Yo, what's up, man?
I am still sore from hiking the enchantments.
Did you see those messages that I sent to you and mom about my hike last weekend?
I glanced at them.
You have a lot of really dope pictures of mountains.
Yeah.
You know what the enchantments are?
It's like a...
No, I've never heard of them.
It's like a sort of region in the Alpine Lakes wilderness area of Washington, kind
of in the Cascade Mountains, and my friends have been trying forever to get me to do some
sort of like torturous outdoor climb.
They want to like hike Mount Rainier and just go to like really cold, frozen, slippery places.
And so I agreed to do the enchantments, which is not cold and frozen and slippery.
It's beautiful, but it's 22 miles long.
22 miles long?
Yeah.
A month ago when they asked me to do this, I was not in good enough shape to have done
it.
What does that take to hike 22 miles from the mountain?
We woke up at like 3 a.m.
We drove out there.
We were on the trailhead by 6.30, and then I think we got back to the car at 8.30 p.m.
So it was like 14, 15 hours.
So this is why you canceled our meeting.
You canceled our meeting.
We had a meeting at like 5 p.m. the day before.
Yeah.
Dude, I can't meet...
Yeah, no.
I was freaking the fuck out.
I'm like, it's 5 p.m.
Yeah, I was freaking the fuck out.
No, I needed a lot.
It was mostly just mental preparation.
I wrote down all my passwords and stuff, and I sent some delayed emails in case I died.
You would get my passwords.
What?
Are you serious?
Are you serious?
I was just not...
I mean, one part of it was this part called Asgard Pass, and it's 2300 feet of elevation
and a mile.
It's just one mile of the 22 miles.
It's like walking up the stairs to a 230-story building.
I wasn't sure I was going to make it back.
You get halfway.
You don't really have any options.
You've got helicopter rescue.
And someone did die.
Someone died a week before he went out there, on Asgard Pass, trying to hike it, and didn't
make it.
Is this one of those, you remember that you saw that someone died a week ago, but it happens
really rarely?
Or is it like, yeah, every week someone goes to Asgard Pass and dies?
I didn't want to look up the stats, man.
Knowing one person died was enough.
But it ended up being really fun.
I was really impressed with myself.
I've been doing a bunch of stairs.
You know me.
I don't like exercise.
I do it purely as a utility thing.
I want to look OK.
I want to feel OK.
And that's literally it.
I derive no enjoyment from it.
But my friends are all into this phrase, like type two fun, type one fun.
So type one fun is just fun, playing video games, going riding a roller coaster.
It's fun.
Type two fun is actually just miserable the entire time, and you don't like it.
And then for some reason, after it's done, you look back and you say, oh, that was fun.
That's type two fun.
Hiking a mountain, you're really just sweating, you're cutting yourself on rocks.
You're stepping together, pebbles in your shoes.
It's cold.
You're hungry.
All you have is cold food.
And then after you're done, you're glad to be done.
Air quote fun.
You're fun that you overcame something that you didn't think that you'd be able to overcome.
And all my annoyingly athletic friends are only into type two fun.
And every time we're having type one fun, they complain about how it's not hard and miserable
and blah, blah, blah.
I feel like they should be my friends.
Maybe we should just swap friends.
Yeah.
We should swap.
But I don't know.
It was gorgeous.
It was beautiful.
I saw some of the most beautiful sites I've ever seen.
I'm trying to avoid falling into like the slippery slope, you know, because like once
your friends get you to do something like this, like, oh, just do this, do this.
Like they want to hike like, oh, we got you.
Mount St. Helens now, you know, it's going to start being like bigger and bigger mountains.
And I'm setting like a firm upper cutoff.
Like if I need special training or equipment, if I have to do avalanche training, like I
don't want to go.
I'm setting a firm cutoff that I don't want to do it.
Hey, what's up, Marco?
Hey, guys.
How are you?
Hello.
Hello, Marco.
Welcome.
We're talking about going on monster death hikes with, with our athletic friends.
Courtland just went on a hike.
Courtland just went on a hike.
It was a 22 mile hike that he was so afraid about that he like went and saved all of
his passwords and made sure that I was in the event that he would die.
I was being appropriately cautious.
Wow.
22 mile.
That's a long hike.
It was way too long.
Are you an outdoorsy person, Marco?
Do you like hiking?
I would say not, not such long hikes.
No, I've never been on such long, but you know, well, I speak in kilometer, but a few
kilometer here and there in the weekends around the parks and around green, green spaces.
Yeah.
I just became a father about 10 months ago for the first time.
So these days, my, my, thank you.
My hike these days is like taking the baby out for, you know, one to our walk around
the park and so on.
Where are you located?
You're in Europe, right?
I'm, I'm in Europe in a Brussels or it just is the Brussels in Belgium, like 20 kilometer
out.
So like we have a, right now it's like 6 PM.
So it's getting dark, like summer is done.
So, so I have like a big light here, it's just to shine in my face so you guys can see
me.
Very good.
I assume, I assume this, this is not going on video anyhow, but in case you need it,
you can have it.
No, no one's going to see you.
You're going to, I mean, while Portland's completely in the dark.
I'm surprised that he's even dressed.
I'm still at it.
I'm like Batman right now.
I'm very mysterious.
It's early here.
It's like 9 AM.
What's that?
What's it like in Brussels?
I've never been.
What's like the, what's like the go to thing in Brussels that would make me want to use
that's my stereotype.
Belgium, Belgium.
I'm not Belgium.
So I moved here three, three years ago.
My girlfriend came to work here.
Basically Belgium is famous for, you know, the French fries, they call them French fries,
but they're actually invented in for, in Belgium.
They're Belgian fries.
If you actually asked French people, they will call them Belgian fries.
So that's Belgian or Belgium is like resentful about the French dealing that label just Belgium.
It's funny because it's kind of like Switzerland is like you have split in three parts and
one part is speaking French officially one part is speaking Dutch.
There's no Belgian language.
You know, there's like three languages, but none of them are Belgian and then half of
the country speaks French.
And I assume somehow that got translated to French fries because the guys in the French
part of Belgium actually invented the fries and then people were like, Oh, this are the
French fries because they speak French.
And I assume this is my guess, but the French fries beer famous for beer, like all the fancy
beer, hundreds of fancy beer come from here.
Waffles, waffles, that's Belgian invention too.
So I guess there's, there's, there might be a few cheeses here, but you know, that will
be more Italian France.
I would say kind of more in like the bigger picture.
I think these three will be more like really what's Belgian famous for our athletes in
Europe.
I was talking to Nathan Barry from ConvertKit years ago and he wanted me to come out to
Boise, Idaho.
And this pitch for Boise, Idaho was basically the same.
We got French fries, potatoes and beer.
I guess I've basically been to Belgium if I've been to Boise.
I think like Belgium is very flat.
So like your, your hikes, I don't think there'll be very dangerous here or anything like that.
Yeah.
See that now you sold him on going to Belgium, Belgium.
So we should, we should introduce you.
You are Marco Seric.
You're the co-founder of plausible analytics.
Uh, you tweeted, I think a month ago that you just passed a hundred thousand dollars
a month in revenue, $1.2 million a year in revenue, uh, and that comes entirely from
your customers.
You just have, I think 7,800, 8,000 customers.
That's insane.
That's no big deal.
Huge amount of money.
$100,000 a month.
Yeah.
$100,000 a month.
You've always kept your team, uh, super tiny, you're independent, you're self-funded, you're
bootstrapped.
You guys launched on any hackers actually like three and a half years ago.
It's a cool story.
And I'm happy to have you on here.
I think plausible is a cool company and congrats on the success.
I'm looking at your revenue graphic.
It's like the classic graph where it's the first year.
It's just flat.
It looks like it's zero.
You guys made only, you think you got up to like $400 a month in revenue your first year.
Yeah.
And then after that, boom, it just starts to curve upward, you know, nine months later
you're making 10 grand a month and nine months after that you're making 40 grand a month.
And then nine months after that you have a hundred grand a month.
So it's not slowing down.
It doesn't seem.
Yeah.
I couldn't make a better summary.
I think that's a good summary.
And thank you.
That's the, I appreciate the kind words from you guys.
Did you expect something like this to happen?
Like obviously you start a company, you want it to be big, you want it to be successful.
How's it feel?
Like, I mean, do you feel like you've reached the promised land or you, where you wanted
to be?
I'm like, I never imagined we would be at this stage.
You know, I try not to have any kind of long-term goals or plans.
So like my co-founder who started the company alone late 2018, I think it was, he is a decoder,
he's a developer.
So he was, you know, developing and, and he was the one that, you know, published on Andy
hackers as soon as he released the first version.
And that's how it started.
But I joined him like April or March, April, 2020, or I know I'm now losing dates.
I'm like just, yeah, just like 2020.
Yes.
That's so much happens in the startup world that that's, you know, two years ago, it's
like so far.
2020 was like five years long.
Yeah, exactly.
And call it and all that.
So basically 2020 March, I joined him.
That's about a year into him releasing the subscription business, $400 MRR, 30, 40 customers.
And I mean, at that stage, I really, I mean, I was, I was there, I believed in the project.
I was like, are we going to make it, you know, we're going to try and get it out to as many
people as possible.
But I never, I never, never dreamed that, you know, we will have 8,000 plus subscribers
today and whatever.
So let me get that straight.
So you're saying when you got on, it had been around for two years and it was at $400 MRR.
So basically released first beta was like January 2019.
But then the first subscription product came in May 2019.
And I joined like, I think it was March 2020.
So say eight, eight months or so of subscription, we went from zero to 400.
And you know, about 40 or so subscribers at that stage.
Wait, so you were the inflection point.
Just grab your hat until Marco joins and then boom.
I have a marketing experience.
So yeah, I came from it with a bit of a different background and different view on things.
So I, I made the matrix clear on our website, like positioning and, and kind of put us up
against Google Analytics, kind of very straightforward.
And then you're very direct and, and luckily, I mean, it's one of those things I, I published
our first blog post in April 2020 or first, my first blog post were plausible.
And you know, I, I went to Hacker News.
I was like, this, this could work for them, for our audience.
I submitted it myself first try within two hours or so it was on the top of the homepage
of Hacker News.
And that's the kind of what launched that.
So if that point did not happen, I don't know if it would have been, you know, where we
are today.
So that was like, why you should remove Google Analytics from your website or something.
The title was something along those lines and the people loved it.
It was not like sales report plus, which was more like the list of why.
And then the last point was like, okay, here's one of the alternatives you can consider and
then to the top.
And I think if you look at our MRR chart, we shared even at that point, like a couple
of days after that, that was like the very, the huge first huge big spike started.
Let's talk about what plausible is.
So your company plausible, I'll describe it here.
It helps people track analytics for their website.
So if I got a website like AndyHackers.com, for example, and I want to see how many page
views I'm getting, how many visitors, how long they're staying, I just install plausible.
It'll tell me everything I need to know.
And I guess kind of the elephant in the room here.
So there's obviously like a bunch of other analytics tools.
Like you said, when you launch an Hacker News, you're like, stop using Google Analytics.
Google Analytics is like probably the number one like analytics platform in the world.
It's super popular.
I was using it like 20 years ago to track traffic to my website.
But plausible is different because it's privacy friendly.
It's privacy focused.
You're not installing cookies, you're not following users around the web.
It's not invasive.
And it's also open source.
So as a user, I could open up the source code to plausible, I can go on GitHub and I can
see how it works.
I can see what kind of changes you're making, I can see why you're making those changes
and I can trust you better as a platform.
A good summary, you can even go as far as download plausible and install it on your
own server or on your own computer and you can actually read everything and see kind
of verify.
If you know how you're doing it, you can verify that our words that we put on our homepage
kind of match with our action on our software.
So they're open source also in a way that you can self-host, plausible, completely free.
All the indie hackers, all the business owners, everyone has experience with Google Analytics.
I've used it for years similar to you and people love it, people hate it.
So that was why they were like, okay, let's put us up against Google Analytics and explain
the differences.
And so we are previously first, we are lightweight, so we're like something like 45 times lighter
for your website, for your loading time.
We are much simpler to use.
So one of the big issues with Google Analytics is it's so complicated that nobody understands
it or few people understand it or you have to buy it and have a course to understand
it.
I want Google Analytics professional basically to come in and do nothing but that.
From our perspective, we noticed you, or at least I noticed you right away.
You said that you made your first post on Hacker News and you got to the front page
and we see people trying to get to the front page of Hacker News all the time.
It's like the toughest crowd ever.
When Dropbox posted their MVP, there are like five people who are like, this is a stupid
product, right?
Like they're a famously tough audience.
It's a website full of angry nerds, angry, discerning, picky nerds.
And like most importantly, and this is sort of the detail about Hacker News that people
don't grok immediately is that there's like a lot of envy, right?
If you're like, Hey, I got this new product and we're doing really well.
You know, it's only a couple of people.
Like there's so many people who are just like, they get really envious, but with plausible,
you have all of the, like you check all of the boxes that angry nerds, angry like tech
nerds love.
It's like, obviously there's the open source.
There's the privacy focus.
There's like the little guy going up against Google, the fact that you're bootstrapped.
So you know, you've got this, uh, subscription based model as opposed to like selling ads
where, you know, the, the, the customers are really just that part makes people feel bad
a lot too.
Sometimes.
Like when we used to put stories on Andy hackers early on of people being bootstrapped, there's
like something where like, if someone sees someone else succeeding, having not raised
a bunch of venture capital or like having not like, you know, tapped on into like family
connections, uh, other people see that and they're like, Oh, I could do that.
And for a lot of people, that's inspiring.
And then for like maybe five or 10% of people, that's like, dang, is there something wrong
with me that I haven't done this?
You know, let me tear this person down, but no one did that to your launch.
Your launch.
It seemed like it was very well received.
Actually our launch was, um, was they retitled it because somebody complained that we were
kind of attacking Google analytics too much or somebody complained that we were promoting
plausible too much in the, even though it was the last point all the way down, but basically
they changed it from, you know, how, why she's removed Google from your website to, I think
it was, you know, uh, previously friendly Google and it's alternative or something.
You can go to acronyms and check it, but one of the moderators actually changed it and
that kind of, uh, our whole traction we had with that post, it was gaining a lot of votes
that kind of stopped immediately and we fell down the homepage and, and so on.
So that, uh, that was our, our kind of introduction to Hacker News, uh, with, with things being
on Hacker News, I would say eight to nine times on the homepage.
So that, that audience, you know, we, we really have a nice experience there.
Obviously, you know, you have hundreds of people upvoting you, but you might have a
one or two comments saying something bad, but that's, uh, to be expected with so many
people kind of have had their eyeballs and you, then you kind of learn to deal with it
or learn to live with it or at least, and, uh, and you can ignore it because, uh, vast,
my majority of them, maybe mostly silent or they just upvoted, but they, they like what
you're doing.
And that's what you are on the homepage.
You should ignore the two or three that say something not so positive.
I'm looking at the post now, two years ago, some of these comments are from like, you
know, October, 2020.
One of them says I've lost count of all the Google analytics alternatives.
It seems there's a new one popping up every week.
It's not a criticism, but I'm wondering why there's so many people developing their own
alternative product as a question, exact question.
I wanted to ask you.
I mean, a lot of people when they're, you're trying to come up with an idea, you know,
it's like, well, it's kind of obvious that there's all these other successful products
that are already out in the world, but most founders are like, okay, I've got to do something
new.
I've got to do something unique.
But you and your co-founder are like set out to build something that was taking on this
huge incumbent.
And then there's already like a thousand other people who are trying to take on the huge
incumbents.
Like, why did, why did you think that was a good idea to build?
Why?
I mean, you joined a little bit late.
Why did you think that was a good idea for you to, to join?
I think, uh, if you look, uh, you know, GDPR was a big, uh, big point in the, in the history
of the web, I would say, especially from European side.
So when it was released or introduced, I don't know, four or five years ago, I don't know.
But that's when this whole privacy aspect started, started becoming bigger and bigger,
trendier and trendier and, uh, Google analytics explain to people, uh, what GDPR is in case
they don't know.
I think it's a, it's a data protection law that protects people from the European union
in terms of, uh, being able to have a say at least in, in how their data is collected
for what reasons, what is it used for?
So I mean, people complain about GDPR because all those banners, you know, now you have
a, every website has a banner or at least every website that uses Google analytics and
such tools, they have a banner saying, Oh, would you like us to sell your data to 100
different companies?
Say yes or no.
And they, they make it difficult for you to say no.
So those banners, they're part of what GDPR is because GDPR was introduced to give you
a clear information.
Like this website wants to do this with this of your data and you have the right to say
yes or not to it, like a clear consent.
And basically that's what GDPR is.
And that at least in my opinion, I'm a marketer.
I used to use Google analytics.
I used to use Facebook.
I used to do the advertising, I was part of a large company doing the Facebook ads and
all that stuff.
So I was myself ignorant about the issues of privacy and so on.
So at least in my, in my personal case, GDPR really was like, I was working for a startup
at that time and I was like tasked, like, can you figure out what GDPR is because it's
going to be introduced next month and can you tell us like, how is that going to change
what we're doing right now in terms of marketing?
And when I read that, like what GDPR was, I was like, but this, this will change completely
what you're doing.
Like we were buying mailing lists and things like that at that point in this other company
and the GDPR has completely stopped.
You know, in some countries you still get like, yeah, in some countries you still get
like all this cold, cold, cold emails, like people buying your email addresses, your phone
numbers somewhere.
But in Europe, that kind of does not exist really anymore.
I'm looking at the GDPR page on Wikipedia and this is like the most perfect story of
timing because look, GDPR was adopted on in 2016 in April and it became enforceable on
May 25th and 2018.
So right when plausible gets, gets created, that's right.
When GDPR becomes enforceable, perfect timing.
And it's like, what am I going to do?
Like keep Google analytics and try to reconfigure it or just like drop it and get this alternative.
But you're still like one of like many Google analytics alternatives.
Like there are others out there.
I know what's Paul Jarvis who wrote the book company.
He runs like fathom analytics, which is also like a privacy focused analytics company.
You're sitting there, you're a marketer.
You're like reading about GDPR.
Like, oh shit, this is like going to change everything.
And then at some point you decide you want to join a company.
Like how did you, I mean, there's a ton of companies on ND hackers.
There's a ton of people who are doing self-funded bootstraps startups.
How do you like sort through tens of thousands of companies and try to like pick a co-founder
and pick a product that you think that you can help accelerate as a marketer?
Well, in this case, Ookoo, my co-founder called the email link.
You know, he found a blog post I did about Google and these alternatives.
I was, I was probably, because I was getting into this world, I was, I started publishing
stuff on my blog and so on.
So he found one.
He contacted me.
I checked out what he built, the dashboard, I was like, this is great.
I know how we can use this.
I was also aware of, you know, some of the other alternatives.
And I thought this one was designed in a way that me as a marketer, I can enjoy better
and I understand better.
So I thought that had really great potential.
So for me, that kind of decision, it's not like I've been through, you know, a lot of
research and find all the other co-founders and kind of figure out who can I join.
And no, this was an opportunity to fell into my lap, you can say.
And I took it and then we worked together and then it turns out it was great.
So now the question is, what about all these other small alternatives like us?
The thing is, nobody knows about them.
For example, even to this day, like that Hacker News comment is like, ooh, why does everyone
build this, you know, these small startups?
Nobody knows about it.
Even to this day, we get emails from people daily saying, oh, I never heard about alternatives
to Google instance until I heard about you.
Say 70% of the web uses one tool.
That is it.
That's what they know.
That is the norm, the standard everyone uses, everyone knows it.
It's been there for decades.
It's made by one of the largest companies in the world.
It's connected to everything you do, the ad campaigns and everything else.
This is what people use.
And it's not like people go every day and, ooh, I need to find an alternative to this
tool that does everything that I need.
So it's not like I have one of those tools that people just go and look for alternatives
all the time.
So on our homepage, it's not like we have to compare ourselves to all the different
smaller tools as well, like us.
No, we just compare ourselves to Google and a couple other of the really big ones because
that's what the people know, like in terms of how many websites they're installed on
in terms of kind of brand awareness, those are the kind of the names that everyone knows
in marketing.
And then there's us and there's all these other smaller ones that nobody knows about,
you know?
It reminds me of this slide that like every startup has on their pitch deck when they
go to pitch venture capitalists where they're like, the market is $600 trillion and if we
can only capture 0.0001%, we'll be making this much money.
But that's like kind of true for you where you don't have to have millions and millions
and millions of websites.
You can make over a million dollars a year, which is like 0.0001% of the market.
And you're the marketer who's come in and made it possible for people to find you.
That's definitely positive in our market is that there's so many websites.
Every website kind of needs some type of analytics.
It's not like we're working with a product that only a few people need.
We're working a product that hundreds of millions of websites need.
So we can find 60,000 of them that need exactly us.
That's perfect enough to have a sustainable business, profitable business that, you know,
now we have a team of eight people.
In terms of reaching people, I mean, you've got a, you're only putting a small dent.
Obviously you're the marketer.
Is it mostly like a marketing effort?
Do you have like, you know, a sales approach?
Like how do you grow in that sense?
Like what's the approach to that?
Yeah.
How do you reach millions of people or how do you reach thousands of customers whenever
every one of these other Google Analytics alternatives is struggling to get found?
Beyond posting to Indie Hackers, which is also a great strategy.
Indie Hackers is a great one.
If you see my, there was a post in Indie Hackers like last week and for whatever I made it
in like top 10 or I don't know, like I was, my name was like in the top of like the most
upvoted Indie Hacker users.
Yeah.
I saw that.
There you go.
That's one of the ways you do it.
But basically if you don't have a sales team, there's no sales strategy.
I say no to majority of people that come and ask us, oh, can we have a sales call?
I was like, I'm sorry, but there's just too many people wanting this and I'm one.
I'm still the kind of only marketer in the company.
So I got to apologize and say, no, but you can look at our live demo and so on.
So no sales, none of those tricks, no paid ads.
We don't do, we have not spent, we've spent zero dollars on advertising until now.
So everything is coming from organic side and uniform our effort of our time.
Obviously the product itself, we've been improving the product, listening to people and kind
of building the features they need.
So every time we add a new feature such as we added a Google Analytics import very recently
and Google Analytics is, they're shutting down the universal analytics next summer.
They announced that a few months ago and we were ready immediately, we didn't add an answer
within a few days.
We were like, okay, here's a Google Analytics import.
So basically that's a big part of it.
And then, you know, that's what people get to hear about you because like Google is shutting
down.
We need to find an alternative.
Here's one that has an import.
Let's try it out.
That's one.
So features and building it up and as the kind of market demands content like we discussed
for Hacker News in the hackers, they published in the first year or so when I had more time,
there was less demand on us, so I had more time.
So I was publishing, I think, two blog posts per week.
And these blog posts were not like, okay, Plausible is the greatest analytics in the
world to come to the South.
No, they were educational, informational, you know, I had to research them, I had to
find a topic that people are interested in, the questions that people want answers for.
And I would then write really educational content.
And that had the side benefit was always that it was hosted on Plausible.io and within the
content or at the end, I will be like, okay, so if you like what this sounds like, take
a look at what you're building.
That was the main one, really.
And those seven times or so, eight times that we were bent on top of Hacker News in the
last two years, every time it was because of a specific blog post that we published.
And so what happens then is that if 30, 40, 50,000 people see that blog post, so one day
on Hacker News, you know, few thousand on any hackers, few thousand on Twitter and so
on, that builds your brand awareness.
So then if you look at our traction, there are all our MRRs, it's not like we went up
straight away.
It's just every week, there's a 2% increase or so on.
And now it's been like two years or weeks.
And every time there's 2% increase, and we get like 1,000 trials per month.
So more people know about us, more people get to experience like there is a Google Analytics
alternative.
If it exists, more people then can share it with their friends and then a network and
colleagues.
Well, I published a blog post when it reached 1 million ARR a couple of months ago, I think.
That was the last blog post I published.
So I no longer need to go publish twice per week because now we are at that stage that
if you look actually, if you look at like, you know, the Google search trends.
So now like plausible search for plausible, plausible analytics, that takes over like
if you look at like, previously first analytics, Google Analytics alternative or GDPR analytics
or cookie less analytics or all these keywords combined, get less searches and plausible
analytics alone now gets.
So basically, that's brand recognition.
Yeah, that basically that approach of publishing content out there, content that kind of has
something to say, for example, if Google did something that we didn't like, what was that
Flock initiative, a couple of like last summer or whatever, then they will publish a post
with our view on it.
And that one went on top of Hacker News as well.
So basically, with each of these posts that made it well in social media and so on in
niche communities, more people will know about us indirectly, they will try us out, then
there will be a reason to talk about us when Google Analytics does something bad, such
as when Google Analytics announces, oh, we're going to shut down Google Analytics, then
people remember, oh, there were those guys, that little team there from Europe.
Yeah.
That I read about five months ago on Hacker News that built something, let me go check
it out and recommend to my company.
So like our stats are live to the public, so you can actually check all the spikes from
Hacker News.
And if you look at the spikes, and if you look at like our goal conversions on that
day, like child signs, there's no big spike.
So you'll get like huge traffic spike, but no, like, it's not like that does not result
in MRR on the same day.
But we do see, like weeks after months after, that people that have read that post, they're
kind of influential.
So what happens a lot is a developer reads something on Hacker News, and then we get
an email, oh, our developers, now that we need an alternative recommended you.
So we get like people that have read about us and heard about us because our blog posts,
and we were not selling blogs directly.
It was just a blog post about specific topic that's related and relevant.
Then eventually, that kind of translated into, you know, recommendations and word of mouth,
and that translates into child signups, and then a certain percentage of people like what
they see in that one month of trial, and then that translates into MRR for us.
This is fascinating because a lot of people try to do what you've done, like content marketing,
blogging, let's write a bunch of educational articles that inform our audience and teach
them about how to succeed with their companies or their startup in this space, teach them
about technology.
That's what you're doing.
You're writing these super helpful articles.
Why do you think this is working so well for you and it doesn't work for others?
Because you have a background in marketing.
You came into this like having already like run your own blogs in the past, having already
kind of seen what works, what doesn't work, you worked, I think at a startup and a much
bigger company that was a public company doing marketing for them.
What do you know about marketing that like the prototypical sort of first time and the
hacker blogger doesn't know that allows you to create this positive flywheel?
Luck is a big part, but basically, I mean, quantum marketing works, there are companies
that do well, but obviously it works and it's been spread that everyone wants to try it.
And then in the end, obviously 1% or so succeeds.
And what I've seen, at least from my experience, those that don't succeed, there's a lot of
this that they get people that don't have any experience with the topic to write.
They get to use these tools rather than experience, so like, okay, let me use this tool and just
follow what they tell me.
But that kind of stuff, when you read those blog posts that the well optimized, none of
our blog posts are optimized.
So we have not run like SEO tool to tell us this is what you should write as a headline.
I just write them the way I would speak to you, and then maybe read it once, twice to
check like spelling mistakes or whatever.
But they have not been run through a machine or AI or whatever to be optimized for search
or to optimize for whatever.
And one thing people do, which is very common, it's like go to Google, search for the topic
you want to cover, take the top 10 blog posts because they're doing something well because
they're ranking top 10, put them all together, all the subheadings, create one blog post
that has everything that all these templates have and just release like 10,000 words out
there.
And the hope is okay, it will work.
So no, I feel the way content is done, like the scale of the many companies want it to
be done is like it's too generic, too kind of robotic.
I feel there's no authentic voice and people can see through that.
So I feel that's one of the main things that I feel like I have contributed with in terms
of content.
It's like, I've experienced through this topic, I really care about what I'm writing.
And I really believe in what I'm writing.
And I'm just writing it out there.
I don't try to filter it myself.
I don't try to get an AI to check myself or whatever.
I don't try to make it on top of Google search results.
And in some ways, if you're lucky, that might work.
I'm just sitting here listening to like just brilliance spew out of your mouth.
And it's like, it's amazing.
You obviously were a really, really talented marketer and your co-founder found you.
So I think the obvious takeaway is like you were putting yourself out there.
Well, I think your co-founder like Uku did like a really smart thing by hiring you.
Like there's so many indie hackers who are basically just like, basically struggling
in obscurity and often they're software engineers and they're building really cool products
that nobody is using, right?
And he like, as you said, Marco, like you're not just a marketer, you're somebody who actually
knows about the space.
You'd grown blogs before, you knew about analytics tools and Uku found you because you've written
a blog post comparing like Google Analytics alternatives and stuff like that.
So you had the domain expertise.
And I think that that's just not a strategy that enough indie hackers take, which is to
go find somebody who actually has experience doing the hard thing that you're struggling
with.
And then the other half of what you did really well, and that sort of like sort of armchair
analyzing your company is that like you found the right channels.
So for example, you're saying like not a lot of people know, even think about having an
alternative to Google Analytics.
When you look at your search traffic, it's mostly people who recognize your brand because
they already know about you and they're searching for you.
And it's like not that many people are searching for like privacy focused alternative to Google
Analytics.
People don't even think about it.
Right.
And so instead of spending like a lot of time trying to like build up your SEO traffic and
target all these keywords that no one's even searching for, you went straight to like the
source of all the nerds who would care about this kind of thing because they know about
privacy and they know about analytics.
You went to Hacker News, you went to Indie Hackers, and like that has been a consistent
source of traffic for you.
And so I think a lot of like marketers and people in general don't think hard enough
about like what channel actually has my people on it and like what am I going to get like
the right bang for my buck if I invest, you know, hours, months, weeks into writing content
for.
Yeah, I think this was early on the we discussed this a lot.
And this was clear from my side, like content is the way to go organic is the way to go
just just because of the niche we're in.
If you're doing some different type of product, I can still look at what kind of channels
you should use.
And before I come to a conclusion, you might use you should use ads, you know, content
does not really work for all spaces.
And I feel in this space, being a Google
and going to Google and giving Google money to do the advertising for you, that just would
not work.
You know, if you have a once in a while, somebody always comes up on Google ads and tries to
do like plausible analytics, whatever ads and so on.
But that that kind of approach never works because what we build and what we believe
in and what the product does, that's not really where the audience will find us.
So now I'm not saying that, you know, now we're at 1 million ARR.
So now maybe maybe this niche approach, the content approach, maybe it won't work anymore,
you know.
So maybe we will be hitting the limits maybe tomorrow, maybe a month from now.
Who knows?
We don't know.
It's the first time we're doing it.
So maybe there will be limits of this approach and then we will need to reconsider and like,
what do we do now?
How do we continue growing?
How do we keep covering the churn?
And so we kind of continue growing and being able to pay the salaries and so on.
But until now, until this level, it's been easily done without any other marketing.
So it was just like a master plan you came up with early on.
I'm trying to like imagine, you know, you join Uku, he reaches out and does he email
you?
Yeah.
I got an email.
Did he immediately say, hey, do you want to join me or how did that play out?
I don't know if I have the email.
I should check it.
Again, it's been more than two years, but basically, I read your blog post.
This blog was the red.
I liked it.
I think we're thinking in a similar way.
I'm building this tool.
Take a look.
Would you be up for, you know, having a call to kind of discuss how, you know, I'm looking
for a healthy marketing?
Would you be up for kind of checking it out?
And from my perspective, I knew there was a need for this.
I knew the GDPR and things we discussed that there was a growing trend.
And you know, I knew some of the other players on the market.
I even tried some of them.
I was never happy as a marketer.
I thought they were like too, they were not made by a marketer for a marketer.
They might have been made by a developer who was like trying to do something and maybe
has not spoken to enough people in the marketing world to kind of understand what needs to
be done.
And I felt Uku was kind of there, closer to that level than the alternatives I knew in
terms of design and features and like how that can be improved, slight things that can
really make it well and great for marketing teams.
So yeah, from my perspective, I was like, yeah, this is great.
Let's get on a call.
Let's see what we can do.
We took it, I think it was three months or so.
Like we said, let's see how we work together, whether there's any potential in this before
we kind of go and sign any kind of co-founder agreement or whatever we did eventually.
So three months, but obviously that blog post went, you know, live within the first month
and we saw traction immediately and so it was kind of quite clear that this works and
the kind of partnership we have works so we can focus on the development, I can focus
on communication and yeah, it's been like this to this day.
So from Uku's side, all that makes sense, right?
I mean, he's already doing the startup, he wants super powered marketers to help him,
but you had a whole different career.
I mean, obviously a successful marketer, otherwise he wouldn't have reached out to you, you know,
had a stable job and this is this like risky venture.
So like before this, did you have ambitions to join a startup one day?
Like basically my career and degree at university went into like a public listing with company
like in London, like I don't know, they're like 3 billion pound war from the stock market
and huge team.
And so I knew I learned how the normal company does it, you know, the corporate, how they
do marketing.
Then I went to a startup, like with a job after I think seven or eight years, then I
went to a startup, like a venture funded startup.
So I then got to know what it is to work for investors, like I got to do the reporting
for investors, got to go to San Francisco, do the, let's see if we can get more funding
so we can pay salaries next year.
I did that for about three years.
And then at the stage where Uku contacted me, I did not have a job.
So I was kind of in between jobs.
And the reason I started publishing is because I started getting interested in this field
of privacy first.
I started researching alternatives for my own, the stuff I use personally, but also
the stuff I use for my own blog.
I started kind of de-googling my own website, so that's why I published an article about
how to de-google your website because I did it myself.
So I started getting into this because of interest.
And what I tried to do is if I want to go in some direction, I will do it myself.
I will learn about it.
I will publish what I learn.
And that kind of opens my doors to privacy first space.
And that's kind of, there were some other companies that reached out as well about getting
help and so on.
But my perspective was like that.
You've written, I think, a few things that are a little bit anti-Google, anti-Facebook,
one of your posts on your blog.
It's like, how do you get your parents off Facebook?
How do you de-google your website?
What's behind this?
Are you anti-big companies?
Are you mostly privacy focused?
I know like myself, I've been immersed in the sort of privacy hacker culture for a long
time.
But I've always been kind of lazy, just like, eh, you know, I still use Google Analytics.
I still have a Facebook account, you know, I'm not on there very often, but I have one.
What's driving your opinions on this kind of stuff?
You know, I used to use all of those tools.
I was a big fan of Google, maybe if you look 10 years back or so, you know.
I remember when there was, was it Hey or what?
No, not Hey.
That's new.
Inbox?
It was a really cool email client for Gmail and I was like, recommend it to my friends
and my family.
I was like, guys, check this out.
Google Photos, when it came out, I was like, this is the best tool I've ever seen in my
life.
You know, Google Photos, what it did.
So I went from being a fan and using all the products to, you know, there was a, I don't
know which came first.
So GDPR, Snowden kind of came with all these revelations about the privacy and what's going
on.
And then Cambridge Analytica.
Yeah.
These three things, all of them kind of impacted me.
All of them I heard about, I read about, I was like, this is the world I live in, both
as a marketer, but as a person, I've been recommending these tools, I've been using
these tools.
Well, maybe, maybe they're not as good as I was thinking.
Maybe, maybe there's something else.
Maybe there's something else in there.
Obviously, there's also the fact that Google has changed, you know, I mean, these days
Google is like a real corporation and it's more about the shareholder value and increasing
that and it's about, you know, building cool tools anymore like it was maybe 10 years ago
or so.
And then, you know, the people that were in charge there and then they don't have much
to say today where it's all about, you know, making more money, I guess, increasing more
money out of people.
So basically, I feel there was these two things, my own interest, these kind of big topics
such as GDPR being kind of top of the mind in kind of culture, especially in Europe,
they're really big, all of these three.
And then that fact that I thought that maybe the directions these companies are heading
is not as good as the kind of where they came from.
And now they're thinking of different things, optimizing for different things and maybe
kind of what that's resulting in in society, but also for me and myself and my family,
my friends is not ideal.
And maybe there's a better way.
Obviously, we're still trying to find a better way, Facebook is still used by most people,
Google the same.
But at least now you have easy, if you want to switch from Google, Google Analytics is
alternatives.
If you want to switch from Gmail, it is alternatives.
I think they're still, it's still difficult for some product.
I think Google photos still misses a really good competitor.
Google Maps is really difficult one to compete against as well.
I haven't found any like, like really, really, really good one that, you know, can do restaurant
reviews and all that stuff with the way the Google Maps does.
But at least for certain aspects of your life, of your website, there really are, I mean,
very, very competitive alternatives that these days compared to say five years ago, it's
much easier to switch.
If you want, yeah, I find myself still being like, it's just so nice to have everything
work together.
Like if I have the Google Home speakers, I can turn on like my smart lights and play
videos on my TV through the Chromecast and then read me my Google Calendar and email.
I feel like I'm sucked in, you know, and it hasn't gotten to the point quite yet.
But Google Analytics is actually a good one that I could switch out because it's not connected
to anything else that is with Google.
And like you said, they're going to change everything and like, I'm not going to be able
to import my data next year and switch over, so it's going to be a fresh start.
So I might as well just switch.
But everything else, it's like, I feel like you're right, there will be a better place
with like a lot more privacy, you know, it'd be a better place if there are more tiny services
than this one big service.
But the convenience of it makes it so difficult, you know, it was so difficult to switch.
I agree.
It's what they've built.
Some of those threads are amazing and they work well.
If you kind of ignore or kind of this privacy aspect, some of that stuff is great.
It's amazing.
Again, Google Photos, I really love Google Photos.
In my de-Googling of my personal life, I tried to actually remove Google Photos and kind
of go and then like people that are going to do the manual backups and so I bought like
an external hard drive.
I'm not a developer or techy at all, so I bought like an external hard drive.
I tried to like follow what people tell me.
I ended up crashing that backup and lost a lot of my pictures and then my son was born,
you know, like late last year and I was like, I really don't want this to happen.
You know, like I'm not capable and we really need good alternatives for things like this.
So like, yeah, convenience and the quality of the products are amazing and I have nothing
to say against that.
I think the Google Analytics is a bit different issue such as being so complicated and obviously
the privacy aspects but in general, some of those products, like they're amazing and they're
very difficult to replace and if I was like trying to work on a competitor, I think it
will be way more difficult than working on a competitor Google Analytics itself.
Yeah.
How do you market a competitor Google Photos or it's tied into my Android phone and I take
a photo and it automatically goes into Google Photos and it's automatically backed up.
They've just got it locked down.
Yeah.
I don't know.
Don't ask me that thing.
I'm curious about your business model.
You're a SaaS, you're not doing it in an ad-based way but when anyone can download the code
for free or you're open source, how is it that you're making money and like making money
hand over fist?
Well, we have the cloud, the convenience like we spoke about.
The cloud, you just go and sign up.
You can be anyone like me like I'm not a developer.
I cannot even if I write the straightest instructions ever, it will be difficult for me to go download
that on GitHub and find a server and install it and make sure it's maintained.
If I get a traffic spot from Hacker News that it doesn't crash, all these things, they're
really like intensive both in terms of experience and knowledge but also in terms of time.
So even though we have that, I will consider like a niche product and not everyone wants
to sell for their analytics like all the Google ICS users, they don't know that it's possible
to sell for its analytics because they just use what's convenient and easy which is Google
Analytics and so we provide our convenient and easy clothes analytics in the cloud.
You just go to clotheswood.io, you sign up and then you worry about, you know, you insert
that little script in your site like you do with Google Analytics and then you worry about
your website.
You worry about driving traffic, checking your stats.
You don't need to worry about, you know, how do I get a server and how do I install this
analytics on my server and how do I make sure I don't have my uptime the way it's supposed
to be or I have my backups in case it crashes.
You don't have to worry about any of those things and neither do you have to worry about
if you use Plots of Analytics in the cloud so basically it's kind of like a balance between
the two.
I mean, we don't have any telemetry or anything so we don't know but there's many people that
use our self-hosted because, you know, they have the experience, they have the skills,
they have the time, they want to learn, their developers, they prefer, you know, there's
many that use it.
We get nothing from it in terms of like money because it's free as in beer, as they say,
because we want to be part of the open source world and we believe, we really believe that
being open source, having our code there available for everyone to kind of inspect and play with
makes our main product better in terms of trust and privacy aspect because you can actually
verify that what we say that it's actually true because you can download it and actually
figure out what it actually does if you have the skills to do so which many people do.
Exactly.
Whenever I see an outside success, like your company that's making millions of dollars,
it's always like a bunch of different forces pushing in the same direction or maybe it's
like a puzzle where all the pieces like fit together and support each other really well,
right?
And so like not only do you have like a good team of like, you know, your co-founders,
a software engineer who's building an awesome product but you also like came on as a marketer
so you got your bases covered there but you're like channels that you picked are really good
but then also your product like fits into like those channels really well, like the
fact that you like chose to make it open source because someone could have said, oh, it's
a privacy focus, Google Analytics alternative and then not made it open source, right?
And then it would have been much harder for the customers to basically verify what you
say is true.
There'd been less trust there.
Like maybe it wouldn't have taken off on Hacker News.
It's a pretty crucial decision.
I don't think we will have been very hard today if we weren't proprietary.
No chance.
Yeah.
I think it's grown as well but not to this level.
It's pretty crucial because if you look at your market, like I'm assuming like most of
your customers, like if they're these privacy focused people, I assume a lot of them are
developers, right?
And I assume a lot of them are like savvy enough to know like, hey, why are you saying
you're privacy focused and you're not open source, right?
And so it's like you're sort of like titillating them and like appealing directly to your customers
and their unique sort of proclivities and interests.
And I think a lot of indie hackers when they start a company, they're not really thinking
on that level.
They're not thinking like, how do I connect my market and the channels and my product
and my business model and make it so all four of those things are really, really meshing
well together.
Yeah.
If you look at the, there's many of these privacy communities that have popped up since
GDPR and like one of the requirements they have for tools they would recommend and list
open source has to be open source because otherwise we cannot read the code, we cannot
figure out what it is, we cannot trust you.
So that's definitely been a key part.
Something that happens often is like we get an email saying, oh, I'm a developer, I found
you on Hacker News, I've installed pods on my server, self-hosted, blah, blah, blah.
But now I want it to reach to my company and my company doesn't want to pay developers
to self-host analytics, they just want to pay you because that's way cheaper and more
efficient for them rather than having one, two developers making sure uptime is there,
you know, and then paying, I don't know how much salary they have to pay, they just want
to pay us a few dollars here and there.
So we do it for them.
So that's another kind of growth way for us is people that self-host our product for free
end up recommending us to the companies they work for and things like that, which ends
up benefiting the main product in the cloud.
Are there any other surprising maybe downsides to open source?
Because I mean, obviously you have the channel fit, right?
I mean, open source and your main market is developers, so that is really nice.
But are there any weird, I'm not going to say downsides, but is there anything tricky
that kind of surprised you when you got it, you got going with it?
Two things, license is one, like I have no idea, I was using, you know, I was using WordPress
and things like that for 10 years, so I have no idea what license WordPress is.
I use WordPress because of the product and what website I can build from it.
I don't know the license.
But this started with something that's called what I learned later, it's called permission
license.
Was it permission license?
Yeah, basically license that allows you to do whatever you want.
Like companies can take the product, build and kind of sell it to their customers.
So what happened?
Then we got that first spike on Hacker News, we got several inquiries from companies like
we love what you do, we love that it's permission license, or we want to sell it to our audience.
Unfortunately, we cannot say anything to you, unfortunately, we cannot pay anything to you,
but we will give you credit and you will raise your profile because we have thousands of
customers, it will raise your profile, and you know, then you can get developers and
you can get to help you build a better product.
But please, can you build your footnotes in the footer of our website?
We like compete with you and say thanks.
The worst is that part was like, if I request a big request for us to build something first
so they can do what they want to do.
So they wanted you to make it easier for them to do this.
Yeah, exactly.
So I was like, is this okay, is this possible to do?
And I was like, I spent, I don't know, a week or so researching licenses.
I found, yeah, with a permission license, anything is possible.
And so we spent a week researching and that's a blog post that went on top of Harken News
as well with our learning and our decision to change our license.
So I think late 2020 or mid or so, like just basically after that big spike initially,
we changed the license to something they called copy left, I think.
Again, I've read about these things, I can read it, I can find it online, but like I'm
not that familiar with the whole world.
I'm just kind of learning.
So copy left, something that's called AGPL, which has a few restrictions in place.
Still fully open source, people love it.
Like Google, Google actually hates it.
Google, that was one of the parts of the blog post, like Google has forbidden their employees
to use anything with this AGPL license because of reasons that it makes it difficult to kind
of use it in any really way you want, like in terms of commercial corporate.
You basically, you can use whatever you want, but you have to, whatever changes you make
to that code, you have to make open source as well and contribute back.
And that's a big difference from permissive, permissive, you can do whatever you want,
close source it, sell it, improve it, but don't open it.
This one that we use right now makes that one distinction really, one.
Just like you can do whatever you want, but you have to open source it and contribute
it back if you do change it.
From that change, we have never had issues like this anymore.
Nobody is now asking us, or can you build this and then we can sell it and we can give
you a credit and while we're selling it to our tens of thousands of customers.
That was one big lesson that, I mean, coming from the proprietary world and products, that's
not something you worry about.
You have your products, you worry about marketing, you don't worry about somebody taking it and
selling it and you're kind of not giving you anything back.
That was one big one, huge one.
I think everyone who goes into open source has to really be careful and know what license
they want to use.
There's a lot of education material about it.
In our blog post that's since been referred several times, like, whoa, this blog post
helped us choose our license, which really made me happy because I was a beginner to
that world when I wrote the post, but it was like the situation made me have to become
an expert or a little expert at least.
Second one was this self-hosted part.
It's like, we released this free as in-bear self-hosted, but the nature of it is so complicated,
installing, maintaining, that we started getting so many questions like, ooh, I tried to install
it, but this failed, or I had a huge spike in chunk, but it's crashed.
How do I fix it?
How do I do this?
Like me, I was doing the support at then, I was like, there's no chance I can help you.
You need to have a really high experience with development to be able to answer these
questions.
These questions are so specific to a specific server and so on, there's no chance we will
spend, we can spend most of our day every day just responding to those questions.
That lesson was like, okay, we need to set expectations clear in the future.
There is no longer any support for plausible self-hosted, we create this community forum,
anyone is open to and welcome to contribute, and if you're using self-hosted and you love
it and you liked it, please check it out, and then if somebody, a beginner, has a question,
can you please help contribute with answers that anyone can learn?
That is really like a lifted weight of our shoulders because at one stage we're really
struggling because all these really, really highly technical questions were coming our
way and we were like, we just couldn't deal with it because there was no, we were like
small resources, there was like two of us at that point, it's just plausible could not
exist if we were just having to answer all the technical questions about self-hosted.
That was my main lesson number two that I've learned, and now that we have these two in
place, a good license, so we no longer worry about that, and this kind of really clear
on every time you'll read about self-hosted now, it's really made clear that it's community
supported only, there's no guarantees you will be able to get support.
If you want support, get on the cloud version and there you will get a response runs within
minutes because the cloud is so easier, when the cloud people don't ask us how do I install
it or how do I back it up because that's what we do for them, they ask us like how is this
metric working with this metric or easy questions that I can answer myself.
What about in the analytics industry itself, I don't interview too many people who've built
a company in the analytics industry, but there's some really huge players, there's Google Analytics
obviously, Mixpanel is one of the first big ones, we use Amplitude, I think they IPOed
a couple years ago, we worked billions and billions of dollars, it's a huge industry,
there's obviously a lot of space, obviously a lot of people trying to enter it, but I'm
sure there's like some stuff you learn being part of it that outsiders might not know,
for example, I've heard it's just super expensive and complex just to house all this data that
you're collecting, so what are some things that you guys have learned about building
a company doing analytics, which is a really crowded space, but obviously a very lucrative
one.
Well, what we're still learning to this day is the infrastructure, so the stuff that I
talked about samples to struggle with, imagine that if you have the scale of 60,000 websites
and we're not tracking 2 billion page views per month, imagine that scale and making sure
that the uptime is either 99.90, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 9, whatever, very high uptime, making
sure that nothing goes down, if it goes down that we have the backup, making sure that
our service is up and running, so the team of 8, we grow from 4 to 8 within the last
two months, and basically six of those people are developers, and I would say at least half
of their time combined is spent on infrastructure, and that means making sure things are running
today, making sure that if we continue growing the way we're going, like we went from 1 billion
to 2 billion within like six months or so, page is tracked, making sure that if we go
to 4 billion in the next six months that we can handle that kind of load.
What we've decided basically early on was that we want to have that in-house, that kind
of infrastructure expertise, the easy choice I guess would have been all this outsourced
to AWS and whatever, they will host and manage the databases for us, but no, we've said we
want to be kind of similar to the decision about being bootstrapped, we want to be in
control, we want to be kind of flexible to do what we want, and so we said we're going
to do it ourselves, so we manage all of our own infrastructure ourselves with our team,
we have all the expertise in-house, and we plan to continue like that, so we don't need
to rely on the big cloud from AWS or whatever to kind of run it for us.
I mean, this kind of happened for Indie Hackers too, where I was making Indie Hackers and
in the beginning, I didn't think anything about traffic, I was like, oh, I'm just making
this cool blog for myself, maybe I'll get a few hundred visitors, and I just coded it
in a way where it just wasn't built to scale, and then within a few weeks, I was getting
hundreds of thousands of visitors a day, and I'm like, oh shit, this is not working, it's
not really standing up, but it's fine.
You just grow and you change and you make some hard decisions later on and you kind
of fix it.
Same thing is true at Stripe, where there are systems at Stripe like three or four years
ago where they're relying on code that was built in the early months of Stripe that was
like not scaling very well and it was fine, and it's like one lesson to take from that
is like, oh, you need to make your code perfect in the beginning to fix this stuff, but then
I think the better lesson to take is the opposite, which is like, hey, the code wasn't perfect
in the beginning and it still became Stripe and still worth a hundred billion dollars,
you know?
That's the way we think about it as well, like not everything is ready and optimized
for what if we grow 10x next year, you know, maybe we're kind of going to be able to predict
that and kind of handle it if it happens, and we're going to have the expertise ready
to be able to do it in time.
So basically this, I don't think the infrastructure side will ever be kind of, it's ready now,
we don't have to worry about it anymore.
I think it will be something we will have to put resources and time into as long as
plausible it is there because it's just a great part of what we do of our services.
Like you got to be fast loading, you're going to be able to track stats, you're going to
be able to display stats.
It's such a good problem to have, you know, the problem that you're worrying about is
getting the hug of death from the internet.
And on that note, Marco, this has been awesome.
There are lots of indie hackers, obviously, that are just now getting started, and they
have no idea what they're doing.
So as a party note, what can other indie hackers learn from your experience?
One really thing that I see very often, let's say mistake, is positioning.
That's something I did the first thing on plausible was like, I don't think our positioning
is strong enough, you know.
I think they mentioned Google Analytics once, twice, but it was not like you enter plausible.io
and within two seconds you understand.
But now you enter plausible.io, you should understand within, let's say, three seconds
what this does.
Because there's that big headline is really focused on what you already know, which is
Google Analytics.
Everyone knows it, or I assume everyone knows it.
And then we have three or four keywords that everyone, or at least most people, have issues
with what they know.
So Google Analytics, but then we say, we're lightweight, we're privacy first, we're open
source, we're simple.
And these are, I think, I don't know, let's say 50% of Google Analytics users have at
least some issues with at least one of these topics, like, oh, Google Analytics is not
privacy first, or Google Analytics is too heavy for my website, or, oh, I really don't
know, I understand how to work with Google Analytics, so I never check it.
And now our position is so clear that those first two seconds that people give you, now
they no longer go back because they didn't get it.
Now they can scroll further down and actually read details about each of these.
And I feel when I go and check a new website many times, I don't get it in two seconds.
And this really with the patience people have online these days, if you don't do that well,
that first to the top, people will not give you that extra chance, extra few seconds to
scroll down.
So basically, that's the brilliant advice that I give to most new startups.
Because that will determine whether you will get a chance, whether you will succeed is
people actually reading what you say further down.
But if you don't catch their attention at the top and actually tell them, this is what
we do, and this is how it compares to what you already know, it will be difficult to
get them to get it and scroll further down and so on.
And I feel that's a really big issue for many websites.
Channing, do you remember hanging out with April Dunford in Italy?
She wrote a book about positioning called Obviously Awesome.
And she talks about this, like positioning is basically just like setting the context
for your product.
And it's something that I think a lot of indie hackers ignore, but like, if you essentially
choose the right market, or you say the right competitor and the headline for your product,
like that gives readers so much information, or they can already just based on like that
little just by saying Google Analytics, they automatically know what you do, they know
a bunch of different features, like you've told them a million things by saying two different
words.
Yeah, I think it's like such a smart thing to think about and something that, especially
if you're listening to this and you've never thought about positioning, check out April's
book.
Margot, I know you've written a little bit about it on your blog as well.
It's worth its weight in gold.
And the slightly not obvious thing about that is that the intuitive thing to do is to just
think about all the individual features.
You're like, oh, we do this, we do this, we do this, and then try to build that up.
But if you just give people like a schema that just loads in all those features that
like shortcuts, all of that cognitive labor that people are going to do, where attention
spans, people are going to bounce way before that.
That's why it's so popular in Silicon Valley to say like, we're X for Y, we're Twitter
for hot dogs.
Or like you're something like it's like, I mean, obviously that makes sense, but if
you get it right, it's like really easy for people to get what you do.
Anyway, Margot, thanks so much for coming.
Can you let listeners know where they can go to find your blog, your writing, your Twitter,
and more about obviously Plausible itself?
Plausible itself is Plausible.io, we have a free trial and go figure out if it's any
good compared to what you use currently.
My blog is kind of, I don't have much time, so I didn't write much lately.
But I do write once in a while for Plausible blog, so Plausible.io forward slash blog.
My main kind of way that I communicate this, this, even that, it's kind of getting sparse
because I don't have time, is Twitter.
So Twitter.com forward slash marcosare, S-A-R-I-C is the last name, or Plausible, I'm also
the one writing Plausible Twitter.
So Plausible HQ, I think is our, Plausible HQ is the, we cannot get Twitter handled.
They don't, we have now the trademark for Plausible and whatever, but they don't allow
us to get Twitter.
Somebody, somebody registered like I think 10 years ago and they never tweeted, but unfortunately
Twitter still doesn't allow us.
So they have Plausible HQ instead.
Nice, nice.
All right.
All right, thanks so much, Marga.