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
so true!
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
#12I 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.
There are offsetting effects from building in public. There's the downside that it encourages copycats, but sharing numbers and strategy also wins positive public attention. I personally pay for Plausible because I like how much they share. They frequently pop up in discussion on HN, and I think their openness drives a lot of that mindshare among the crowd here. If it's a service I care about, I don't want to be on t…
Well said!
I've been a paying customer for over 2 years and their transparency and overall a strong "sharing" culture played a big role. It's just easier to trust.
Re: Lessons from building Plausible Analytics to $1.2M ARR in public
#13If 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 are more tied to cool ideas than actual business problems.
Businesses are, mostly, boring things. They have boring problems. If you’re doing something too interesting there’s a good chance you’re just playing around
Re: Lessons from building Plausible Analytics to $1.2M ARR in public
#14If 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.
Re: Lessons from building Plausible Analytics to $1.2M ARR in public
#15If 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 you have a defining feature that sets you apart, that's not boring, it's innovative and interesting. So maybe web analytics/cron job/backups are still not boring because something is keeping major companies from crushing those specialties.
Web3's always been shit though.
Re: Lessons from building Plausible Analytics to $1.2M ARR in public
#16If 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.
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.
Re: Lessons from building Plausible Analytics to $1.2M ARR in public
#17If 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…
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 need, and the price seems worth it, you can probably close the sale.
Of course the first one is key. That’s the hardest thing about starting from scratch. They have to find you.
Re: Lessons from building Plausible Analytics to $1.2M ARR in public
#18If 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.
Riffing..
Take one of those ideas. Make a site that reviews all the current competitors in the market.
Put the one with the best existing seo strategy in first place.
Contact them and let them know and ask that they link to it, offer to write a guest blog post about how you reviewed every tool in the space and this one came out on top, and why.
Share the site all over where you can find people talking about the niche.
if the niche is not too big, this will often get you ranking for that term. Google loves “best ___ in 2023” content.
You are building a traffic source.
Then you can build a product and put your product in 1st place or even above the list entirely. Write a blog post about how you took the best of the other tool you reviewed and created the perfect tool for .
Ok, end riff, i have no idea if that will work but it seems repeatable and not too difficult. It really is all about getting traffic.
Re: Lessons from building Plausible Analytics to $1.2M ARR in public
#19Recently 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.
Re: Lessons from building Plausible Analytics to $1.2M ARR in public
#20If 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.
> 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 type of phone.
Differentiate a bit. The only questions to answer are: can you execute on your idea, is there a market large enough to achieve your target revenue and is it overcrowded?