How Plausible Analytics CEO Marko Saric grew to $3.1M revenue and 1.5K customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is marco saric she's the co-founder of plausible analytics a simple open source lightweight and privacy-friendly alternative to google analytics it's trusted by over 3 000 subscribers to deliver their website and business insights marco you ready to take us to the top i am all right when did you launch this thing what year uh about two years ago two and a half years ago okay so called 2019 time frame something like that i think it was actually 2018 december that's like when developing started in about summer of 2019 was the first kind of launch of the product and and get us into your like personal situation for a second were you working a full-time gig and this was a side project or you quit the gig where were you in life yeah so basically plus started as a is a project of my co-founder he's a developer he started developing it he spent about a year developing everything getting it on like ready to go and then he got me involved because i'm the marketer so i came from the marketing side i i took this as uh as a full-time kind of uh i joined him as a co-founder pretty much then about a year in or so okay now it's the equity conversation is always tough with this sort of setup did you guys just split it 50 50 or do you have less than him uh 51 49 51 for him i think there was some legal reason there was somebody needed to have a tiny tiny majority but yeah that's uh i felt kind of like a fair thing yeah i came in from the like i kind of helped him develop it as in from the marketing side of things and kind of kind of push it that way and he does the development side of the the product and design and all that so i think it's kind of these two things coexist and balance each other out so i think it's it's quite fair i want to dive into the product here in a second but first tell us on average what are customers paying for this per month uh we have a whole range depends so basically we charge by paid view so you know if you have a small website with thousand you know page views per month you will pay something like five dollars per month but you might have 150 million you know and then you'll you're paying into hundreds per month so it's a huge range starting from you know five dollars it can be up to hundreds what's your what's your uh don't name the customer obviously but your largest customer what are they paying for do you know it's actually that's the 150 million one but what are they paying per month i think it's somewhere around 600 per month something like that but i don't that could be somewhere somewhere there okay sure fair enough five to 600 per month um do you know what a sweet spot is like is a hundred bucks per month like a good sweet spot somewhere in there it really depends i mean uh uh i think in general web analytics are a bit uh more affordable than say product analytics so even when people come from something like a mix panel and things like that they're they're kind of like they feel feel comfortable in this kind of price range because you know product analytics for the same page view number of pages you'll be paying way more okay yeah i want to i want to focus my questions around a persona so i understand you have a massive range but like like if you really just take all your customers and divide into whatever your revenue is what would be the average customer being paid be paying per month about let's say maybe fifty dollars five zero okay okay yeah i have not done this kind of calculation no problem so so you come in as a marketer you get 49 of the business how did you sign up for the first 100 customers basically uh we're bootstrapped self-funded so you know ads are out of the account with the question uh what we did i mean what i have experienced in and what i felt was the good uh solution for previously first open source product is to go content marketing sites so i started creating content i think in in on the third week or so when i joined i i published my first blog post after doing some kind of more marketing side on positioning on the website and so on but i published my first blog post of in april last year about why you should remove google analytics from your website like i don't know 10 10 different reasons all there you know a couple thousand words published it event on top of the hacker news got you know i don't know 20 30 000 visitors on the first day or two uh got out of somewhere about 60 70 by now but basically content is how we got our first and still still are getting our our you know trials to this day talk to me with the hacker news for a second so so when you did that you got how many unique website hits that day i think it it actually we're a bit funniest because we are all open so you can actually go to clausbul.io and you can like hit our website and there's like a button that says live demo and that's where you can see our own stats but i think uh it must must have been about must have been about you know 20 000 that day okay and how many new trial signups do you remember i will have to go backwards but i think let's say you know blogging is it's not like you get you know you know 10 of these through it's not like an ad you know so it's it's a bit more indirect process so let's say we got 50 to 100 out of that but what it does for us is is kind of builds the the brand the brand awareness and kind of the kind of us getting us into this this field and people then you know few weeks down the line i i may need a new analytics platform oh i remember those guys that talked about why you should not use google analytics and and that's how it goes really it's not as direct as something like ads so it's you know 20 000 does not really mean you will get a huge spike in signups on that day but a few weeks down the line it it will show yep very cool so this is how you get your first sort of spike of customers now how many customers are you serving today they're about 3 300 subscribers they're paying customers exactly and we get um about i mean yesterday we got something like 50 trials we got about 1 000 of your trials per month and then yeah about the one third of those convert so it's going quite well um last year march when i joined we were about i don't know like less than 100 and now we're at 3 300 um and is is going quite well i think we were mrr was about uh 400 or something when i joined so april last year about 400 and 200 400 per month mrr yes in total total 400. yeah and i think it was 405 saying in start of april last year and now we are at 23 000 something 20 23 300 i think something along those lines i love that okay so if we take 23 300 divided by the 3 300 paying subscribers they're paying on average about seven bucks a month something like that which would be i'm using your pricing your pricing slider on your site so that price point would be what about 10k unique website views something like i think i think something like last time i checked about eighty percent of customers are on the lower two tiers so up to 100 000 page views which which kind of makes sense i mean it's not easy to get a website with more than 100 000 pages so about 80 percent of customers are there in those first two tiers and then you know you know the 150 million tier it's like the only one yeah this is such a cool story why did you guys decide to build you know a lot of people should i build an open public should i not build in public you're leaning all in you're building in public why did you guys decide to do that fully open source i think open source and previously first they kind of go together hand in hand i think if you wanna be able to be transparent and trustworthy you gotta you gotta show what you're doing and kind of you cannot be like google our biggest competitor the google analytics is like a black box you know you have no idea what they're doing while they're completely opposite you can actually go to github you can you know view our code you can you know contribute to it you can even download it and run it yourself on your own server you don't even need to pay anything to us so i think that transparency was really important to to kind of showcase this previously first and kind of that we have nothing to hide kind of thing yep yeah no i agree with that now talk to me about how you guys are managing cash flow so you're you're bootstrapped how many people are on the team now today two just two of us this is great i love so revenue per employee is about 11 12 grand per month i always i always like looking at that metric so you guys are doing this both full time now well both both full time i mean the first few months or so we didn't get paid then for a few months we kind of got a little bit of a salary but i think since since january february this year we're kind of getting to to reaching the salary levels we got used to you know you know in the real world kind of so he's writing all the code you're doing all the marketing and the two of you have done this together here's here's my big question i'm a big fan of you don't you shouldn't hire people just to hire people to brag about how big your team size is on podcasts it's way more impressive to have a small team doing a lot right doing a lot of revenue a lot of customers how big can you guys get with only two people no more hires you know if you ask me this last year i will have sent no chance three thousand customers we can be uh or our two two or two of us so i i right now i don't want to predict it but i think it's it's comfortable because we've optimized so many things and you know i was thinking it would go crazy with customer support at 3 000 customers but uh you know we have like very very you know simple and easy to understand documentation and everything is out there and i think we're kind of rolling and it's going well and i don't think there's that there's a need short term at least to hire anyone it might even slow us down you know obviously with training and so on yeah so are you guys profitable today yes yeah maybe we're bootstrapped we don't do any our marketing budget has been zero us dollars since day one we have not spent even one dollar on advertising where are all these thousand trials per month coming from them all content marketing content marketing social media word of mouth obviously it's it's i think one of the things about being open source is this community you can build so if you go to our github we have something like seven eight thousand likes you know the stars on github and lots of developers know about us lots of people in this kind of field know about us and and if you go twitter and search for us you can see daily people are recommending us and people are saying oh i have not moved my clients or i have not moved with my own website from google analytics to plus but there's something that happens daily it's easy to see on twitter so yeah yeah that's a big one you've got a great and got a great following there i mean you've got 18 000 followers uh you know you guys do something really well that i think a lot of founders are scared to do which is you've got to try you've clearly defined the enemy right google analytics right a lot of founders they are building something because they are against something else but they won't they're nervous to talk about the thing they're against way more powerful to build a community with that enemy publicly out there 100 so when i joined first thing i did was positioning over the home page because before my co-founder did not really consider googling that much there was a mention of google links but it was not that clear and i was like we got to make this clear so in one second you understand it because i feel that's one of the biggest mistakes startups do because they kind of try to hide the fact that this big company exists you know while all of their potential customers know that there is this company that exists so why not help your potential customers and but just straight up tell him what's the difference what do you stand for what are you what are you kind of completely against to what they're doing and tell you like it is it's like you know information for your customers you're helping them out yep no i totally agree with that now let me ask you a question you guys are obviously growing quickly will you stay bootstrapped if you have plans to raise we're saying no pretty much daily to to all these vcs and and there's no there's no current plan to to raise any there's no need either i mean uh yeah we would not even if you had the funding we would not go and hire somebody new right now because uh we plan to take it a bit slower so no plans what would you value the business at today i have no idea no i think there was somebody somebody said that we could raise what was it he said between seven and 15 million and without kind of any without kind of like no strings attached kind of he mentioned a few months ago when we because we tweet uh we share the public you know the mri and so on so every time i share this there's like you know several emails from these vcs kind of like oh you want to take funding and one of them was a bit more concrete so i mentioned i think he mentioned something about seven to 15 million and like he was like we will just give you the money you do what you want but yeah so nothing better that i can no better calculation other than that fact well your annual run rate if you're doing 23 grand a month right now in revenue is what to about 270 000 per year uh let me let me let me ask you a question right if somebody uh that also like i could see like a clip folio or grow.com be very interested in sort of what you're building if one of them approached you and offered you guys you know four million dollars all cash up front to sell the business did you take it probably not are you are you in a relationship yeah yeah i'm in a relationship would they if you came home tonight to dinner and told them that you were going to get 49 you turned down 49 of a 4 million would they leave you immediately or they be supportive i think they'll be supportive but that's definitely when you ask it like that it's a bit more to think about for sure because on my own i'll be like i will really not not want to sell and it really has to be a right situation right buyer for everyone for us for the customers but when you ask it like that i'm like more like maybe i should think about it twice but yeah no plans no plans for you for investors or sales that's great hey let's touch on churn real quick what's your turn rate today i think it's about two percent okay two percent per month is that good it doesn't really matter what if it's good or bad the question is like do the economics work and you guys are profitable and you're growing nicely i mean like one thing that i look at our expansion mrr i always wanted that to be bigger than churn and that's that's covered quite quite well every month what is your expansion if you look at the customers from one year ago how much they expanded on average so let me just quickly uh i don't uh i didn't spend much time on this in your dashboard yes i i've been using paddle and now i'm in the dashboard and i can see last month we got expansion of uh expansion of around 400 and churn 400 so that was very even this month expansion of 300 and turn of 100. so it's like and then the previous month which was march expansion 800 and turn 300. so like um that's one that i care about i mean umrr always covers obviously both but uh i'm curious that the the churn gets covered by expansion to kind of event it off i would personally just this is anecdotal based off the interviews that i've done in the database that i run um you rarely see companies at this stage in this taxonomy this category have expansion revenue like you guys do i would credit it because it's so crystal clear that people are paying you a price point tied to the number of unique website visits so you have a natural automatic upsell built in and that's a very healthy thing and we don't actually even enforce it so strong we send an email a couple months in and we kindly ask you to to upgrade and it works well and people respect that then people upgrade and yeah like you say it's natural thing you you you want to build your website to to grow more and then you end up having more visitors which means you end up having to pay more for your analytics it kind of makes sense because also our costs are are larger with storage and all that stuff yeah very good all right marco let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite book uh rework i would say base camp number two is there a founder you're following or studying right now not right now but i've followed ran fishkin for years now i love his thinking and he's got a great book lost and founder highly recommended another great one yes number three what's your favorite online tool for building possible twitter i guess twitter i don't really have a favorite one number four how many hours you sleep to get every night how much what sweet ah okay seven seven hours approximately and what's good what's your situation married single kids um no kids girlfriend live together not married not married yet no kids and how old are you marco i'm 38 i think 38 he says and with a with a question mark on the end last question what's something wishing you when you were 20. i wish i started to start ups faster as in co-owner owners founder i was until last year i was basically i'm more like an employee plausible.io they are an alternative to google analytics that does not crap all over your privacy they're growing very quick 400 a month in revenue a year ago now over twenty three thousand dollars per month over three thousand three hundred customers marco got forty nine percent of the business his technical co-founder took fifty one percent they're off to the raises bootstrap and building in public marco thanks for taking us to the top thanks nathan one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1 pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the sas world whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else i don't want you to miss it additionally if you 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