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
And one or both focuses on sales.
Lessons from building Plausible Analytics to $1.2M ARR in public
41–50 of 77 posts
Re: Lessons from building Plausible Analytics to $1.2M ARR in public
#42Earlier 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.
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…
Just for clarity, is the product you build in the same category as the products you initially reviewed?
Re: Lessons from building Plausible Analytics to $1.2M ARR in public
#43If 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.
Re: Lessons from building Plausible Analytics to $1.2M ARR in public
#44I 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?
Hi - co-founder of Beam here. Appreciate the discussion about our product in this context. We've tried to differentiate our product from the other GDPR compliant web analytics by also focusing on product analytics proxies which are easy to implement and interpret. We think our funnel analysis and cohort retention tools can be very helpful. To learn more about why we built Beam, check out this blog post - https://beamanalytics.io/blog/why-we-started-beam
Re: Lessons from building Plausible Analytics to $1.2M ARR in public
#45Oh, plausible has goals now ? Time to revisit it to push it again in my org :).
Re: Lessons from building Plausible Analytics to $1.2M ARR in public
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
Talk to the people who have the problem you are solving (or the people making purchasing decisions for those people). Do they know about the existing solutions? Do they use any? Would they be willing to switch? Have they switched in the past?
Re: Lessons from building Plausible Analytics to $1.2M ARR in public
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Hi - co-founder of Beam here. Appreciate the discussion about our product in this context. We've tried to differentiate our product from the other GDPR compliant web analytics by also focusing on product analytics proxies which are easy to implement and interpret. We think our funnel analysis and cohort retention tools can be very helpful. To learn more about why we built Beam, check out this blog post - https://beam…
Thanks for the context. Looks like a cool product and (as someone who hates cookie banners) I'm excited to see more GDPR compliant providers.
Re: Lessons from building Plausible Analytics to $1.2M ARR in public
#48Earlier 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…
Please let me know if you have a beta or link so we can test it as soon is live.
Re: Lessons from building Plausible Analytics to $1.2M ARR in public
#49If 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 is boring. Cron job monitoring is boring. Running a backup service is boring...
I think you are missing part of finding customers in crowded market. It is very not boring and not trivial.
Re: Lessons from building Plausible Analytics to $1.2M ARR in public
#50The founders refuse to adopt tracking of user flows through a web site, allegedly for privacy reasons.