How Plausible Analytics CEO Marko Saric grew Plausible Analytics 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...