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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

#21

Post by stuartjohnson12 »

marcopicentini wrote: post #16
dottedmag wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Mintlify are probably the guys who will close on this one first. Great team, moving very fast.

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

#22

Post by huhtenberg »

encoderer wrote: post #13

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 ar…

> the cron one is mine

It did stood out from the list actually.

Web analytics is very interesting from the UI/UX perspective. In fact that's exactly what make Plausible notable - their super-polished wonderful UI.

Backup service is no less interesting, but from the technical perspective, especially around hardware reliability issues.

Cron monitoring - yep, boring as hell.

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

#23

Post by marcopicentini »

stuartjohnson12 wrote: post #21
marcopicentini wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Mintlify are probably the guys who will close on this one first. Great team, moving very fast.

They do not support multi language.

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

#24

Post by huhtenberg »

spapas82 wrote: post #10
ents wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

GP was referring to the clone (the Beam thing), not PA.

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

#25

Post by capableweb »

marcopicentini wrote: post #3

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.

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.

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

#26

Post by chronicom »

paulgb wrote: post #7
marcopicentini wrote: post #3

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.

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?

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.

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

#27

Post by skilled »

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.

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

#28

Post by achempion »

marcopicentini wrote: post #16
dottedmag wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

document360 support i18n

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

#29

Post by pembrook »

skilled wrote: post #27

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 qui…

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.

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

#30

Post by zX41ZdbW »

chronicom wrote: post #26
paulgb wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

Just in case, Tinybird is built on top of ClickHouse. If you look deep enough into any analytics service, you'll find ClickHouse inside.
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