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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

#31

Post by chronicom »

zX41ZdbW wrote: post #30
chronicom wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#32

Post by preinheimer »

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…

I think it only looks insane because Google is “free”. I’ve been running a SaaS profitably for about a decade (and with employees for half that time), we’re still well below that.

We’re plausible customers for our new thing because we wanted to take a privacy first approach. No need for a cookie banner, no weird permissions or opt out. Just a functional website. I understand GA is crazy powerful, but for what I’m actually using Plausible is so much easier to use.

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

#33

Post by sccxy »

tiberriver256 wrote: post #19

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.

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.

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

#34

Post by maxilevi »

gumballindie wrote: post #20
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.

> Every time I look at a boring problem in tech there is a pretty okayish solution Congratulations. It means your ideas are good and there is a proven market for them (assuming the solutions you find are generating revenue). The fallacy that “there already is a product” out there doing something and as such you shouldnt would imply that we’d all wear identically looking jeans and there would be one car design and one…

How do you find out if it’s overcrowded or not? Supposedly with a good enough differentiator it doesn’t really matter if it’s overcrowded right?

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

#35

Post by hoofhearted »

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.

I’m working on something now that solves just this.

I had to build out a Next app last year with a seamless looking blog and docs site. I struggled to find real solutions, so I ended up getting in touch with Marco from Plausible to get some advice. He helped me to figure out their stack, and I replicated it to my project. I released a dope next app with a markdown powered blog and docs site that looked amazing.

I’m working on releasing a free cli tool for frontend devs based off this work. I’d love some feedback and watches on GitHub if anyone is interested. Link is in my bio.

SHOW HN and IH coming soon :)

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

#37

Post by jehb »

pembrook wrote: post #29
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.

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.

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

#38

Post by ecuaflo »

rubenfiszel wrote: post #6
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.

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.

Nice job with Windmill! Would you be interested in listing Windmill on https://starter.place?

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

#39

Post by tiffanyh »

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…

Cronitor.io is his business in case anyone is interested.

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

#40

Post by pembrook »

jehb wrote: post #37
pembrook wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 resonati…

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.

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