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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

#71

Post by JohnFen »

encoderer wrote: post #17
vsareto wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think the important thing with AI is to start at the customer and work backwards to AI. If you are trying to think of cool things you can build with the new AI APIs you are probably doing it wrong. One thing to remember about having competition is that most customers are not doing a “bake off” and they probably are not even aware of your competitors. If they found you, and you seem reputable, and you do what they n…

As an old business mentor once told me: if you've found a niche where there is no competition, the odds are very good that there's some huge problem around addressing it that you haven't thought of. If nobody else is fishing in the lake, it's probably because there are no fish, the fish are poisonous, or there's a crazy person around who will shoot you for fishing there.

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

#72

Post by JohnFen »

tootie wrote: post #43
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…

Web analytics isn't boring to me. I also think it's a really hard area to break into. There's no shortage of competition and none of them seem very differentiated.

I really don't think there is any sort of programming that is inherently boring. There can be programming that doesn't intersect with a given individual's interest, but that's different.

For every sort of programming I can think of, I can think of people who find it boring (even machine learning!) and people who find it exciting (even cron monitoring!).

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

#73

Post by jehb »

dspillett wrote: post #58
jehb wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

I'm not arguing anyone should provide this service for free. I'm suggesting "if your website analytics on 500k monthly views isn't helping maximize donations by more than $42/month, you're doing something wrong" is not helpful, nor is "if you're not running a business, why do you care about analytics at all?"

While there are some corners of the web dedicated to making money, that's not a goal for many (most?) websites, and yes, those websites can also use analytics.

Maybe the only way to get analytics for those webmasters is to subsidize the cost by handing personal data on every single visitor over to Google, because maybe it really does cost $500 a year per site for third party to host analytics software for you. If so, we spent three decades creating what turns out to be a pretty shitty experience for creators and consumers on the web.

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

#74

Post by Dowwie »

dspillett wrote: post #56
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.

https://github.com/plausible/analytics/discussions/149

> @ukutaht, Apr 27, 2021, Maintainer > The vision of this project is and has always been to be aggregate-only with no reporting on individual users or sessions.

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

#75

Post by hoofhearted »

rambambram wrote: post #65
hoofhearted wrote: post #35

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).

How about now? Is it still saying it’s not secure?

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

#76

Post by hoofhearted »

marcopicentini wrote: post #48
hoofhearted wrote: post #35

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…

Please let me know if you have a beta or link so we can test it as soon is live.

Hey Marco, check out the MVP that I launched! Could I get some feedback?

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

#77

Post by marcopicentini »

hoofhearted wrote: post #76
marcopicentini wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please let me know if you have a beta or link so we can test it as soon is live.

Hey Marco, check out the MVP that I launched! Could I get some feedback?

I would created as a Saas with: - multi language. Default translated using deepL and then a translator can check and review using a WYSIWYG editor. - alternative html SEO tag for Google. - Tailwind syntax template
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