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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

#51

Post by riku_iki »

vsareto wrote: post #15
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…

AI will probably be boring eventually since it's a large umbrella. Even if you scope down to LLMs and NLP, gluing those to work with your stuff in interesting ways will still seem boring compared to publishing papers. What I never got about businesses doing technically boring things is that only the marketing/sales layer is adding value, so it's interesting people would chose a newer business over an older one. If yo…

> AI will probably be boring eventually since it's a large umbrella.

it depends on if advancements will be slowdown. If capabilities will start growing exponentially aka singularity, then we will have very aggressive ride to the new level of humanity development.

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

#53

Post by e12e »

tiffanyh wrote: post #39
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.

Thank you. Was wondering about that - no link in bio.

Clickable link:

https://cronitor.io

Ed: (business) might be built in the open - but (product) isn't F/OSS?

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

#54

Post by jehb »

pembrook wrote: post #40
jehb wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mor…

I'm not sure who you're arguing with about GA and self-hosted Plausible. I use each, for different projects in different circumstances.

> 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.

Again, not every website exists to make money. My friend's foodie blog. My wife's not-for-profit farm project homepage. My local community discussion forum. The little page I threw together to support another friend's open source project. Going back to the original comment, these sites 1) could use analytics that respect visitor's freedom and 2) have a budget of fewer than $42 a month for the entire project.

You might be surprised at how many zero-budget hobby sites get to 500k page views a month. Especially discussion forums. I think I may have hit that threshold with a WarCraft II discussion forum I ran when I was a teen in the 90s. But back then, we stuck anything on our sites with abandon, including the "hit counters" I used for "analytics", and all sorts of guestbooks and other nonsense. Not just JavaScript, we'd drop Perl and PHP scripts straight into our CGI-BIN folders that did who-knows-what with user data. I just would have hoped the state of web analytics for the hobbyist website operator wouldn't be quite so depressing 25 years later.

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

#55

Post by firecall »

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…

Yep, we run an agency doing very boring things with Ruby on Rails. Not chasing the latest and greatest.

We also have side projects/businesses that solve very boring problems in boring old fashioned ways using Ruby on Rails.

And we are making a living in a remotish part of Australia and I don't have to commute and answer to people I dont like very much! :-)

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

#56

Post by dspillett »

Dowwie wrote: post #50

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

Do you have reference for that? 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.

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

#57

Post by firecall »

dottedmag wrote: post #14
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…

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.

In reality, you just have to get started.

Keep making things, iterating, grinding away.

Some things stick, some things don't.

You network and grow your business along the way.

That's the boring journey, but the reality for most of us.

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

#58

Post by dspillett »

jehb wrote: post #54
pembrook wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mor…

I'm not sure who you're arguing with about GA and self-hosted Plausible. I use each, for different projects in different circumstances. > 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. Again, not every website exists to make money. My friend's foodie blog. My wife's not-for-profit farm project homepage…

> You might be surprised at how many zero-budget hobby sites get to 500k page views a month.

Similarly, you might be surprised how much it can cost to support a SaaS service scaled for a great many 500K+ views/month sites: infrastructure for recording the data and rendering it back out as reports, monitoring and growin/reshaping that infrastructure as needed, meeting user support expectations, etc.

The SaaS service is operating as a business, not a pubic service.

If there is something I learned releasing simple software and slapping websites together back in the late 90s, is that there are no end of people who are convinced you are missing a trick by not offering what they want under the conditions (price usually being a key one of those conditions) they want it. You can't make all of them happy, you can't serve every market expectation, to try is to guarantee burnout of you business, yourself, and (if more than a one-man-band) your people.

Of course if they've genuinely missed a golden combination of features and pricing strategy, why not capitalise on that untapped market? Or use another product that is trying to tap it already.

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

#59

Post by satvikpendem »

pembrook wrote: post #40
jehb wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mor…

> 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"

Not really. For example I use Plausible self-hosted through Coolify (open source Heroku alternative) which has a one click add service feature, it has quite a few services including a full blown Nextcloud instance too I believe. It works well because it's all Docker.

I don't have to worry about it after the one click. It even auto updates.

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

#60

Post by davnicwil »

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…

Even 'differentiate a bit' might be the same instinct biting.

Really, just market and sell adequately enough to grab the share of the market that you need is all it comes down to. Your product might even be a worse copy of an established competitor and this still holds true.

It's so rarely about more or different features, better UX, or innovative twists on ideas, and so often about just getting in front of the customer in the right place at the right time.

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