Plausible Co-founder Interview
Learn how Plausible, a Google analytics alternative went from $400 MRR to over $100K with clear positioning.
1. What's your startups name, what does it do, how long have you been working on it and (optional) your MRR?
We’re working on Plausible Analytics, an easy to use, open source, lightweight (< 1 KB) and privacy-friendly alternative to Google Analytics. We’re entirely funded by our subscribers and just made it to our 5th anniversary in January 2024.
We used to share our MRR and publicly celebrate the milestones in the early days but have stopped at around 100k level. It was very exciting and motivating to share the success but at some point when the numbers got larger it felt a bit weird to continue doing it. We still try to be transparent in other ways so all of our code is available to the public, our website stats are open and we share lessons learned too.
2. What's your name and what were you doing before?
My name is Marko and I’m the co-founder focused on the communication and marketing side of things. This is the first project that I’m a co-founder of. Previously, I worked in online marketing both for a large, publicly-listed company and a venture-funded startup.
3. How did you come up with your startup and it's name?
My co-founder Uku is a developer and he started thinking about building a simple web analytics tool when he was asked to install Google Analytics on the site of a startup he worked at. The name itself was proposed by Uku’s colleague who had registered the domain name plausible.io but wasn’t using it for anything.
4. Are you a programmer, if so, how did you learn and how long did it take?
I’m not a programmer. I can do some copy/paste “programming” to tweak my personal blog but all my Plausible pull requests on our GitHub are just about the copy on our website, blog posts, documentation and such.
5. How long did it take you to build a mvp, did you do any validation?
Uku released the first beta version of Plausible less than two months after having the idea to work on it. He basically followed the “build in public” approach so started sharing each step along the way on Indie Hackers and Twitter.
There was no big strategy behind it in terms of validation etc. The main validation really was that the web analytics market is so huge and that so many people have issues with the dominant player in that market. There must be a little bit of space for an alternative there.
6. What was your launch like, what did you do, was it a success?
There was no big launch either. Simply a message about the beta release being shared on Twitter and Indie Hackers. Things were a bit slow early on in terms of commercial success and we only had about 400 MRR a year and a half into the project. I’m glad that Uku stuck to it during that time and that he ended up reaching out to me to team up.
7. How long did it take to get your first customer?
The first five months or so were the beta period. People could sign up and use the beta product but it was free to use and there were no subscriptions. First paid customer arrived shortly after the subscriptions were launched and all the existing beta users were informed about it.
8. What's your top marketing methods and how can others start doing them?
When I joined Uku, almost a year and a half into this journey, I started working on having a clear positioning for Plausible and I started publishing blog posts. We haven’t done any type of paid marketing at all so our marketing to this day is really based on content and word of mouth.
The content I published was not directly trying to sell Plausible but was mostly based on being informative, educational, taking a stand and having an opinion. As an example, the first blog post was titled “Why you should stop using Google Analytics on your website” and it made it onto the front page of Hacker News which changed the traction for us.
9. Whats the top 5 tools you use to run your startup?
Some of the key tools we use to run Plausible:
- Clickhouse database for stats
- Hetzner for servers
- Bunny for CDN
- GitHub is where all the development is
- Basecamp is where all the internal discussion is
10. What would you do differently if starting over?
Couple of things come to mind:
It took us almost a year and a half to start putting more focus on marketing. Uku is a developer with less experience in marketing so most of his time was spent on the development. The marketing back then was mostly based on being transparent and sharing what we were working on in public.
We’re open source and we started with something that’s called a permissive license not intentionally but more because it was the most popular choice on GitHub. We’ve since learned a lot about running a sustainable open source project. One of the lessons was that permissive license is not ideal for a project like ours so we had to switch the license to something that works better.