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

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61–70 of 77 posts

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

#61
post #9

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

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.

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

#62
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

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

#63
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 they make it affordable enough for high-traffic non-profit websites to use on a whim, they will be leaving a lot of money on the table from web businesses who do actually make money – and those businesses are actually the best customers for their SaaS – willing to pay more money for less traffic.

I'm also not using them for my casual projects because I can't afford their cloud service, and I can't be bothered to self host, but they'll be totally fine without me.

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

#64

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.

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.

I agree. As you build you get a better sense for what people want. You also figure out how to build faster as you collect tech stack, or even more than one. When the right idea comes along, you can then move quite quickly.

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

#65

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.

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 w…

For your interest, I clicked through to your website from Github and it gave me a 'site not secure' prompt from my browser (desktop Firefox).

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

#66
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.

What should a content site relying on contextual ads be expecting to make from 500,000 pageviews per month?

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

#67
post #7

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?

…and plausible is a direct ripoff of Fathom analytics (design by Paul Jarvis).

A good rule of thumb: if you think something is original, chances are it’s because you’re just not very familiar with the space.

Ultimately, none of this matters. The goal of a product should be to help customers achieve the outcomes they want, not create something original.

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

#68

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.

GitBook founder here :)

We are working on multiple aspects of the products that should cover a lot of this (improved i18n, SEO, faster rendering)!

Would love to get your feedback on what you would like to see improved exactly on our SEO friendliness and i18n support. We have an open GitHub community for feedback; https://github.com/GitbookIO/community/discussions

And for anyone, if you are interested in building a "A SaaS to host product guides ", we are hiring engineers/designers/builders: https://jobs.gitbook.com/ :)

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

#69

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.

GitBook founder here :) We are working on multiple aspects of the products that should cover a lot of this (improved i18n, SEO, faster rendering)! Would love to get your feedback on what you would like to see improved exactly on our SEO friendliness and i18n support. We have an open GitHub community for feedback; https://github.com/GitbookIO/community/discussions And for anyone, if you are interested in building a "A…

It's been 2 years that I suggest to implement i18n. Or at least let add a JS snipped to use WeglotJS

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

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

For your interest, I clicked through to your website from Github and it gave me a 'site not secure' prompt from my browser (desktop Firefox).

Thank you for checking it out! Much appreciated.

Yeah, I have a few hypothesis that I am going to prove using the Elegant tool that I’m working on.

The first hypothesis is that I’m going to use Elegant itself to scaffold out the documentation. So when the domain is live, Elegant will be ready for beta testing. I hope to get some content up on the domain this week!

Thanks for pointing this out.

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