Simple Analytics Co-Founder Interview
Here's how Iron & Adrian grew Simple Analytics to $30K MRR with zero validation.
1. What's your startups name, what does it do, how long have you been working on it and (optional) your MRR?
Simple Analytics is a privacy-friendly and simple Google Analytics alternative. No cookies, no personal data - just the insights you need in a straightforward dashboard.
Simple Analytics is a two-person business. No investors. No VC stuff. Just me and Adriaan. We own 100%.
Adriaan started in 2018. He was fed up with Google Analytics. It's complex, bloated, and clunky, and Google doesn't care about privacy or ethics. He launched it on HackerNews back then and got some initial traffic. From there, it gradually grew into a full-time one-person business.
I joined in 2022. Adriaan was stuck at 11K MRR for a while since he only focused on building the product—no marketing. I brought in the marketing angle, and we just passed 30K MRR last month. We have an open page where we share our MRR, costs, profit, etc.
2. What's your name and what were you doing before?
My name is Iron Brands (Yes, this is my real name haha). I'm from The Netherlands.
Before joining Simple Analytics, I founded another business. It was a marketplace to connect students with internship opportunities in The Netherlands, it's called Fiks. Please, to all indie hackers reading this, don't start a marketplace. I started this when I when I was in university with my best friend. We both couldn't code, so we thought a marketplace would be a great idea to start with. (and boy, we were wrong).
We worked on it tirelessly for three years and eventually we were able to pull it off in some form. My friend is still running it and doing 100K ARR. I was in charge of sales and did 1862 sales meetings in 2,5 years. Nearly worked myself in a burnout and that's when I decided I needed to get into Saas. I met Adriaan and the rest is history.
3. How did you come up with your startup and it's name?
So that was Adriaan. He was fed up with the way Google Analytics disregarded visitor privacy. Their business model basically comes down to giving you the product for free and selling your visitors' data to advertisers. In addition, GA is such an overpowered solution for a lot of people that just want a nice dashboard with some stats.
Adriaan complained to his girlfriend about this and she basically told him "Why don't you build a better solution then?" This is how he got going.
The name speaks for itself. Very happy he chose that one.
4. Are you a programmer, if so, how did you learn and how long did it take?
Does this say enough?
I'm definitely not a programmer. Just barely know how to open a browser. I also added this interview in the discussion section, not via the regular way cause it took me too long to figure out how haha.
5. How long did it take you to build a mvp, did you do any validation?
I think it was a couple of months, but Adriaan launched the "MVP" on HN quite soon. It only consisted of pageviews when he launched. Nothing else. Just that.
No real validation. Just scratching your own itch and launch it. When HN blew up, Adriaan knew there was something there.
6. What was your launch like, what did you do, was it a success?
Hackernews. Blew up. And got the first users through the door. Product Hunt was not really a success. Most of the first users came from Hackernews and Twitter. One of the first users was Pieter Levels. That helps with distribution.
7. How long did it take to get your first customer?
So Adriaan took a couple of months of building, but then when he launched, users started coming in.
8. What's your top marketing methods and how can others start doing them?
Allright, this is me!
So we did quite some things, but I mainly believe you can divide marketing into two phases.
Phase 1: Getting traction - Going from 0 to 1
Getting traction is all about getting that first users in. Doing things that don't scale.
- Getting into Reddit communities, Facebook groups, Forums
- Start reaching out on Linkedin, email people, cold dm etc.
- Add your startup to directories
- Add comments to Reddit pages that already rank for your keyword (Parasite SEO)
- Answer Quora
- Build in public
Just that scrappy kind of stuff. And hammer on it!
The one that worked the best for us: Hacking Hackernews
Here is how it worked:
- Adriaan built a newstracker for new on Google Analytics
- When news came in, we jumped right on it.
- Create a blog outlining whats happening and what the implications are
- Only add a little CTA at the end
- Submit on Hackernews and Reddit
- Go viral
It's a hit and miss strategy with considerable more hits than misses for us.
Phase 2: Focus on long-term growth - Going from 1 to 10
When you get to a certain stage where you want to go all for the long run, it's time to focus on different stuff. Stuff that enables long-term sustainable growth.
- Get your pricing right.
- Add a free plan (This is a delicate one. Doesn't fit every business)
- Build shareable features for your product. (Free tools, powered by etc.)
- Get your referral plan right.
- Get your onboarding right.
- Get you homepage right.
- Get your email sequences right.
- Think about viral loops: How can one user bring in more users? Tally is a great a example to learn about this.
And last but not least:
- SEO
- SEO
- SEO
9. Whats the top 5 tools you use to run your startup?
Tech stack: Ask Adriaan. I know we use "bare metal" servers. Adriaan is very proud of that.
Marketing stack:
10. What would you do differently if starting over?
Man, a lot. If I started with Adriaan together in 2018, we would be at 100K MRR now. Not because of me, but Adriaan did three years without marketing. You really to fix product and distribution. One of the two is not enough. We are still fixing distribution now.
If you don't want to do marketing. Find someone who loves to do this. There are so many people like me out there (noobs that can't code), that don't know how to build product but just love marketing and growth. The co-founder discussion is something for another blog, but don't neglect distribution. Either do it yourself or find someone that loves doing it.