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>If you hear about Plausible these days, it likely comes from one of our 4,802 paying customers. People who use and enjoy using Plausible help us spread the wor

by tacon 5y ago

>If you hear about Plausible these days, it likely comes from one of our 4,802 paying customers. People who use and enjoy using Plausible help us spread the word to even more people. >We have a $0 paid advertising budget and we don’t have an affiliate program either. We pretty much ignore all the best marketing practices. This is very impressive, but I am not sure it generalizes to the average bootstrapped startup.

paulgb 5y ago
> I am not sure it generalizes I guess the marketing best practices they ignore wouldn't be best practices if it did :) Still, it's nice to see that the model can work. As a happy customer, I'm pleased to see that the model is sustainable. When a product decides to stick to word-of-mouth alone, incentives are very aligned for them to make the user experience good enough to tell other people about (as I have).
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
andrewljohnson 5y ago
That was my experience with boot-strapping too (B2C). Successful boot-strapped companies basically need to create customer love and word-of-mouth. We didn't spend anything on marketing until around a million annual revenue.
- skadamat 5y ago
  +1 this, we bootstrapped at Dataquest and word of mouth played a big role
tyingq 5y ago
I don't know what else they did, but smartystreets.com did a great job with word of mouth. They would find forums with questions about address correction, and provide great answers that DID NOT require using their software. Then just put their site in the profile or at the end of the post in a tactful way. I started using them based on the expertise in these posts.
rp1 5y ago
Marketing can help, but if people don’t love your product enough to tell others about it, then it’s going to be hard to get traction.
- garbagecoder 5y ago
  Have you heard of Windows?
mritchie712 5y ago
> ignore all the best marketing practices Not sure how they're missing this, but they are not ignoring best practices. Content and SEO are fundamental marketing practices. This post and their entire blog is content and SEO. I guess they think it sounds cool to say "we don't care about marketing", but they are marketing the same way most bootstrappers people would tell you to.

by tacon 5y ago

paulgb 5y ago

> I am not sure it generalizes I guess the marketing best practices they ignore wouldn't be best practices if it did :) Still, it's nice to see that the model can work. As a happy customer, I'm pleased to see that the model is sustainable. When a product decides to stick to word-of-mouth alone, incentives are very aligned for them to make the user experience good enough to tell other people about (as I have).

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

andrewljohnson 5y ago

That was my experience with boot-strapping too (B2C). Successful boot-strapped companies basically need to create customer love and word-of-mouth. We didn't spend anything on marketing until around a million annual revenue.

skadamat 5y ago
+1 this, we bootstrapped at Dataquest and word of mouth played a big role

tyingq 5y ago

I don't know what else they did, but smartystreets.com did a great job with word of mouth. They would find forums with questions about address correction, and provide great answers that DID NOT require using their software. Then just put their site in the profile or at the end of the post in a tactful way. I started using them based on the expertise in these posts.

rp1 5y ago

Marketing can help, but if people don’t love your product enough to tell others about it, then it’s going to be hard to get traction.

garbagecoder 5y ago
Have you heard of Windows?

mritchie712 5y ago

> ignore all the best marketing practices Not sure how they're missing this, but they are not ignoring best practices. Content and SEO are fundamental marketing practices. This post and their entire blog is content and SEO. I guess they think it sounds cool to say "we don't care about marketing", but they are marketing the same way most bootstrappers people would tell you to.