Lessons from building Plausible Analytics to $1.2M ARR in public
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Lessons from building Plausible Analytics to $1.2M ARR in public
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Re: Lessons from building Plausible Analytics to $1.2M ARR in public
#2Here'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
Re: Lessons from building Plausible Analytics to $1.2M ARR in public
#3I 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.
Re: Lessons from building Plausible Analytics to $1.2M ARR in public
#4I 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.
Not possible to self host though.
Re: Lessons from building Plausible Analytics to $1.2M ARR in public
#5I 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.
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.
Re: Lessons from building Plausible Analytics to $1.2M ARR in public
#6I 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.
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.
Re: Lessons from building Plausible Analytics to $1.2M ARR in public
#7I 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.
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?
Re: Lessons from building Plausible Analytics to $1.2M ARR in public
#8I 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.
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?
Re: Lessons from building Plausible Analytics to $1.2M ARR in public
#9Not 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
Re: Lessons from building Plausible Analytics to $1.2M ARR in public
#10I 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.
Not possible to self host though.
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
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.