All their marketing seems to be pitching the product against Google Analytics. But they don't spend any time differentiating themselves from other privacy-first analytics companies, of which there are many.
I mean, when they started in 2018:
> Uku’s first thought was, “Ugh. Can we just use something other than Google Analytics?”. This is how the idea for Plausible was born.
Surely they must have looked around and seen that there were already quite a few products doing privacy-first analytics? But yet they started anyway? And had success even though their marketing doesn't really state any reasons why the user should use them not the many other privacy-first analytics offerings out there?
I mean I'm happy for them that they're successful, but I think there must be more to it than alluded to in this blog post, both in (a) the decision to start in the face of lots of competition and (b) success despite not trying to differentiate themselves from the competition.
99.999% of their potential customer base is still using Google Analytics. I'm not sure the comparison to anything else matters at this point.
When you buy a Tesla you won't find comparisons about potential savings or benefits over other electric cars. Instead it is compared to the cost of ownership of a gas powered car.
> When I looked around I was fully ready to pick up another tool and install it on Gigride immediately.
>
> Turns out there are some alternatives for Google Analytics but I didn’t find any of them compelling. Simple Analytics and Fathom are the closest to my ideal but they are a bit too barebones to be useful for my use-case. For example, it’s quite important to me what browsers versions my users are on – if I use a css rule that isn’t supported in IE7, how many users does it affect? Neither Fathom or Simple Analytics provide that answer currently.
>
> This seems like an opportunity to build the tool that I really want.
I also started a privacy-friendly analytics SaaS without looking at the market. Sometimes it's better to just get started. Otherwise you probably won't start doing anything, as there are existing products most of the time. In my case, I was looking for a Go (golang) solution that I could embed in my website, as a library so to speak, and just turned it into a product later as I was looking for a new project to work on.
We're now at $1500 MRR and growing. I'm also opposing the position of "just being against GA" now and we try to differentiate more. It's almost impossible to get anyone away from GA who does do performance marketing. So I don't quite see how Plausible or other privacy-friendly products are a replacement. But most websites that use GA just don't have to, because they don't rely so much on ads or personal data to get value.
I might be abusing the term here, but Plausible seems like the best example of a mittelstand[1] that sells SaaS.
They are not beholden to VC investors and can grow slowly, organically. According to this article, they were able to cover their costs by January 2021. By keeping their team small, they can remain sustainable for a long time and refine their product.
The biggest challenge for growth right now seems to be that customer support costs will scale linearly with growth.
Scaling customer support is the biggest fear, but I think it isn’t as bad as people think it is.
1. You can get a long way with extensive FAQ and give people ways to help themselves.
2. Existing customers don’t need the same kind of handholding as new customers, because they know the software pretty well.
3. It is up to you how much actual support you provide.
4. Customer support heavily depends on the kind of customers you have/want. If you provide something for free, you get a lot more stupid support requests than if you charge a modest fee.
I suspect that support costs are actually sub-linear, as you scale you don't just add support staff, you start putting in extra stages to redirect support - better documentation, UX designers, community support. Support requests are a mix of unique challenges and common challenges, the common challenges can always be pushed towards a fixed support cost.
Customer support can definitely be handled or “minimized” by what I’d call “extreme thoughtfulness”. Design your application with the correct abstractions, be ready to redesign everything from the ground up every two years as requirements change, and constantly try to create tooling that will help customers and CSMs serve as much as possible themselves.
Since reading the thread on money-making side hustles on HN a few days back[1], I was able to finally brush off my procrastination and start twiddling with some of my side projects that have been lying dormant over the years! And the model Plausible uses (I think the right term is "Open Core"?) which is also used by the incredible Product analytics tool Posthog [1] aligns really well with how I want to build out my side-hustles. Open source, but also available packaged and hosted if you so prefer.
One thing I was concerned about was about revenue that these "open source by default" products make, so glad that this post has come along just in time to alleviate some of those concerns (of course, as with most engineering side projects, the priority is to build something cool first, and if it ends up making some money, then all the better!) and it's always nice to see successful OSS-driven products in a crowded analytics space.
(I'm a PostHog cofounder - we get about 35% of revenue from (2) and 65% from (3) below)
There are three established ways to make money from open source if you're thinking about this.. my default recommendation would be the exact model Plausible uses today - (3) below, if you are just getting started and either bootstrapped or VC backed in today's funding environment.
1. paid support
Advantages: (i) no need to build any extra features or set up hosting for your customers up front - low risk of wasting time in case you don't get product market fit with your paid product (ii) probably a good way to get close to users, as long as you don't end up over-fitting to 1 or 2 edge case use cases (who are, likely, those most likely to need paid support) - however, this will happen naturally if you set up a slack/discord community and you help people out for free
Disadvantages: (i) you are no longer a builder, so you're not doing 100% leveraged work, so the margins are slimmer (ii) will take some time to get to revenue because you will need a reasonably popular project to get much demand (iii) this will be hard to fund if you want to do the VC route, there are exceptions though
2. extra, paid self-hosted features
description: you have an open source project, and users can buy premium features on top for a fee of some kind
Advantages: (i if you target enterprises who don't want to send data outside their environment who don't want to buy closed source SAAS products - they can try + buy much your product faster than your competition's
Disadvantages: (i) it's hard to avoid customers expecting support managing the instance (just because they're paying you, even though you "just" sold extra features) (ii) you have to build a lot since you need an open source product and a paid product on top - so it needs a lot of investment to do this without hurting the open source project's value (I'd strongly recommend you get VC if you do this option, as you'll probably find bigger order values but slower sales cycles as well as all the building work) (iii) many people think everyone is moving to cloud, but we've seen there is a ton of underserved market here (more than enough to get to $100M+ revenue in our market at least), and increasing legislation around user privacy is keeping pressure on here
3. paid hosting of the project
description: you have an open source project, and users can pay you to host it for them
If you are bootstrapping or even VC backed in today's funding environment, I'd recommend defaulting to open source project _and_ a cloud hosted version as your paid version, unless there's a good reason not to.
Advantages: (i) this is the fastest way to monetize (ii) for users without self hosting needs, this is likely a better user experience - less work to manage, so you may just grow a lot quicker initially
Disadvantages: (i) you need to manage the hosted version (ii) at a product level, you are potentially competing head on with closed source SAAS
Posthog looks really nice, but given the focus on Kubernetes for deployment, and the number of services deployed (Postgres, Clickhouse, Zookeeper, Redis, Kafka, a worker, and the web app itself), I presume it's aimed at large sites?
“We’re intentionally small, profitable and sustainable.”
This here ^^. Too many fall in the trap of agiling themselves to death. Instead, find the right people with the right skills and dont force process. Communicate well and frequently and you’ve got yourself a well oiled team. Current client has successfully managed to daily, retro and refine themselves to a drop in productivity by at least 20%. My invoices are coming in nicely, despite wasting days on meetings that could have been an email or a short call with the relevant stakeholders, but i’ll fire the client first chance i find one that actually wants me to work and not play “fun” t-shirt planning pokers.
We're currently on the 500K views/mo plan and are more than happy customers.
They're affordable, ethical, and the product does exactly what I want and nothing more. I simply love Plausible and I'm happy to see them picking up steam!
I have been using Google Analytics for years and it has become really crappy. Especially the latest release where you can't even see your daily traffic anymore. Everything is lagging behind, you can only see the actual data 2 days after the fact.
On the other hand I have 3M+ page views, which would induce a $129/month Plausible bill.
That's simply too much, especially because I have a very low CPM.
This is very inspirational, it’s my dream to build a business like that.
It’s also great to see that it is still possible to build sustainable businesses without the more shady practices and growth hacking you often see, without millions of vc funding, without aggressive hiring. Just a small but strong team and a great product.
It looks like it was a long journey, I applaud the perseverance, and congratulate them on their well deserved success.
Can you comment on the impact that Elixir has had for your platform? Usually reports of technology decisions are biased towards the positive, so sharing any challenges that you've experienced along the way would be really helpful. Do you think that Elixir was the right tool for the job and if you could start over again, would you choose it?
I use plausible analytics to measure traffic on my observable notebooks. I did try with GA but it didn't work with Observable's iframe sandboxing. Because plausible is open source, I could fiddle with it a little and could get it to report the top level page user facing URLs instead of the iframe's. Very happy I can get traffic stats from a site I don't own and very happy I don't need user consent because it's GFPR compliant. It tracks just what I am interested... My traffic, and with a little config it excludes my own page views. Great product, perfect for my use case I wish them well.
I think it really demonstrates how much more important execution is than an idea. Being the “simple” version of X or X for “niche user” can be a viable strategy rather than coming up with some revolutionary product idea. It also lends itself to competing as a small team, since larger competitors can't afford to pay close attention to those smaller verticals.
I’m a happy Plausible customer for https://allthecode.co - the privacy aspect is amazing but the killer feature for me? Actually understanding my website data and knowing how to find where traffic comes from and where is goes without needing to search for hours on end. GA is a disaster of UX now and this is wonderful in comparison.
> With all the new trials and customers, and an increase in larger websites trying our service, Plausible became much slower to use. (...) We moved from our PostgreSQL database to ClickHouse
Had the impression they were monitoring up to a couple hundred websites at that time. Probably small ones.
I'm surprised Postgres was slowing them down. Maybe the queries or the database were not well optimized?
If you need customizable reports (filtering and aggregating by any dimension), you cannot avoid scan over non-aggregated data. This is where you cannot optimize Postgres queries. Postgres becomes slow starting from just single million records.
[+] [-] sherbondy|3 years ago|reply
https://plausible.io/plausible.io?period=30d&source=Hacker+N...
What a great demo of the product :D
[+] [-] quincunx|3 years ago|reply
At the time of writing, Goal Conversions:
- Visit/blog 12800
- Signup 8
I knew anecdotally that HN doesn't convert but, oof, that's rough..
[+] [-] OJFord|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adrianmsmith|3 years ago|reply
I mean, when they started in 2018:
> Uku’s first thought was, “Ugh. Can we just use something other than Google Analytics?”. This is how the idea for Plausible was born.
Surely they must have looked around and seen that there were already quite a few products doing privacy-first analytics? But yet they started anyway? And had success even though their marketing doesn't really state any reasons why the user should use them not the many other privacy-first analytics offerings out there?
I mean I'm happy for them that they're successful, but I think there must be more to it than alluded to in this blog post, both in (a) the decision to start in the face of lots of competition and (b) success despite not trying to differentiate themselves from the competition.
[+] [-] cooperadymas|3 years ago|reply
When you buy a Tesla you won't find comparisons about potential savings or benefits over other electric cars. Instead it is compared to the cost of ownership of a gas powered car.
[+] [-] stedman|3 years ago|reply
> When I looked around I was fully ready to pick up another tool and install it on Gigride immediately. > > Turns out there are some alternatives for Google Analytics but I didn’t find any of them compelling. Simple Analytics and Fathom are the closest to my ideal but they are a bit too barebones to be useful for my use-case. For example, it’s quite important to me what browsers versions my users are on – if I use a css rule that isn’t supported in IE7, how many users does it affect? Neither Fathom or Simple Analytics provide that answer currently. > > This seems like an opportunity to build the tool that I really want.
[+] [-] marvinblum|3 years ago|reply
We're now at $1500 MRR and growing. I'm also opposing the position of "just being against GA" now and we try to differentiate more. It's almost impossible to get anyone away from GA who does do performance marketing. So I don't quite see how Plausible or other privacy-friendly products are a replacement. But most websites that use GA just don't have to, because they don't rely so much on ads or personal data to get value.
Our product: https://pirsch.io
[+] [-] boberoni|3 years ago|reply
They are not beholden to VC investors and can grow slowly, organically. According to this article, they were able to cover their costs by January 2021. By keeping their team small, they can remain sustainable for a long time and refine their product.
The biggest challenge for growth right now seems to be that customer support costs will scale linearly with growth.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31327219
[+] [-] WA|3 years ago|reply
1. You can get a long way with extensive FAQ and give people ways to help themselves.
2. Existing customers don’t need the same kind of handholding as new customers, because they know the software pretty well.
3. It is up to you how much actual support you provide.
4. Customer support heavily depends on the kind of customers you have/want. If you provide something for free, you get a lot more stupid support requests than if you charge a modest fee.
[+] [-] SilverBirch|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rozenmd|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anyfactor|3 years ago|reply
- Always incorporate gifs with documentation and guidelines
- Create video and step by step tutorials unconditionally
- Convert every customer interaction to an FAQ segment or a microblog
- Avoid writing books as documentation blogs. Adopt w3school like writing habits.
- Post your FAQs to stackoverflow. Two dummy accounts. One to post the questions, one to answer the question
- Add every meta information and phrasing variations possible to commonly asked questions
- Support/success staff should also be a part of the dev team so they can understand the product philoshophy and not just be a liaison of the dev.
TLDR: Make customer interaction as google-able as you can.
[+] [-] ramraj07|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] madmax108|3 years ago|reply
One thing I was concerned about was about revenue that these "open source by default" products make, so glad that this post has come along just in time to alleviate some of those concerns (of course, as with most engineering side projects, the priority is to build something cool first, and if it ends up making some money, then all the better!) and it's always nice to see successful OSS-driven products in a crowded analytics space.
Congrats folks!
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31764696
[2] https://posthog.com/
[+] [-] rambambram|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] james_impliu|3 years ago|reply
There are three established ways to make money from open source if you're thinking about this.. my default recommendation would be the exact model Plausible uses today - (3) below, if you are just getting started and either bootstrapped or VC backed in today's funding environment.
1. paid support
Advantages: (i) no need to build any extra features or set up hosting for your customers up front - low risk of wasting time in case you don't get product market fit with your paid product (ii) probably a good way to get close to users, as long as you don't end up over-fitting to 1 or 2 edge case use cases (who are, likely, those most likely to need paid support) - however, this will happen naturally if you set up a slack/discord community and you help people out for free
Disadvantages: (i) you are no longer a builder, so you're not doing 100% leveraged work, so the margins are slimmer (ii) will take some time to get to revenue because you will need a reasonably popular project to get much demand (iii) this will be hard to fund if you want to do the VC route, there are exceptions though
2. extra, paid self-hosted features
description: you have an open source project, and users can buy premium features on top for a fee of some kind
Advantages: (i if you target enterprises who don't want to send data outside their environment who don't want to buy closed source SAAS products - they can try + buy much your product faster than your competition's
Disadvantages: (i) it's hard to avoid customers expecting support managing the instance (just because they're paying you, even though you "just" sold extra features) (ii) you have to build a lot since you need an open source product and a paid product on top - so it needs a lot of investment to do this without hurting the open source project's value (I'd strongly recommend you get VC if you do this option, as you'll probably find bigger order values but slower sales cycles as well as all the building work) (iii) many people think everyone is moving to cloud, but we've seen there is a ton of underserved market here (more than enough to get to $100M+ revenue in our market at least), and increasing legislation around user privacy is keeping pressure on here
3. paid hosting of the project
description: you have an open source project, and users can pay you to host it for them
If you are bootstrapping or even VC backed in today's funding environment, I'd recommend defaulting to open source project _and_ a cloud hosted version as your paid version, unless there's a good reason not to.
Advantages: (i) this is the fastest way to monetize (ii) for users without self hosting needs, this is likely a better user experience - less work to manage, so you may just grow a lot quicker initially
Disadvantages: (i) you need to manage the hosted version (ii) at a product level, you are potentially competing head on with closed source SAAS
[+] [-] GordonS|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] yrgulation|3 years ago|reply
This here ^^. Too many fall in the trap of agiling themselves to death. Instead, find the right people with the right skills and dont force process. Communicate well and frequently and you’ve got yourself a well oiled team. Current client has successfully managed to daily, retro and refine themselves to a drop in productivity by at least 20%. My invoices are coming in nicely, despite wasting days on meetings that could have been an email or a short call with the relevant stakeholders, but i’ll fire the client first chance i find one that actually wants me to work and not play “fun” t-shirt planning pokers.
[+] [-] adamsmith143|3 years ago|reply
How do you know they don't use agile? Being small, profitable and sustainable is not necessarily != Agile.
[+] [-] danielovichdk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mbStavola|3 years ago|reply
They're affordable, ethical, and the product does exactly what I want and nothing more. I simply love Plausible and I'm happy to see them picking up steam!
[+] [-] sgallant|3 years ago|reply
Traffic goes from approx 4K visitors/day to almost 20K visitors today (so far).
https://plausible.io/plausible.io
[+] [-] throwaway4good|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] that_guy_iain|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] janmo|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aembleton|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robertlagrant|3 years ago|reply
- Host the code unmodified, which is within the terms of the licence
- Host the code modified, and release the mods, which is within the terms of the licence
Surely the worry is they will just host and charge for it for less then Plausible can, which AGPL doesn't stop (to my knowledge)?
[+] [-] danuker|3 years ago|reply
And competing might not offer enough of a margin. Integration is hard, even if they save on the codebase itself.
[+] [-] your_challenger|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mathgladiator|3 years ago|reply
I also use plausible.
[+] [-] codeptualize|3 years ago|reply
It’s also great to see that it is still possible to build sustainable businesses without the more shady practices and growth hacking you often see, without millions of vc funding, without aggressive hiring. Just a small but strong team and a great product.
It looks like it was a long journey, I applaud the perseverance, and congratulate them on their well deserved success.
[+] [-] Dowwie|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tlarkworthy|3 years ago|reply
https://observablehq.com/@endpointservices/plausible-analyti...
[+] [-] winrid|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benjaminwootton|3 years ago|reply
There must be a lesson here in doing one thing well.
Thousands of people choosing to pay when there is a massively more powerful and fully featured free alternative.
Web analytics have also been around for decades, and even today there is no shortage of competition.
[+] [-] jamil7|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] simonbarker87|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rmbyrro|3 years ago|reply
Had the impression they were monitoring up to a couple hundred websites at that time. Probably small ones.
I'm surprised Postgres was slowing them down. Maybe the queries or the database were not well optimized?
[+] [-] zX41ZdbW|3 years ago|reply