insights on how marketing is going? Eg. what channels you have been focussing on and plans for the future on that.

    1. 1

      Thank you! That's an great compliment. It for sure doesn't feel like that ;)

      I have some bigger clients who can bring in more money than others, but I also feel like the tool is a good fit for smaller customers. I don't want to change the tool into something that would make it less fun to use for existing customers. This also limits the marketing channels a bit, so I'm mainly focusing on a broader message like on Indie Hackers or Hacker News.

      I have some crazy plans on doing some big marketing plans, but those are secret for now ;)

      1. 1

        Haha - very exciting!! Keep up the great work dude :D

  14. 1

    Congrats Adriaan, keep up the good work!

    Can you elaborate what you mean with opening the door for students?

    1. 2

      Thank you. We partnered with the GitHub Education Program: simpleanalytics.com/students

  15. 1

    Very cool!

    I'm curious how one builds an analytic tool like that, in other words, what went into building the initial product?

    1. 1

      We go quite in dept in our other milestone. Let me know if you have any questions after that!

  16. 1

    Congrats! That's amazing!

  17. 1

    Congratulations Adriaan! 🚀

  18. 1

    Your product is useful and that is the main reason for its growth. Go for 1000$ 👍🏻👍👍

  19. 1

    You might want to review this post. "No alt text provided for this image"

  20. 1

    Happy to be one of the 315! All the best, Adriaan and team.

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    This comment was deleted 4 years ago.

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    This comment was deleted 4 years ago.

    1. 1

      It has events but only can those be linked in single page apps. If a visitor refreshes their page events can't connect to each other. The fun part is that you'll not need any cookie banner or complicated privacy policies.

      docs.simpleanalytics.com/events

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    This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

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    This comment was deleted 4 years ago.

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