From $400/mo to $188,000/mo in 3 years. Marko Saric of Plausible tells us how he did it.

Marko Saric and Uku Täht built their privacy-friendly analytics platform from $400/mo to $188,000/mo in 3 years.

No investment. No slimy marketing tactics.

I caught up with Marko to find out how. 👇

Marko and the hockey stick

James: Plausible has had hockey-stick growth from pretty much the moment you came on. Let's start there.

Marko: My co-founder Uku is the developer. He started developing Plausible with the regular ‘build in public’ approach. This included posting what he was up to on Twitter, Indie Hackers, and the blog — what feature he was building, the thinking behind it, feature announcements, feedback gathering, etc.

I joined a bit over a year into that. When I joined I continued the public approach but added some content marketing into the mix too. This included a lot of content with educational, informational, and opinionated angles focusing on the world of web analytics, online privacy, and bootstrapped startups.

Content marketing done right

James: Sounds pretty standard. What did you do differently?

Marko: I think what’s unusual about the way we grow is more about what we haven’t done rather than what we have done.

We’ve never done any type of paid advertising, we don’t have an affiliate program, we don’t pay anyone to recommend us, we don’t have a mailing list that we use to broadcast marketing messages, we don’t do any sales calls, etc.

James: What's the thinking behind that?

Marko: We want to grow without supporting surveillance capitalism. Some may say that we’re growing too slow or we’re leaving money on the table or someone less ethical will steal our lunch, and we're okay with that.

We don't want to sacrifice our principles or happiness to become the next unicorn.

James: Right, and these principles are core to your branding — they're a big part of why customers choose your product. So it's a win-win.

How did you approach writing content?

Marko: When there were headlines or happenings that our potential audience cared about, I would post about it. I didn't just repeat the information everyone else was reporting. I put our personal spin and point of view into it.

There’s a lot of interest in this type of content. And for us, Google Analytics is a competitor, so there’s always something to talk about.

James: How did you differentiate these from other posts?

Marko: The posts were not promotional at all. I tried to make them as useful and as educational as I could.

And I wouldn’t just publish and move to the next post either. After each post, I would try and get some attention by posting it in relevant communities and niche sites in order to drive interest.

Sometimes I would simply submit the post to Hacker News. Sometimes I would take the full content of the post and republish on Indie Hackers and so on. Without doing this second part, nobody would have known about all the content we were publishing.

James: Make sense — if you're avoiding surveillance capitalism, you probably aren't focusing on getting traffic via Google.

Ok, back to the hockey stick... so um, how?

Marko: It’s really difficult to know. And I doubt we could simply replicate this same success if we tried to create a new startup.

Luck and timing have a big part to play. We’re riding the privacy wave which is increasing in popularity. We're in a huge market and the big player made so many bad decisions. Plus, new privacy regulations have opened the doors to new ways of doing analytics.

Our experience and passion for this field have a role to play as well. The product needs to deliver. The communication needs to be clear. The fact that we’re transparent and try to run Plausible with specific principles and values helps a lot. There needs to be some message in there that resonates with people.

And then there's consistency. It might seem easy and quick from the outside, but Uku has spent countless hours writing code and I’ve spent countless hours writing words. We’ve been taking small steps consistently day after day for several years now, and all that time and effort, including all the tiny wins along the way, make a difference.

James: What, no silver bullet? Darn.

So when did you start seeing progress?

Marko: The first blog post I published was called 'Why you should stop using Google Analytics on your website’. I submitted it to Hacker News. It made it to the top of the front page and it changed traction for us.

A growth spin on building in public

James: Ok, let's talk about building in public.

Marko: We continued the ‘build in public’ approach but with a growth spin to it by sharing our marketing steps taken, achievements accomplished (including sharing our MRR milestones), and lessons learned.

James: Do you do it from your personal accounts or brand account?

Marko: My own account was larger than Plausible’s account early on so I posted a lot there in those days. These days, I mostly post from the official Plausible account.

But I post much less than I used to. Brand recognition for Plausible is strong now, so posting on social doesn’t make that much of a difference in terms of signups.

I know that, in general, personal accounts tend to get better engagement than brand accounts, but we’re trying to make it work with the brand account. I also like the idea that Plausible can stand on its own and be relevant without using my personal profile to amplify the message.

Maintaining hockey-stick growth

Doing what works

James: Ok, so you worked your content magic, built in public, and now you've got traction. What did you do next?

Marko: It’s remarkable how little our growth approach has changed from when we were two people with $400 MRR and less than 100 paid users.

James: For sure, I would have anticipated new strategies.

Marko: We just continued doing what worked. I published new blog posts twice per week several months in a row in that first year. It’s busier now, so I don’t publish as often.

Baking in retention

James: What about retention?

Marko: Looking at ProfitWell benchmarks, our Voluntary Churn Rate is 52% lower than average for a company of our size MRR-wise. We’re somewhere just under 2% churn on an average month so the retention doesn’t seem to be much of an issue and we haven’t done much about it.

James: How'd you pull that off?

Marko: It’s connected to the way we communicate and do marketing, I think. Most of our paid users come through word of mouth. They have a specific need or a particular issue with Google Analytics and they come to us because we help them solve it. It’s all pretty organic and natural, which means the people who sign up are likely to stick around.

James: Makes sense. What about the product itself?

Marko: The product is solid, fast, easy to use, and stable. And we regularly improve it according to the feedback, which also helps to keep people happy.

One rule we have is to never overpromise and underdeliver. It’s pretty common for companies to promise a certain feature will be built at a certain time to get someone to sign up. We don’t do that and I think this helps in terms of retention too.

This also means that we rarely make big breaking changes to how the product works. Our dashboard on the surface level is pretty close in terms of look and feel to how it was three years ago when I joined, but it’s just got so much more powerful and is providing many more insights for many new marketing and business use cases.

Boosting LTV (plus their business model)

James: Have you optimized the lifetime value of your users?

Marko: This is something we’re not that good at and we haven’t focused much on. ProfitWell tells me that our Lifetime Customer Value is 77% lower than the average for a company of our size MRR-wise. We have over 11,000 paid users, but our average revenue per user is under $20.

I think this is because our pricing is purely based on our cost at this stage (the number of pageviews a site gets) but we plan to experiment with value-based pricing later this year by introducing a business plan with some premium features exclusive to the paid users on that plan.

We’ve never increased the prices for our paid users either and I think doing it this way with premium features rather than increasing prices to all is a better approach. If you don’t need these new features, you can stay on the same plan and same price.

James: That's a good segway into your business model.

Marko: Our business model is a typical SaaS startup model. We offer a service that we charge subscription fees for.

But we’re an open-source SaaS startup too, mainly for the sake of trust and transparency but we’ve also decided to make it so that you can download our code and run it on your own server. You don’t get support from us, you don’t get to support further development of the product either and you need to do all the work managing an analytics infrastructure yourself but it’s free as in beer for those who want it.

James: Going open-source seems particularly important in your niche. Must be a little scary to give away the keys to the castle, though.

Marko: Luckily for us, there are a lot of people who would prefer to pay us a fee to manage and maintain everything for them so they can focus on running their business and whatever they’re passionate about instead of being focused on managing the uptime and backups of their web analytics server infrastructure.

James: Nice. And we touched on that last time we spoke, so let's leave it there. Alright, where can people find you?

Marko: Plausible.io. And we’re present on Twitter, Mastodon, and LinkedIn.

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