9 ms·

Lessons from building Plausible Analytics to $1.2M ARR in public

210 points by trulykp 4y ago

trulykp 4y ago
Here's an interview with Plausible (an alternative to Google Analytics) co-founder Marko on the journey of going from 0 to $1.2m in ARR and building as much as possible in public
marcopicentini 4y ago
I used plausible and it was great. Then I found Beam analytics, which is a copycat with a better free plan. I switched in no time to Beam Analytics now. I would be more worried about copycats. When you share your success, other developers want to have it too. Even if you believe you are for the long run you lose money in the short term because of your ego.
- ents 4y ago
  Not possible to self host though.
  - spapas82 4y ago
    Actually it definitely is possible to self host plausible analytics! It's an open source project with an AGPL license. You can even find instructions for self hosting here: https://plausible.io/docs/self-hosting https://plausible.io/docs/self-hosting Please notice that although they recommend docker for self hosting, it is very easy to self host an a bare RHEL server (you need to be a little familiar with Elixir though but not so much, you can take a peek at the docker entrypoint scripts to see what's going on) ; I'm doing exactly that for some months now and I'm happy with the results.
    - huhtenberg 4y ago
      GP was referring to the clone (the Beam thing), not PA.
- mtlynch 4y ago
  There are offsetting effects from building in public. There's the downside that it encourages copycats, but sharing numbers and strategy also wins positive public attention. I personally pay for Plausible because I like how much they share. They frequently pop up in discussion on HN, and I think their openness drives a lot of that mindshare among the crowd here. If it's a service I care about, I don't want to be on the free tier because I want a mutually beneficial relationship with my service provider. It's cheaper for me to pay a few hundred dollars per year than to have to scramble and switch platforms when my vendor folds or drops their free tier.
  - trulykp 4y ago
    Well said! I've been a paying customer for over 2 years and their transparency and overall a strong "sharing" culture played a big role. It's just easier to trust.
- rubenfiszel 4y ago
  But in the end, they grew it to $1.2M ARR. That some very cost sensitive people are finding other ways is not much of a loss because it's very hard to get money from those people anyway. We are building windmill.dev this way and fully open-source, I'm less worried about copy-cats than about the project not taking off because of too much friction.
  - ecuaflo 4y ago
    Nice job with Windmill! Would you be interested in listing Windmill on https://starter.place https://starter.place?
- paulgb 4y ago
  Wow, I thought by copycat you meant that they went for a similar feature set, but from screenshots it looks identical down to font and color choices. Are they just running a white labeled instance of Plausible’s OSS?
  - chronicom 4y ago
    It's not white labelled Plausible. The creators of it are on Twitter if you are interested in following their journey (i.e. twitter/TheBuilderJR). It's built on Tinybird, Supabase, and Next.js, while Plausible is built in Elixir using plain Postgres and Clickhouse, and Phoenix. A lot of relatively new analytics services tend to have similar looking frontends these days I've noticed though.
    - zX41ZdbW 4y ago
      Just in case, Tinybird is built on top of ClickHouse. If you look deep enough into any analytics service, you'll find ClickHouse inside.
      - chronicom 4y ago
        Yeah, I was actually looking at the idea of using it to make a little analytics site for my hobby projects last week :). The reason I mentioned it separately though was that I would assume Plausible has written a lot of code to deal with things that using Tinybird means you don't have to worry about.
  - flurly 4y ago
    Hi - co-founder of Beam here. Appreciate the discussion about our product in this context. We've tried to differentiate our product from the other GDPR compliant web analytics by also focusing on product analytics proxies which are easy to implement and interpret. We think our funnel analysis and cohort retention tools can be very helpful. To learn more about why we built Beam, check out this blog post - https://beamanalytics.io/blog/why-we-started-beam https://beamanalytics.io/blog/why-we-started-beam
- jacooper 4y ago
  Doesn't seem to be actually a clone though, at least not of current Plausible, because if it is, they are currently breaking the AGPL license. But Plausible was MIT licensed until 2020, so maybe a clone of early Plausible?
- capableweb 4y ago
  One huge selling point of using Plausible is that you can self-host it and it's FOSS. If the company disappears, you can continue using what got developed so far, and maintain it yourself. Beam Analytics doesn't seem to feature any of those two things, making it less of an alternative, at least for a sub-section of the users of Plausible.
granshaw 4y ago
Not sure if it’s touched on but one cofounder focuses on product while the other focuses on marketing. Cannot stress enough how much of a winning formula this is
- trulykp 4y ago
  so true!
- altdataseller 4y ago
  And one or both focuses on sales.
- senko 4y ago
  This. There's a graph somewhere on their blogs showing traffic before and after certain events including when Marko joined. It was, to a first approximation, flat before that. It's incredibly powerful if you can have one cofounder (ideally who's good at marketing like Marko obviously is) focus on marketing exclusively.
encoderer 4y ago
If you aspire to run an indie software business like this, you might want to take note of how absolutely boring most of the success in this space is. Web analytics is boring. Cron job monitoring is boring. Running a backup service is boring. These businesses (the cron one is mine) are all doing great, making millions. But in this space the vast majority of devs are chasing fun and cool projects in web3 and AI that are more tied to cool ideas than actual business problems. Businesses are, mostly, boring things. They have boring problems. If you’re doing something too interesting there’s a good chance you’re just playing around
- dottedmag 4y ago
  How to find these boring problems? Every time I look at a boring problem in tech there is a pretty okayish solution, so I'm discouraged to even try to make something, as I know that okayish solution will be even better when I get mine to work.
  - marcopicentini 4y ago
    If you want an idea: A SaaS to host product guides with good i18n. - Gitbook.io doesn't support i18n well. Not SEO friendly and not language detector. - Readme.io is too expensive for just product docs. - Hosting with NextJS etc.. is a pain if you need to support i18n and edit content using markdown.
    - stuartjohnson12 4y ago
      Mintlify are probably the guys who will close on this one first. Great team, moving very fast.
      - marcopicentini 4y ago
        They do not support multi language.
    - achempion 4y ago
      document360 support i18n
tiberriver256 4y ago
Recently switched to Plausible from GA for my blog. Analytics are way easier to use compared with GA4. Probably would not have even considered switching if they would have left universal analytics. Privacy stuff and performance we're secondary bonuses. Worth every penny.
- sccxy 4y ago
  Same here. I went with self hosted version for my personal sites. Simple features and nothing too complex. Mostly I watch real-time stats, monthly page views and daily 404 pages.
skilled 4y ago
I like what Plausible is doing, and they definitely know how to make content marketing work, but I'm going to be honest - the pricing model they're using is a bit out of this world. On top of everything else you have to pay (subscribe for) on the web these days, paying $500 a year for 500k monthly pageviews is insane! Now, obviously, my opinion doesn't hold a lot of weight by itself because it seems that they're quite profitable, but I will never understand that kind of pricing for something so basic.
- pembrook 4y ago
  If you've got 500,000 monthly pageviews and $42/month isn't a rounding error to you, I think there's something wrong with your business. And if you're not running a business, why do you care about analytics at all? Most medium-large sized companies will pay people $150,000/yr just to translate the data from tools like plausible into ugly powerpoint presentations for management.
  - jehb 4y ago
    Two assumptions there I'd challenge. 1) Pageviews do not equal revenue. The purpose of every website isn't inherently to make money. 2) The purpose of analytics is to understand your visitors and their interaction with content. There doesn't need to be a profit motive to want to do this. I've worked on plenty of nonprofit, informational, and discussion sites where we use analytics to discover what content is resonating with what kind of an audience, how people are discovering the site, what paths people take through the content, where errors are occurring, or just congratulate authors for writing things that got a lot of reads.
    - pembrook 4y ago
      Why not free Google analytics? "...but evil big tech and data privacy" Why not use Plausible self hosted (it's open source and free)? "...but it's not actually free if you have to spend many hours setting it up and maintaining it" Forgive my snark, but that's usually how these conversations tend to go. Even if you're a non-profit, if your website analytics on 500k monthly views isn't helping maximize donations by more than $42/month, you're doing something wrong. Ultimately, the main takeaway is, it doesn't matter how low or high the price is. Some people just believe they're entitled to a world where everything works perfectly for their needs and they never have to pay for it. I suggest ignoring those people--because you'll never make them happy.
adxmcollins 4y ago
Inspiring read! I used Plausible back in the early days and it was a great product, I'm not surprised they made it big!
johnchristopher 4y ago
Oh, plausible has goals now ? Time to revisit it to push it again in my org :).
Dowwie 4y ago
The founders refuse to adopt tracking of user flows through a web site, allegedly for privacy reasons.
- dspillett 4y ago
  Do you have reference for that? https://plausible.io/docs/top-pages#how-it-works https://plausible.io/docs/top-pages#how-it-works seems to suggest that flows are recorded unless you are routing based on query params, unless you are meaning something else by user flows.
  - Dowwie 4y ago
    https://github.com/plausible/analytics/discussions/149 https://github.com/plausible/analytics/discussions/149 > @ukutaht, Apr 27, 2021, Maintainer > The vision of this project is and has always been to be aggregate-only with no reporting on individual users or sessions.
rtpg 4y ago
I always feel a bit depressed that so many of these microbusinesses seem focused on sales pipeline stuff. I get it, but at one point it feels like money just kind of sloshing around between various salestech companies.
tlarkworthy 4y ago
I am a paying PA customer and I love the service but I am kinda surprised they only just reached those figures. They have great market awareness in my circles but it just goes to show that developers are stingy and conservative and it's a hard market to do well in. If feel they should b making 10x this number by now given they are internationally known and the biggest alt to a gigantic usecase

210 points by trulykp 4y ago

Here's an interview with Plausible (an alternative to Google Analytics) co-founder Marko on the journey of going from 0 to $1.2m in ARR and building as much as possible in public

marcopicentini 4y ago

I used plausible and it was great. Then I found Beam analytics, which is a copycat with a better free plan. I switched in no time to Beam Analytics now. I would be more worried about copycats. When you share your success, other developers want to have it too. Even if you believe you are for the long run you lose money in the short term because of your ego.

ents 4y ago
Not possible to self host though.
- spapas82 4y ago
  Actually it definitely is possible to self host plausible analytics! It's an open source project with an AGPL license. You can even find instructions for self hosting here: https://plausible.io/docs/self-hosting https://plausible.io/docs/self-hosting Please notice that although they recommend docker for self hosting, it is very easy to self host an a bare RHEL server (you need to be a little familiar with Elixir though but not so much, you can take a peek at the docker entrypoint scripts to see what's going on) ; I'm doing exactly that for some months now and I'm happy with the results.
  - huhtenberg 4y ago
    GP was referring to the clone (the Beam thing), not PA.
mtlynch 4y ago
There are offsetting effects from building in public. There's the downside that it encourages copycats, but sharing numbers and strategy also wins positive public attention. I personally pay for Plausible because I like how much they share. They frequently pop up in discussion on HN, and I think their openness drives a lot of that mindshare among the crowd here. If it's a service I care about, I don't want to be on the free tier because I want a mutually beneficial relationship with my service provider. It's cheaper for me to pay a few hundred dollars per year than to have to scramble and switch platforms when my vendor folds or drops their free tier.
- trulykp 4y ago
  Well said! I've been a paying customer for over 2 years and their transparency and overall a strong "sharing" culture played a big role. It's just easier to trust.
rubenfiszel 4y ago
But in the end, they grew it to $1.2M ARR. That some very cost sensitive people are finding other ways is not much of a loss because it's very hard to get money from those people anyway. We are building windmill.dev this way and fully open-source, I'm less worried about copy-cats than about the project not taking off because of too much friction.
- ecuaflo 4y ago
  Nice job with Windmill! Would you be interested in listing Windmill on https://starter.place https://starter.place?
paulgb 4y ago
Wow, I thought by copycat you meant that they went for a similar feature set, but from screenshots it looks identical down to font and color choices. Are they just running a white labeled instance of Plausible’s OSS?
- chronicom 4y ago
  It's not white labelled Plausible. The creators of it are on Twitter if you are interested in following their journey (i.e. twitter/TheBuilderJR). It's built on Tinybird, Supabase, and Next.js, while Plausible is built in Elixir using plain Postgres and Clickhouse, and Phoenix. A lot of relatively new analytics services tend to have similar looking frontends these days I've noticed though.
  - zX41ZdbW 4y ago
    Just in case, Tinybird is built on top of ClickHouse. If you look deep enough into any analytics service, you'll find ClickHouse inside.
    - chronicom 4y ago
      Yeah, I was actually looking at the idea of using it to make a little analytics site for my hobby projects last week :). The reason I mentioned it separately though was that I would assume Plausible has written a lot of code to deal with things that using Tinybird means you don't have to worry about.
- flurly 4y ago
  Hi - co-founder of Beam here. Appreciate the discussion about our product in this context. We've tried to differentiate our product from the other GDPR compliant web analytics by also focusing on product analytics proxies which are easy to implement and interpret. We think our funnel analysis and cohort retention tools can be very helpful. To learn more about why we built Beam, check out this blog post - https://beamanalytics.io/blog/why-we-started-beam https://beamanalytics.io/blog/why-we-started-beam
jacooper 4y ago
Doesn't seem to be actually a clone though, at least not of current Plausible, because if it is, they are currently breaking the AGPL license. But Plausible was MIT licensed until 2020, so maybe a clone of early Plausible?
capableweb 4y ago
One huge selling point of using Plausible is that you can self-host it and it's FOSS. If the company disappears, you can continue using what got developed so far, and maintain it yourself. Beam Analytics doesn't seem to feature any of those two things, making it less of an alternative, at least for a sub-section of the users of Plausible.

granshaw 4y ago

Not sure if it’s touched on but one cofounder focuses on product while the other focuses on marketing. Cannot stress enough how much of a winning formula this is

trulykp 4y ago
so true!
altdataseller 4y ago
And one or both focuses on sales.
senko 4y ago
This. There's a graph somewhere on their blogs showing traffic before and after certain events including when Marko joined. It was, to a first approximation, flat before that. It's incredibly powerful if you can have one cofounder (ideally who's good at marketing like Marko obviously is) focus on marketing exclusively.

encoderer 4y ago

If you aspire to run an indie software business like this, you might want to take note of how absolutely boring most of the success in this space is. Web analytics is boring. Cron job monitoring is boring. Running a backup service is boring. These businesses (the cron one is mine) are all doing great, making millions. But in this space the vast majority of devs are chasing fun and cool projects in web3 and AI that are more tied to cool ideas than actual business problems. Businesses are, mostly, boring things. They have boring problems. If you’re doing something too interesting there’s a good chance you’re just playing around

dottedmag 4y ago
How to find these boring problems? Every time I look at a boring problem in tech there is a pretty okayish solution, so I'm discouraged to even try to make something, as I know that okayish solution will be even better when I get mine to work.
- marcopicentini 4y ago
  If you want an idea: A SaaS to host product guides with good i18n. - Gitbook.io doesn't support i18n well. Not SEO friendly and not language detector. - Readme.io is too expensive for just product docs. - Hosting with NextJS etc.. is a pain if you need to support i18n and edit content using markdown.
  - stuartjohnson12 4y ago
    Mintlify are probably the guys who will close on this one first. Great team, moving very fast.
    - marcopicentini 4y ago
      They do not support multi language.
  - achempion 4y ago
    document360 support i18n

tiberriver256 4y ago

Recently switched to Plausible from GA for my blog. Analytics are way easier to use compared with GA4. Probably would not have even considered switching if they would have left universal analytics. Privacy stuff and performance we're secondary bonuses. Worth every penny.

sccxy 4y ago
Same here. I went with self hosted version for my personal sites. Simple features and nothing too complex. Mostly I watch real-time stats, monthly page views and daily 404 pages.

skilled 4y ago

I like what Plausible is doing, and they definitely know how to make content marketing work, but I'm going to be honest - the pricing model they're using is a bit out of this world. On top of everything else you have to pay (subscribe for) on the web these days, paying $500 a year for 500k monthly pageviews is insane! Now, obviously, my opinion doesn't hold a lot of weight by itself because it seems that they're quite profitable, but I will never understand that kind of pricing for something so basic.

pembrook 4y ago
If you've got 500,000 monthly pageviews and $42/month isn't a rounding error to you, I think there's something wrong with your business. And if you're not running a business, why do you care about analytics at all? Most medium-large sized companies will pay people $150,000/yr just to translate the data from tools like plausible into ugly powerpoint presentations for management.
- jehb 4y ago
  Two assumptions there I'd challenge. 1) Pageviews do not equal revenue. The purpose of every website isn't inherently to make money. 2) The purpose of analytics is to understand your visitors and their interaction with content. There doesn't need to be a profit motive to want to do this. I've worked on plenty of nonprofit, informational, and discussion sites where we use analytics to discover what content is resonating with what kind of an audience, how people are discovering the site, what paths people take through the content, where errors are occurring, or just congratulate authors for writing things that got a lot of reads.
  - pembrook 4y ago
    Why not free Google analytics? "...but evil big tech and data privacy" Why not use Plausible self hosted (it's open source and free)? "...but it's not actually free if you have to spend many hours setting it up and maintaining it" Forgive my snark, but that's usually how these conversations tend to go. Even if you're a non-profit, if your website analytics on 500k monthly views isn't helping maximize donations by more than $42/month, you're doing something wrong. Ultimately, the main takeaway is, it doesn't matter how low or high the price is. Some people just believe they're entitled to a world where everything works perfectly for their needs and they never have to pay for it. I suggest ignoring those people--because you'll never make them happy.

adxmcollins 4y ago

Inspiring read! I used Plausible back in the early days and it was a great product, I'm not surprised they made it big!

johnchristopher 4y ago

Oh, plausible has goals now ? Time to revisit it to push it again in my org :).

Dowwie 4y ago

The founders refuse to adopt tracking of user flows through a web site, allegedly for privacy reasons.

dspillett 4y ago
Do you have reference for that? https://plausible.io/docs/top-pages#how-it-works https://plausible.io/docs/top-pages#how-it-works seems to suggest that flows are recorded unless you are routing based on query params, unless you are meaning something else by user flows.
- Dowwie 4y ago
  https://github.com/plausible/analytics/discussions/149 https://github.com/plausible/analytics/discussions/149 > @ukutaht, Apr 27, 2021, Maintainer > The vision of this project is and has always been to be aggregate-only with no reporting on individual users or sessions.

rtpg 4y ago

I always feel a bit depressed that so many of these microbusinesses seem focused on sales pipeline stuff. I get it, but at one point it feels like money just kind of sloshing around between various salestech companies.

tlarkworthy 4y ago

I am a paying PA customer and I love the service but I am kinda surprised they only just reached those figures. They have great market awareness in my circles but it just goes to show that developers are stingy and conservative and it's a hard market to do well in. If feel they should b making 10x this number by now given they are internationally known and the biggest alt to a gigantic usecase