They Made $1 Million+ Going Against Google

In 2018, when Uku Täht was asked to set up Google Analytics for his company, he asked a key question: "Can we just use something other than Google Analytics?"

At the time, the answer was no. But fast forward to today, and there's a good chance you might use a company called Plausible Analytics, which now makes over $1 million in annual revenue by being everything Google Analytics isn't.

Plausible is simple to use, doesn't track individual users, and isn't free…

You might think charging for something Google gives away for "free" is business suicide, especially for a bootstrapped two-person team. But Plausible's story shows that sometimes being the paid underdog with a clear "we're not Google" positioning is exactly what people want.

Now, how Plausible has grown this has been a little unique compared to the dozens of bootstrapped companies I’ve studied in The Bootstrapped Report because it’s maybe the most straight forward growth strategy I’ve seen.

With online privacy being a key concern for many right now, let's dive into how Plausible Analytics has bootstrapped their way to over $1 million in annual revenue by being the privacy-focused alternative to Google Analytics.

The Story of Plausible Analytics

The Start of Plausible

In 2018, Uku Täht, the original founder of Plausible Analytics, was working at a tech company as a developer when the marketing team asked if he could set up Google Analytics for the company's website.

Uku set it up, but also asked a key question: "Can we just use something other than Google Analytics?"

According to Uku, there were 4 main reasons why he asked this question:

First, Google Analytics, especially Google Analytics 4 (GA4), is overwhelming and hard to learn. The UX isn't the greatest to say the least.

Second, Google has Google Analytics for a reason. Google wants to track all of the end users on websites and they happily do so through Google Analytics.

Third, the accuracy of some reports on Google Analytics are suspect. Session length and direct traffic source, two key metrics for many marketers, can be pretty inaccurate.

Fourth, Google Analytics is heavy on websites which means there's more to load when someone visits your website. A big deal for speed of a website and sometimes the user experience.

That led Uku to essentially saying, "screw it, I'll build my own." And thus Plausible Analytics was born.

In December 2018, Uku started writing the first lines of code for Plausible and the MVP was ready in January 2019.

Launching Plausible

With the MVP ready, Uku posted that he had built Plausible on Indie Hackers, a community for founders building profitable software businesses.

Plausible was completely free to use when he launched it, there wasn't even the ability to pay for Plausible.

Through posting building in public updates and product updates on Indie Hackers, Hacker News, and Twitter, by May of 2019, Plausible had 60 beta users using Plausible for free.

In May of 2019, Uku started charging people to use Plausible with pretty affordable pricing based on what he thought was fair. Here's the original pricing model:

• up to 10k pageviews - $6 / mo
• up to 100k pageviews - $12 / mo
• up to 1m pageviews - $36 / mo

A handful of the beta users took Uku up on the pricing model and Uku made $64 in the first month of charging customers.

Uku continued to use this marketing playbook while building Plausible. He would write blog posts, and then share those out on Twitter, Indie Hackers, and Hacker News. No engagement pods or anything like that, just posting where he thought people might care about the work he was doing.

In July of 2019, one of his blog posts hit the front page of Hacker News.

He hit 2,500 visitors in one day to the Plausible website, but even with that traffic spike, revenue didn't spike with it. Uku had just grown Plausible to $118 MRR.

In February of 2020, Uku decided he wanted a marketing partner for Plausible so he could focus on just developing Plausible as a product.

He ended up seeing one really relevant blog post by Marko Saric, who wrote a blog post called "De-Google your site". Not sure if there's a blog post that would be any more relevant to the work Plausible was and is doing.

Uku cold emailed Marko after seeing his blog post about being his marketing partner on Plausible and by March 2020, Marko joined as a co-founder to Plausible.

Bringing on Marko as the co-founder of Plausible ended up being a tipping point for Plausible.

Marko ended up taking the same playbook Uku was using for marketing, but supercharged it.

Marko published his first blog post for Plausible on April 8th, 2020 and it ended up being the top post on Hacker News that day. Not bad for a first post.

The positioning of Plausible

Being the top post on Hacker News is awesome, but that's not what is most interesting here.

What's interesting is how Marko positioned Plausible.

The first blog post he wrote was "Why you should stop using Google Analytics".

It's super clear and it's picking a fight which makes this blog post clickworthy.

Everyone and their mother is using Google Analytics at the time without thinking about it and here Marko is saying, "yeah, that's a dumb idea".

What I love about it is that it creates a lot of intrigue which leads to a lot of conversations around Plausible and makes Plausible incredibly memorable. You also know what Plausible does right out of the gate. It's "oh, they're the Google Analytics alternative".

Do you always want to be the alternative to your bigger competitor? Not necessarily, but if you can latch on to their marketing and their ecosystem to benefit you in a big way, it's not a bad idea.

The scaling of Plausible

This blog post on "Why you should stop using Google Analytics" brought Plausible to a new level.

They had over 25,000 views from just Hacker News on that blog post, and it added over $400 MRR which brought them to a total of just over $1k MRR.

This playbook of writing blog posts and having them shared out in many places has been scalable too.

Even though Marko wasn't always consistent with posting new blog posts, he was at least publishing a new blog post every other week and sometimes would publish two blogs per week.

By April of 2021, Uku and Marko hit $250k in ARR. A little over 2 years from starting Plausible.

The growth strategies of Plausible Analytics

I mentioned throughout their story about how Uku & Marko would write a blog post and then share it to places like Indie Hackers and Hacker News.

Plausible's open data validates that Indie Hackers and Hacker News have been a large part of their growth.

However, there's a lot more to it, so let's dive in.

1. Communities

Hacker News and Indie Hackers are definitely where Plausible met their first customers and users. There's no debate about that.

When you look at Plausible's open data on site traffic, there's more to it when it comes to communities.

First, they've published on their blog that not all communities have been great for them to post in. For example, Plausible launched on Product Hunt in August of 2020 and they were the #2 product of the day on August 27th. Yet, it barely brought in any customers or traffic.

This was when Plausible was starting to really pick up steam and yet, Product Hunt, a place where you would think they would naturally do well, didn't go so hot. Proof that your ideal customer persona matters.

Second, it wasn't just Hacker News and Indie Hackers.

Github & Reddit are lower on the list for Plausible when it comes to traffic in the time frame of January 2019 to April 2021, but they're still significant. They had over 17,000 visitors from Github and over 6,700 visitors from Reddit.

It gets even better for Github if you filter with the goal of "sign up for a trial". According to Plausible's public dashboard, Github brought in more free trials than Hacker News and Indie Hackers by a wide margin.

In a lot of ways, it makes sense since Github is where the developers are. Plausible's target market is so concentrated on Github compared to other communities.

2. SEO

Plausible might be anti-Google Analytics but they can't claim to be completely anti-Google.

Google search is their #2 source for user signups - a little bit of proof that they're latching on to Google's ecosystem to draw some people away from it.

While Hacker News drove more visitors to Plausible's website, Google search has delivered more actual signups. This makes perfect sense - people actively searching for analytics tools are already in the market for a solution like Plausible.

The blog content strategy paid dividends here. All those posts about privacy-focused analytics and Google alternatives created a strong SEO foundation, especially when amplified through communities like Hacker News and Indie Hackers.

Google isn't their only search engine success story either. DuckDuckGo has been remarkably effective for Plausible - a natural fit given the shared privacy values. Looking beyond April 2021 to the present, DuckDuckGo ranks as the 4th best signup source with over 1,200 total conversions.

One other interesting place when it comes to SEO for Plausible? ChatGPT. It wasn't part of their road from $0 to $250k in annual revenue, but is clearly a part of their current trajectory with over 500 signups just from ChatGPT.

3. Social Media

We've covered about 90% of Plausible's growth strategies so far.

Twitter is the last 10%.

Uku and Marko would share their blog posts on Hacker News, Indie Hackers, and Twitter.

It makes sense given where Twitter was in 2020. It was a much different place than it is today.

It was way easier to grow a following, get traction, and build in public in 2020-2022. It clearly shows that in Plausible's data.

It was a significant part of the road to $250k for Plausible but has clearly tapered off. The growth of Plausible from Twitter pretty much dies at the very end of 2023.

Sadly, this one graph feels like one of the best representations that Twitter just isn't the same as it once was.

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