21 ms·

Simple Analytics hits $4k MRR and shares its numbers

288 points by AdriaanvRossum 7y ago

AdriaanvRossum 7y ago
We always have been open about our metrics as we are building a company based on trust. This time we went a step further and did break down our revenue and costs. We did go through all our transaction to build the chart you see with the last 4 months. We divided the costs up by banking (Stripe), hosting, services and freelancers. If there are any numbers missing, please let us know. We would love to add more data points that interest you. The open page has a Twitter thread combined with more details: https://twitter.com/AdriaanvRossum/status/1225528125620133889 https://twitter.com/AdriaanvRossum/status/122552812562013388...
- balls187 7y ago
  A discussion about freelances v labor would be interesting. Congrats on 4k MRR.
  - AdriaanvRossum 7y ago
    Good point. I also didn't include my own fee. I guess profit is kind of what I get at the moment. We are planning on sharing our profit with our freelancer when it hits a certain level.
    - radicalbyte 7y ago
      Adriaan, I wanted to ask this last time you posted but forgot to ask. How did you sort out the business side? Did you start straight out as an LLC (BV), or are you working in a freelance structure? I have a side project but I'm hesitant to release it because I'm not in a BV. Doing a BV means losing some really nice tax benefits that I'd rather not lose.
  - radicalbyte 7y ago
    Labour in NL is extremely high risk. You can be on the line for paying a salary for two years if someone is ill. No matter the cause of the illness or the length of service (yes, one day of service is enough). Freelancers cost more up front however they don't have that risk. Also, the actual freelancers in general come from the top 10% of developers, so they're usually better.
- Avtomat_K 7y ago
  How do you earn so much money? I didn't think that starting a startup brought you so much money. Of course, getting clients is not an easy task, but at the same time, I see that they are the businesses that attract more customers.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - IshKebab 7y ago
    Get to the front page of HN I guess?
  - Topgamer7 7y ago
    He only has 322 customers. Tech generally has good profit margins. The cost of hosting a server is cheap, and can usually accommodate up to millions of requests a second. One of the risks of starting a start up is there is no demand for your service (among a million other factors for success).
    - manigandham 7y ago
      You may have misstated this as commodity hardware is very capable these days but "millions of requests a second" is never cheap.
      - Avtomat_K 7y ago
        Hardware purchase is very expensive, but web hosting does not usually reach very high prices.
  - dinkleberg 7y ago
    Since when is $4k MRR a lot of money? They are off to a great start, but that is far from making it.
    - michaelbuckbee 7y ago
      Agreed, and given available data from Baremetrics, that's actually quite a bit above average: https://baremetrics.com/blog/how-fast-saas-companies-hit-arr-milestones https://baremetrics.com/blog/how-fast-saas-companies-hit-arr... On average it takes a company a year(ish) to hit $4kMRR. EDIT: I mistakenly thought they launched on Oct 2019, but a comment further down puts launch at Dec 2018. Which means they're doing well but not spectacularly...which means they maybe should raise prices.
- misiti3780 7y ago
  when did you launch ?
  - AdriaanvRossum 7y ago
    December 19, 2018 Relevant thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18024277 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18024277
    - misiti3780 7y ago
      nice, congrats!
- mritchie712 7y ago
  What are the top 3 reasons people buy this? You push the privacy angle pretty hard, but that doesn't seem like enough for people to whip out their card (even at the reasonable price). My guess is a lot of people are just overwhelmed when they look at Google Analytics and end up going with you for simplicity. Also, where is server side analytics on your roadmap?
  - AdriaanvRossum 7y ago
    - Simplicity - Privacy friendliness - Features (like bypassing ad-blockers [1], see which tweets got traffic [2], events, ...) We have customers like banks and governments who really care about the privacy part. Most of our customers use our tool because it has a very simple interface. One thing that also plays a big role is the likability of the brand. People seem to like it and are willing to pay money for its mission. We even had customers that didn't use our tool but where actively keeping the subscription active. PS: Server side tracking is already possible [3]. [1] https://docs.simpleanalytics.com/bypass-ad-blockers https://docs.simpleanalytics.com/bypass-ad-blockers [2] https://simpleanalytics.com/simpleanalytics.com/referrers/twitter https://simpleanalytics.com/simpleanalytics.com/referrers/tw... [3] https://docs.simpleanalytics.com/server-side-tracking https://docs.simpleanalytics.com/server-side-tracking
    - ronyfadel 7y ago
      Google Analytics doesn't report visits for users that have ad-blockers on, right? I own a website with about 50k pageviews a month. This could mean that actual viewership could be -much- higher? It's insane that GA doesn't offer a server-side solution like SimpleAnalytics does.
      - n1c 7y ago
        They don't have a CNAME style option; but it's possible to interact with their API: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/protocol/v1/devguide https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...
      - 7y ago
v1l 7y ago
Would be great to see distribution by price tier. Does it skew more towards lower tier or mid?
mason55 7y ago
Would be interesting to see something that breaks out COGS vs. R&D as it might be better representative of the trajectory of the business. For example, revenue is up but profits are down, apparently due to freelancers costs. Are those freelancers just doing some one-off work (e.g. the marketing site)? Or are they essential to running the business? As traffic scales are freelancer costs going to scale? Another useful metric would be recurring gross margin (recurring revenue minus the ongoing costs to support that revenue). Otherwise if you spend $4k on a marketing site it looks like your business is suddenly doing terribly. If you don't want to throw out R&D costs completely then at least amortize the R&D costs.
- AdriaanvRossum 7y ago
  Good questions, thanks for those. When working alone on the project I feel like the momentum gets lost sometimes. Sometimes I'm busy building a feature that takes a lot of time and don't have time for other features or bugs. Or when working on marketing there is no time to build new stuff. There might be a future when I'm not coding at all and only responsible for the other aspects of the business. That's why I'm already hiring a freelancer. Normally the freelancer would work 1 day a week which is about half the time he worked in January. Not sure if I would consider it as essential though, because I can always take over and do it all myself. But I'm not planning to do it all myself. Freelancer costs will not scale as much as traffic would scale. As the work of the freelancer is related to new features. Most of our systems can handle a lot of traffic and if we can't anymore we need to add more hardware (which will be recurring) or write some software (which is not recurring). As for recurring gross margin. Would a list/graph of recurring costs be sufficient? Combined with the monthly recurring revenue of course.
  - encoderer 7y ago
    It’s not too late to find a cofounder. I would consider it if I were you. You can vest their equity (and even consider vesting a portion of your own to show continued commitment). One reason: vacations are nice.
    - 7y ago
siphium 7y ago
Congradulations!!!!! You are a force of light in the world!!! Your success is a success not just for indie maker community but for the privacy of everyone online! Thank you!
- riskymagemerge 7y ago
  Love the idea. Keep growing!
mikejarema 7y ago
I noticed the TM used in the title: "Open Startup™". I wasn't sure if TM was used in jest here or whether there was actually an organization behind it holding the exclusive right to use the term. Anyone know? Is there an "authoritative" source for open startups -- a list, practices, etc etc? The closest I could find was: - a TM, "100 OPEN STARTUPS", held by a Brazilian company [https://trademark.trademarkia.com/100-open-startups-87085663.html https://trademark.trademarkia.com/100-open-startups-87085663...] edit: they have active US and EU trademarks on the term - Baremetrics' list of open startups, did they pioneer this approach? [https://baremetrics.com/open-startups https://baremetrics.com/open-startups] edit: openstartups.com redirects here - A seemingly independent list [https://open-startups.xyz/ https://open-startups.xyz/] It'd be ironic for the term "open startup" to be locked up behind a TM and a "governing body", so I'm inclined to think it's not. However, the use of the TM here got me wondering.
- AdriaanvRossum 7y ago
  We use it because we want it to be a common term for startups. We copied it from @levelsio who tweeted about it [1]. According to wikipedia the use of the trademark symbol indicates an assertion that a word, image, or other sign is a trademark; it does not indicate registration. It's not super relevant for our page though. [1] https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/968219339588493312 https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/968219339588493312
  - mminer237 7y ago
    If you want it to be a common term for businesses of different sources, isn't that the exact opposite of the purpose of a trademark?
    - corobo 7y ago
      It's Tradesnark™ https://tvtropes.org/Main/Tradesnark https://tvtropes.org/Main/Tradesnark
      - mikeydiamonds 7y ago
riantogo 7y ago
Is your market the set of businesses who don’t want google analytics on their pages? Won’t that be narrow? I imagine most small businesses don’t care and big ones won’t trust you over google? Genuinely curious.
- encoderer 7y ago
  Given they’ve reached $50k run rate in under a year I would suggest the answer is: it’s big enough. VCs obsess over TAM but it’s not the most important thing if you’re not playing that game.
  - nojvek 7y ago
    What’s TAM?
    - manigandham 7y ago
      Total addressable market - how many total possible customers can you sell to.
- XCSme 7y ago
  I am also working on a analytics product, and I can confirm that there is a market for software that comes from "indie" developers and not from big companies. In my case it's a self-hosted analytics platform and the idea of having the your analytics data only for yourself and being certain that it's not used for other purposes (competitors, advertising, etc.) is pretty well received by individuals and businesses of all sizes.
  - npsomaratna 7y ago
    We're interested in moving away from GA completely - a self-hosted solution is what we've been looking for. Could I know what your product is? If you'd prefer not to post it here, please feel free to inbox me (contact details in my profile). Thanks!
NKCSS 7y ago
loading the website from referral data in a frame might not be too smart... I could poison those referral headers with some exploit loolkit and boom, you expose your users to a lot of BS... Example: https://simpleanalytics.com/simpleanalytics.com/referrers/fastcompany.com https://simpleanalytics.com/simpleanalytics.com/referrers/fa...
- XCSme 7y ago
  What do you mean? That's a screenshot of the site, not an iframe. Could you further explain how this could be exploited?
- AdriaanvRossum 7y ago
  We did build a screenshot app for this: https://github.com/simpleanalytics/screenshot-grabber https://github.com/simpleanalytics/screenshot-grabber
  - NKCSS 7y ago
    My bad, I did not catch that (should have probably checked before posting that. At least that's a lot less dangerous; now people at least have to click on it. Sorry for jumping to that first conclusion.
    - AdriaanvRossum 7y ago
      No worries!
gastondelar 7y ago
didn't know it played starcraft
omarhaneef 7y ago
For those who want to see the effect of landing on HN's front page: This link has the actual number of visitors as of noon today (California time? Eastern time). It went from 1.6k to 3.3k visitors. I can't tell if this was right around the time it landed on HN.
- AdriaanvRossum 7y ago
  If you want to see the details: https://simpleanalytics.com/simpleanalytics.com/referrers/news.ycombinator.com?start=2020-02-12&end=2020-02-12 https://simpleanalytics.com/simpleanalytics.com/referrers/ne... (Amsterdam time zone)
  - andy_ppp 7y ago
    This is excellent - it would be good if the charts were in the browser timezone (should be easy) and they seem to draw points into the future, I'm sure this could be disabled?
kohanz 7y ago
Thanks for sharing! Really curious about the freelancer side. What kind of work are they doing? Where do you find them? Are you happy with their output?
- AdriaanvRossum 7y ago
  When working alone on the project I feel like the momentum gets lost sometimes. Sometimes I'm busy building a feature that takes a lot of time and don't have time for other features or bugs. Or when working on marketing there is no time to build new stuff. There might be a future when I'm not coding at all and only responsible for the other aspects of the business. That's why I'm already hiring a freelancer. The hiring process did go like this: - We posted a tweet along the lines of "We are looking for a Node.js programmer to fight for privacy. 8 hours per week for $1000 per month" [1] - We got ~150 responses via Twitter DM - We write them all back with a form they needed to fill in - ~80 of those did fill in the form - From those we selected 5 applicants to do a paid assignment - From those we selected 2 for a video call - Then Dave [2] was selected To us it's very important to treat your applicants in a very nice way. Take time to respond their questions, let them know why they were not selected and pay for their assignments. We got a lot of great feedback for applicants who didn't got selected because of this. Although we are still in the starting phase (he started in January) I'm very happy with the output our developer Dave produces. [1] https://twitter.com/SimpleAnalytic/status/1191341896037289984 https://twitter.com/SimpleAnalytic/status/119134189603728998... [2] https://twitter.com/hellodeibu https://twitter.com/hellodeibu
smt88 7y ago
I'm confused. Why would it be interesting for a startup to be earning $4k MRR? Are all the points because of the transparency? < $48k/yr with someone working even 20 hrs/wk is a worse proposition than getting a mid-level 9-5 job in the US. I definitely don't believe a business needs to have the growth/revenue VCs demand, but it should at least pay one person a decent salary...
- al_ 7y ago
  The point is the productand therefore the revenue is scalable. Much more than a salary in a 9-5 job.
- ronreiter 7y ago
  It's just the start...
- rabidrat 7y ago
  It's harder to go from 0 to $4k MRR than from $4k to $40k.
  - paxys 7y ago
    That is debatable. After a point organic and word-of-mouth growth (e.g. people signing up after seeing your HN post) is going to tap out, and you will have to start spending big money on customer acquisition.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
- noodle 7y ago
  The point is the process. The MRR that sustains a full time job doesn't suddenly appear from nowhere, and there aren't a lot of people talking about the "pre-success" data points. I myself am much more interested in the data behind the people in the process of going from 0 to successful, even if they fail; not the hindsight blog posts about people who are already successful.
boynamedsue 7y ago
Congrats to getting to this point! How did you get an initial set of customers? How did you get the word out besides on HN?
- rexreed 7y ago
  Yes! Would love to know this - highly beneficial information sharing.
ronreiter 7y ago
Great job!!! You are an inspiration.
dom96 7y ago
Loving the openness you are showing by sharing these numbers. Is there a list anywhere of similar Open Startups (TM)? :)
- pvsukale3 7y ago
  Here https://open-startups.xyz/ https://open-startups.xyz/
- lpellis 7y ago
  There is also https://www.indiehackers.com/products https://www.indiehackers.com/products
firefoxd 7y ago
Congratulations! One thing I would like to especially note is the cost of hosting. It is currently at $382. That's fantastic. There many Show HN here that have domains that don't even resolve anymore. They spend a large chunk of their money on hosting and can't sustain it long enough. They have no choice but to stop paying for it. You don't have to start with an expensive AWS instance and eat all your budget. Go with cheap yet excellent options like linode or digitalocean. Eventually when you meet those bottlenecks, move to more scalable solutions.
- AdriaanvRossum 7y ago
  Thanks! The hosting costs are a little higher than normal. We moved our servers recently and are paying double for some little ones. We are using a bare metal server for our main database and app. That works very well for us an it doesn't hit any limits. We use a Dell R240 1x Intel Xeon E-2174G with 64 GB RAM and 2x480GB SSD in RAID 1. We didn't want to use Linode or Digitalocean because they are not based in Europe which has the best privacy laws in place.
  - servercobra 7y ago
    That's awesome. Did you just get a dedicated server from a provider (I'm assuming, since you're paying monthly?) or did you buy the server and colocate it?
    - AdriaanvRossum 7y ago
      We are using https://www.leaseweb.com/dedicated-servers#NL https://www.leaseweb.com/dedicated-servers#NL which is indeed a monthly contract.
  - 1rdaniels 7y ago
    Linode employee here - Linode is compliant with GDPR regulation, EU-US Privacy Shield, and Swiss-US Privacy Shield. More info here: https://www.linode.com/legal-compliance/ https://www.linode.com/legal-compliance/ Our Privacy Shield certificate is here: https://www.privacyshield.gov/participant?id=a2zt0000000TRDiAAO&status=Active https://www.privacyshield.gov/participant?id=a2zt0000000TRDi...
spectramax 7y ago
What's the point of an open startup? Open source is actually beneficial to the user because they can look at the code, modify it and install the software themselves. It empowers the user. Open Startups seem like a hipster thing to do in silicon valley with literally no benefit to the user, I don't care how much a company makes. I care about the product and their services. It feels more about marketing themselves as Open Startups than actually providing value of any kind. But yea, let me put some graphs (smoothed lines ofcourse) and put up a big banner that screams "OPEN STARTUP". I am curious what counterpoints are? What do you guys like Open Startups? For centuries, companies have been closed (in terms of finances) and it has been working fine.
- thatguyagain 7y ago
  1: I don't think it's a thing done in Silicon Valley at all. It didn't even originate from Silicon Valley. OP is based in Europe. 2: Free information is always of value, so how is this making it less valuable to the user? If it works as marketing for the host, so what? Doesn't make it less valuable. I know more now about company X than I would if it wasn't open. It's that simple. 3: Many countries around the world have a very open system where you can go to a government or private website (the information is usually provided by the government) and look up financial information about every company in that country. For example, here is Volvo in Sweden: https://www.allabolag.se/5560125790/aktiebolaget-volvo https://www.allabolag.se/5560125790/aktiebolaget-volvo
sickrumbear 7y ago
I'm curious how MRR is $3.4K in december but actual 'revenue' is $2.2K?
- clairity 7y ago
  based on the details shown on hover, looks like MRR is gross revenue, and "revenue" might be net revenue (gross revenue minus direct costs).
anderspitman 7y ago
I did a blog post[0] recently comparing a few options for getting off Google Analytics. I've been very happy with GoatCounter[1] (open source and has a free tier), but Simple Analytics likely would have been my second choice. [0] https://anderspitman.net/20/#get-off-google-analytics https://anderspitman.net/20/#get-off-google-analytics [1] https://www.goatcounter.com/ https://www.goatcounter.com/
RikNieu 7y ago
What are the freelancers doing? Thats quite a big expense.
aldoushuxley001 7y ago
Is there any possibility of seeing the search terms that people used on search engines to find your site? I know this is made very difficult these days, but it is really an awesome feature. Either way, great work. I'm currently debating between Simple Analytics and using GoAccess. In your opinion, what's the difference between the two?
glofish 7y ago
I think sharing numbers at this granularity is fun for readers, and I, like others enjoy digging into details, but to frankly, it may not be so good for the companies in question. It provides too much data and insight to competitors. I wonder what the rationale is. Perhaps attracting visitors makes up for the risks. Just my opinion.
- scribu 7y ago
  > It provides too much data and insight to competitors. I think being confident enough to publicize your cost structure might actually deter competitors. They'll look at it, realize they can't compete on cost and decide to pursue a different avenue. The challenge is maintaining that cost-effectiveness as you grow.
tnolet 7y ago
Always great to see a fellow Dutch entrepreneur break the $4k barrier! Congrats!
nreece 7y ago
Fyi, your CDN hostname (cdn.simpleanalytics.io), as in your JS code, is blocked by uBlock Origin.
woutr_be 7y ago
I really love reading things like this, on the other hand I also feel very demotivated seeing how difficult it is to earn money through a side project.

We always have been open about our metrics as we are building a company based on trust. This time we went a step further and did break down our revenue and costs. We did go through all our transaction to build the chart you see with the last 4 months. We divided the costs up by banking (Stripe), hosting, services and freelancers. If there are any numbers missing, please let us know. We would love to add more data points that interest you. The open page has a Twitter thread combined with more details: https://twitter.com/AdriaanvRossum/status/1225528125620133889 https://twitter.com/AdriaanvRossum/status/122552812562013388...

balls187 7y ago
A discussion about freelances v labor would be interesting. Congrats on 4k MRR.
- AdriaanvRossum 7y ago
  Good point. I also didn't include my own fee. I guess profit is kind of what I get at the moment. We are planning on sharing our profit with our freelancer when it hits a certain level.
  - radicalbyte 7y ago
    Adriaan, I wanted to ask this last time you posted but forgot to ask. How did you sort out the business side? Did you start straight out as an LLC (BV), or are you working in a freelance structure? I have a side project but I'm hesitant to release it because I'm not in a BV. Doing a BV means losing some really nice tax benefits that I'd rather not lose.
- radicalbyte 7y ago
  Labour in NL is extremely high risk. You can be on the line for paying a salary for two years if someone is ill. No matter the cause of the illness or the length of service (yes, one day of service is enough). Freelancers cost more up front however they don't have that risk. Also, the actual freelancers in general come from the top 10% of developers, so they're usually better.
Avtomat_K 7y ago
How do you earn so much money? I didn't think that starting a startup brought you so much money. Of course, getting clients is not an easy task, but at the same time, I see that they are the businesses that attract more customers.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- IshKebab 7y ago
  Get to the front page of HN I guess?
- Topgamer7 7y ago
  He only has 322 customers. Tech generally has good profit margins. The cost of hosting a server is cheap, and can usually accommodate up to millions of requests a second. One of the risks of starting a start up is there is no demand for your service (among a million other factors for success).
  - manigandham 7y ago
    You may have misstated this as commodity hardware is very capable these days but "millions of requests a second" is never cheap.
    - Avtomat_K 7y ago
      Hardware purchase is very expensive, but web hosting does not usually reach very high prices.
- dinkleberg 7y ago
  Since when is $4k MRR a lot of money? They are off to a great start, but that is far from making it.
  - michaelbuckbee 7y ago
    Agreed, and given available data from Baremetrics, that's actually quite a bit above average: https://baremetrics.com/blog/how-fast-saas-companies-hit-arr-milestones https://baremetrics.com/blog/how-fast-saas-companies-hit-arr... On average it takes a company a year(ish) to hit $4kMRR. EDIT: I mistakenly thought they launched on Oct 2019, but a comment further down puts launch at Dec 2018. Which means they're doing well but not spectacularly...which means they maybe should raise prices.
misiti3780 7y ago
when did you launch ?
- AdriaanvRossum 7y ago
  December 19, 2018 Relevant thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18024277 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18024277
  - misiti3780 7y ago
    nice, congrats!
mritchie712 7y ago
What are the top 3 reasons people buy this? You push the privacy angle pretty hard, but that doesn't seem like enough for people to whip out their card (even at the reasonable price). My guess is a lot of people are just overwhelmed when they look at Google Analytics and end up going with you for simplicity. Also, where is server side analytics on your roadmap?
- AdriaanvRossum 7y ago
  - Simplicity - Privacy friendliness - Features (like bypassing ad-blockers [1], see which tweets got traffic [2], events, ...) We have customers like banks and governments who really care about the privacy part. Most of our customers use our tool because it has a very simple interface. One thing that also plays a big role is the likability of the brand. People seem to like it and are willing to pay money for its mission. We even had customers that didn't use our tool but where actively keeping the subscription active. PS: Server side tracking is already possible [3]. [1] https://docs.simpleanalytics.com/bypass-ad-blockers https://docs.simpleanalytics.com/bypass-ad-blockers [2] https://simpleanalytics.com/simpleanalytics.com/referrers/twitter https://simpleanalytics.com/simpleanalytics.com/referrers/tw... [3] https://docs.simpleanalytics.com/server-side-tracking https://docs.simpleanalytics.com/server-side-tracking
  - ronyfadel 7y ago
    Google Analytics doesn't report visits for users that have ad-blockers on, right? I own a website with about 50k pageviews a month. This could mean that actual viewership could be -much- higher? It's insane that GA doesn't offer a server-side solution like SimpleAnalytics does.
    - n1c 7y ago
      They don't have a CNAME style option; but it's possible to interact with their API: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/protocol/v1/devguide https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...
    - 7y ago

v1l 7y ago

Would be great to see distribution by price tier. Does it skew more towards lower tier or mid?

mason55 7y ago

Would be interesting to see something that breaks out COGS vs. R&D as it might be better representative of the trajectory of the business. For example, revenue is up but profits are down, apparently due to freelancers costs. Are those freelancers just doing some one-off work (e.g. the marketing site)? Or are they essential to running the business? As traffic scales are freelancer costs going to scale? Another useful metric would be recurring gross margin (recurring revenue minus the ongoing costs to support that revenue). Otherwise if you spend $4k on a marketing site it looks like your business is suddenly doing terribly. If you don't want to throw out R&D costs completely then at least amortize the R&D costs.

AdriaanvRossum 7y ago
Good questions, thanks for those. When working alone on the project I feel like the momentum gets lost sometimes. Sometimes I'm busy building a feature that takes a lot of time and don't have time for other features or bugs. Or when working on marketing there is no time to build new stuff. There might be a future when I'm not coding at all and only responsible for the other aspects of the business. That's why I'm already hiring a freelancer. Normally the freelancer would work 1 day a week which is about half the time he worked in January. Not sure if I would consider it as essential though, because I can always take over and do it all myself. But I'm not planning to do it all myself. Freelancer costs will not scale as much as traffic would scale. As the work of the freelancer is related to new features. Most of our systems can handle a lot of traffic and if we can't anymore we need to add more hardware (which will be recurring) or write some software (which is not recurring). As for recurring gross margin. Would a list/graph of recurring costs be sufficient? Combined with the monthly recurring revenue of course.
- encoderer 7y ago
  It’s not too late to find a cofounder. I would consider it if I were you. You can vest their equity (and even consider vesting a portion of your own to show continued commitment). One reason: vacations are nice.
  - 7y ago

siphium 7y ago

Congradulations!!!!! You are a force of light in the world!!! Your success is a success not just for indie maker community but for the privacy of everyone online! Thank you!

riskymagemerge 7y ago
Love the idea. Keep growing!

mikejarema 7y ago

I noticed the TM used in the title: "Open Startup™". I wasn't sure if TM was used in jest here or whether there was actually an organization behind it holding the exclusive right to use the term. Anyone know? Is there an "authoritative" source for open startups -- a list, practices, etc etc? The closest I could find was: - a TM, "100 OPEN STARTUPS", held by a Brazilian company [https://trademark.trademarkia.com/100-open-startups-87085663.html https://trademark.trademarkia.com/100-open-startups-87085663...] edit: they have active US and EU trademarks on the term - Baremetrics' list of open startups, did they pioneer this approach? [https://baremetrics.com/open-startups https://baremetrics.com/open-startups] edit: openstartups.com redirects here - A seemingly independent list [https://open-startups.xyz/ https://open-startups.xyz/] It'd be ironic for the term "open startup" to be locked up behind a TM and a "governing body", so I'm inclined to think it's not. However, the use of the TM here got me wondering.

AdriaanvRossum 7y ago
We use it because we want it to be a common term for startups. We copied it from @levelsio who tweeted about it [1]. According to wikipedia the use of the trademark symbol indicates an assertion that a word, image, or other sign is a trademark; it does not indicate registration. It's not super relevant for our page though. [1] https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/968219339588493312 https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/968219339588493312
- mminer237 7y ago
  If you want it to be a common term for businesses of different sources, isn't that the exact opposite of the purpose of a trademark?
  - corobo 7y ago
    It's Tradesnark™ https://tvtropes.org/Main/Tradesnark https://tvtropes.org/Main/Tradesnark
    - mikeydiamonds 7y ago

riantogo 7y ago

Is your market the set of businesses who don’t want google analytics on their pages? Won’t that be narrow? I imagine most small businesses don’t care and big ones won’t trust you over google? Genuinely curious.

encoderer 7y ago
Given they’ve reached $50k run rate in under a year I would suggest the answer is: it’s big enough. VCs obsess over TAM but it’s not the most important thing if you’re not playing that game.
- nojvek 7y ago
  What’s TAM?
  - manigandham 7y ago
    Total addressable market - how many total possible customers can you sell to.
XCSme 7y ago
I am also working on a analytics product, and I can confirm that there is a market for software that comes from "indie" developers and not from big companies. In my case it's a self-hosted analytics platform and the idea of having the your analytics data only for yourself and being certain that it's not used for other purposes (competitors, advertising, etc.) is pretty well received by individuals and businesses of all sizes.
- npsomaratna 7y ago
  We're interested in moving away from GA completely - a self-hosted solution is what we've been looking for. Could I know what your product is? If you'd prefer not to post it here, please feel free to inbox me (contact details in my profile). Thanks!

NKCSS 7y ago

loading the website from referral data in a frame might not be too smart... I could poison those referral headers with some exploit loolkit and boom, you expose your users to a lot of BS... Example: https://simpleanalytics.com/simpleanalytics.com/referrers/fastcompany.com https://simpleanalytics.com/simpleanalytics.com/referrers/fa...

XCSme 7y ago
What do you mean? That's a screenshot of the site, not an iframe. Could you further explain how this could be exploited?
AdriaanvRossum 7y ago
We did build a screenshot app for this: https://github.com/simpleanalytics/screenshot-grabber https://github.com/simpleanalytics/screenshot-grabber
- NKCSS 7y ago
  My bad, I did not catch that (should have probably checked before posting that. At least that's a lot less dangerous; now people at least have to click on it. Sorry for jumping to that first conclusion.
  - AdriaanvRossum 7y ago
    No worries!

gastondelar 7y ago

didn't know it played starcraft

omarhaneef 7y ago

For those who want to see the effect of landing on HN's front page: This link has the actual number of visitors as of noon today (California time? Eastern time). It went from 1.6k to 3.3k visitors. I can't tell if this was right around the time it landed on HN.

AdriaanvRossum 7y ago
If you want to see the details: https://simpleanalytics.com/simpleanalytics.com/referrers/news.ycombinator.com?start=2020-02-12&end=2020-02-12 https://simpleanalytics.com/simpleanalytics.com/referrers/ne... (Amsterdam time zone)
- andy_ppp 7y ago
  This is excellent - it would be good if the charts were in the browser timezone (should be easy) and they seem to draw points into the future, I'm sure this could be disabled?

kohanz 7y ago

Thanks for sharing! Really curious about the freelancer side. What kind of work are they doing? Where do you find them? Are you happy with their output?

AdriaanvRossum 7y ago
When working alone on the project I feel like the momentum gets lost sometimes. Sometimes I'm busy building a feature that takes a lot of time and don't have time for other features or bugs. Or when working on marketing there is no time to build new stuff. There might be a future when I'm not coding at all and only responsible for the other aspects of the business. That's why I'm already hiring a freelancer. The hiring process did go like this: - We posted a tweet along the lines of "We are looking for a Node.js programmer to fight for privacy. 8 hours per week for $1000 per month" [1] - We got ~150 responses via Twitter DM - We write them all back with a form they needed to fill in - ~80 of those did fill in the form - From those we selected 5 applicants to do a paid assignment - From those we selected 2 for a video call - Then Dave [2] was selected To us it's very important to treat your applicants in a very nice way. Take time to respond their questions, let them know why they were not selected and pay for their assignments. We got a lot of great feedback for applicants who didn't got selected because of this. Although we are still in the starting phase (he started in January) I'm very happy with the output our developer Dave produces. [1] https://twitter.com/SimpleAnalytic/status/1191341896037289984 https://twitter.com/SimpleAnalytic/status/119134189603728998... [2] https://twitter.com/hellodeibu https://twitter.com/hellodeibu

smt88 7y ago

I'm confused. Why would it be interesting for a startup to be earning $4k MRR? Are all the points because of the transparency? < $48k/yr with someone working even 20 hrs/wk is a worse proposition than getting a mid-level 9-5 job in the US. I definitely don't believe a business needs to have the growth/revenue VCs demand, but it should at least pay one person a decent salary...

al_ 7y ago
The point is the productand therefore the revenue is scalable. Much more than a salary in a 9-5 job.
ronreiter 7y ago
It's just the start...
rabidrat 7y ago
It's harder to go from 0 to $4k MRR than from $4k to $40k.
- paxys 7y ago
  That is debatable. After a point organic and word-of-mouth growth (e.g. people signing up after seeing your HN post) is going to tap out, and you will have to start spending big money on customer acquisition.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
noodle 7y ago
The point is the process. The MRR that sustains a full time job doesn't suddenly appear from nowhere, and there aren't a lot of people talking about the "pre-success" data points. I myself am much more interested in the data behind the people in the process of going from 0 to successful, even if they fail; not the hindsight blog posts about people who are already successful.

boynamedsue 7y ago

Congrats to getting to this point! How did you get an initial set of customers? How did you get the word out besides on HN?

rexreed 7y ago
Yes! Would love to know this - highly beneficial information sharing.

ronreiter 7y ago

Great job!!! You are an inspiration.

dom96 7y ago

Loving the openness you are showing by sharing these numbers. Is there a list anywhere of similar Open Startups (TM)? :)

pvsukale3 7y ago
Here https://open-startups.xyz/ https://open-startups.xyz/
lpellis 7y ago
There is also https://www.indiehackers.com/products https://www.indiehackers.com/products

firefoxd 7y ago

Congratulations! One thing I would like to especially note is the cost of hosting. It is currently at $382. That's fantastic. There many Show HN here that have domains that don't even resolve anymore. They spend a large chunk of their money on hosting and can't sustain it long enough. They have no choice but to stop paying for it. You don't have to start with an expensive AWS instance and eat all your budget. Go with cheap yet excellent options like linode or digitalocean. Eventually when you meet those bottlenecks, move to more scalable solutions.

AdriaanvRossum 7y ago
Thanks! The hosting costs are a little higher than normal. We moved our servers recently and are paying double for some little ones. We are using a bare metal server for our main database and app. That works very well for us an it doesn't hit any limits. We use a Dell R240 1x Intel Xeon E-2174G with 64 GB RAM and 2x480GB SSD in RAID 1. We didn't want to use Linode or Digitalocean because they are not based in Europe which has the best privacy laws in place.
- servercobra 7y ago
  That's awesome. Did you just get a dedicated server from a provider (I'm assuming, since you're paying monthly?) or did you buy the server and colocate it?
  - AdriaanvRossum 7y ago
    We are using https://www.leaseweb.com/dedicated-servers#NL https://www.leaseweb.com/dedicated-servers#NL which is indeed a monthly contract.
- 1rdaniels 7y ago
  Linode employee here - Linode is compliant with GDPR regulation, EU-US Privacy Shield, and Swiss-US Privacy Shield. More info here: https://www.linode.com/legal-compliance/ https://www.linode.com/legal-compliance/ Our Privacy Shield certificate is here: https://www.privacyshield.gov/participant?id=a2zt0000000TRDiAAO&status=Active https://www.privacyshield.gov/participant?id=a2zt0000000TRDi...

spectramax 7y ago

What's the point of an open startup? Open source is actually beneficial to the user because they can look at the code, modify it and install the software themselves. It empowers the user. Open Startups seem like a hipster thing to do in silicon valley with literally no benefit to the user, I don't care how much a company makes. I care about the product and their services. It feels more about marketing themselves as Open Startups than actually providing value of any kind. But yea, let me put some graphs (smoothed lines ofcourse) and put up a big banner that screams "OPEN STARTUP". I am curious what counterpoints are? What do you guys like Open Startups? For centuries, companies have been closed (in terms of finances) and it has been working fine.

thatguyagain 7y ago
1: I don't think it's a thing done in Silicon Valley at all. It didn't even originate from Silicon Valley. OP is based in Europe. 2: Free information is always of value, so how is this making it less valuable to the user? If it works as marketing for the host, so what? Doesn't make it less valuable. I know more now about company X than I would if it wasn't open. It's that simple. 3: Many countries around the world have a very open system where you can go to a government or private website (the information is usually provided by the government) and look up financial information about every company in that country. For example, here is Volvo in Sweden: https://www.allabolag.se/5560125790/aktiebolaget-volvo https://www.allabolag.se/5560125790/aktiebolaget-volvo

sickrumbear 7y ago

I'm curious how MRR is $3.4K in december but actual 'revenue' is $2.2K?

clairity 7y ago
based on the details shown on hover, looks like MRR is gross revenue, and "revenue" might be net revenue (gross revenue minus direct costs).

anderspitman 7y ago

I did a blog post[0] recently comparing a few options for getting off Google Analytics. I've been very happy with GoatCounter[1] (open source and has a free tier), but Simple Analytics likely would have been my second choice. [0] https://anderspitman.net/20/#get-off-google-analytics https://anderspitman.net/20/#get-off-google-analytics [1] https://www.goatcounter.com/ https://www.goatcounter.com/

RikNieu 7y ago

What are the freelancers doing? Thats quite a big expense.

aldoushuxley001 7y ago

Is there any possibility of seeing the search terms that people used on search engines to find your site? I know this is made very difficult these days, but it is really an awesome feature. Either way, great work. I'm currently debating between Simple Analytics and using GoAccess. In your opinion, what's the difference between the two?

glofish 7y ago

I think sharing numbers at this granularity is fun for readers, and I, like others enjoy digging into details, but to frankly, it may not be so good for the companies in question. It provides too much data and insight to competitors. I wonder what the rationale is. Perhaps attracting visitors makes up for the risks. Just my opinion.

scribu 7y ago
> It provides too much data and insight to competitors. I think being confident enough to publicize your cost structure might actually deter competitors. They'll look at it, realize they can't compete on cost and decide to pursue a different avenue. The challenge is maintaining that cost-effectiveness as you grow.

tnolet 7y ago

Always great to see a fellow Dutch entrepreneur break the $4k barrier! Congrats!

nreece 7y ago

Fyi, your CDN hostname (cdn.simpleanalytics.io), as in your JS code, is blocked by uBlock Origin.

woutr_be 7y ago

I really love reading things like this, on the other hand I also feel very demotivated seeing how difficult it is to earn money through a side project.