How Plausible Analytics Reached 3,300 Paying Customers and About $23,300 MRR Bootstrapped (Interview with Co-Founder Marko Saric)

Introduction and Company Overview

Nathan Latka

00:00Hello, everyone. My guest today is Marko Saric. He's the cofounder 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. Marko, you ready to take us to the top?

Marko Saric

00:14>> I am.

Founding Timeline and Origins

Nathan Latka

00:15Alright. When did you launch this thing? What year?

Marko Saric

00:18>> About two years ago, two and a half years ago.

Nathan Latka

00:20Okay. So call it 2019 time frame, something like that?

Marko Saric

00:23>> I think it was actually twenty eighteen December. That's when, like, when development started, and about summer of twenty nineteen was the the first kind of launch of the And

How Marko Joined as the Marketing Co-Founder

Nathan Latka

00:33and get 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?

Marko Saric

00:41>> Yeah, so basically, Plausible started as a project of my co founder. He's a developer. He started developing it. He spent about a year developing everything, getting it on, 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 a as a as a full time kind of I joined him as a co founder pretty much then about a year in or so.

Equity Split Details

Nathan Latka

01:03Okay. Now it's the equity conversation's always tough with this sort of setup. Do you guys just split it fifty fifty or do you have less than him?

Marko Saric

01:11>> Fifty one forty nine.

Nathan Latka

01:1251

Marko Saric

01:12>> for him, I think there was some legal reason. There was somebody needed to have a tiny tiny majority. But, yeah, that's it felt kind of like a fair thing. Yeah. That's good. Came in from the I kind of helped him develop it as in from the marketing side of things and kinda kinda 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

01:33>> these two things coexist and balance each other out. So I think it's it's quite fair.

Pricing Model and Customer Range

Nathan Latka

01:37Wanna dive into the products here in a second, but first, tell us on average what are customers paying for this per month?

Marko Saric

01:44>> We have a whole range depends. So basically, we charge by page view. So if you have a small website with thousand page views per month, will pay something like $5 per month, but you might have 150,000,000 and then you're paying it to hundreds per month. So it's a huge range starting from $5 it can be up to hundreds.

Nathan Latka

02:03What what's your what's your don't name the customer, obviously, but your largest customer, what are they paying per month? Do you know?

Marko Saric

02:09>> It's actually that's the 150,000,000 one, but what are they paying per month? I think it's somewhere around 600 per month, something like that. But, Dawn, the CAC could be somewhere somewhere there. I'm not gonna be quite so sure.

Nathan Latka

02:23Fair enough. 5 to 600 per month. Do you know what a sweet spot is? Like, is a $100 per month like a good sweet spot somewhere in there?

Marko Saric

02:30>> It it really depends. I mean, I think in general, web analytics are a bit more affordable than, say, product analytics. So even when people come from something like Mixpanel and 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.

Nathan Latka

02:49Okay. Yeah. I wanna I wanna focus my questions around a persona. So I understand you have a massive range, but, like like, if you literally just take all your customers and divide it into whatever your revenue is, what what would be the average customer being pay be paying per month about?

Marko Saric

03:03>> Let's say maybe $50.

Nathan Latka

03:09$5.00. Okay. Okay.

Marko Saric

03:11>> Yeah. And 50 I have not done this kind of calculation

How They Got Their First 100 Customers

Nathan Latka

03:14before, but, yeah, it's No problem. So so you come as the marketer. You get 49% of the business. How'd you sign up for first 100 customers?

Marko Saric

03:23>> Basically, we are bootstrapped, self funded. So ads are out of the kind of the question. What we did, I mean, what I have experienced in and what I felt was the good solution for privacy first open source product is to go content marketing side. So I started creating content. I think in On the third week or so when I joined, I published my first blog post after doing some kind of more marketing site on positioning on

03:47>> the website and so on. But I published my first blog post, I think, April last year about why you should remove Google Analytics from your website, like, I don't know, ten ten different reasons, all there, you know, couple of thousand words. Published it, went on top of the Hacker News, got, you know, I don't know, twenty, thirty thousand visitors on the first day or two. Got, I don't know, somewhere about sixty, seventy by now, but basically,

04:09>> content is how we got our first and and still still are getting our our our, you know, trials to to this day. Mhmm. Talk to me about

Nathan Latka

04:16the Hacker News for a second. So so when you did that, you got how many unique websites that day?

Marko Saric

04:21>> Think I it they're a bit funniest because they are all open. So you can actually go to plausible.io, and you can hit our website, and there's a button that says live demo, and that's where you can see our own stats. But I think it must have been about

04:39>> 20,000 that day.

Nathan Latka

04:41Okay. And how many new trial signups? Do you remember?

Marko Saric

04:45>> I will have to go backwards, but I think let's say, blogging is not like you get 10% of this through, it's not like an ad. So 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 kind of builds the brand the brand awareness and kind of us getting us into this field and people then, you know, a few weeks down the line, I

05:10>> may need a new analytics platform. Oh, I remember those guys that talked about why you should not use Google Analytics. That's how it goes really. It's not as direct as something like ads. It's 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 will show.

Customers, MRR Growth and Why Plausible Is Open Source

Nathan Latka

05:27Yep, very cool. So this is how you get your first sort of spike of customer. Now how many customers are you serving today?

Marko Saric

05:33>> We're about 3,300.

Nathan Latka

05:353,000 subscribers. Those are paying customers.

Marko Saric

05:38>> Exactly. And we get about I mean, yesterday we got something like 50 trials. We get about 1,000 something trials per month. And then, yeah, about one third of those convert. So it's going quite well. Last year, March when I joined, we were about, I don't know, like less than a 100, and now we're at 3,300,

06:00>> it's gone quite well. I think we were MRR was about 400 or something when I joined. So April last year, about 400, and 400 about seven.

Nathan Latka

06:10$400 per month?

Marko Saric

06:11>> MRR. Yes. In total MRR? Total, 400. Yeah. And I think it was 405, say, in in start of April last year. And now we are at 23,000 something. 20? 23,300, I think. Something along those lines.

Nathan Latka

06:26I love that. Okay. So if we take 23,300 divided by the 3,300 paying subscribers, they're paying on average about $7 a month, something like that, which would be I'm I'm using your pricing your pricing slider on your site. So that price point would be, what, about 10 k unique website views? Something like that. I think

Marko Saric

06:45>> something like last time I checked, about 80% of customers are on the lower two tiers, so up to a 100,000 page views, which which kinda makes sense. Mean, it's not easy to get a website with more than a 100,000 page views. So about 80% of customers are there in those first two tiers, and then, you know, the one at 150,000,000 tier, it's like the only one.

Nathan Latka

07:04Yep. Yep. This is such a cool story. Why did you guys decide to build you know, lot of people go, should I build an open public? Should I not build an open public? You're leaning all in. You're building in public. Why did you guys decide to do that?

Marko Saric

07:14>> Fully open source. I think open source and privacy 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 and kind of you cannot be like Google, our our biggest competitor, the Google Analytics, like a black box. You You have no idea what they're doing. While they are complete opposite, you can actually go to GitHub. You can, you

07:35>> know, view our code. Can, You 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 privacy first and and kind of we have nothing to hide kind of thing.

Team Size and Profitability

Nathan Latka

07:50Yep. Yep. No. I agree with that. Now talk to me about how you guys are managing cash flow. So you're boot you're bootstrapped. How many people are on the team now today?

Marko Saric

07:57>> Two. Just two of us.

Nathan Latka

07:59This is great. I love so revenue per employee is about $11 to 12 grand per month. I always I always like looking at that metric. So you guys are doing this both full time now?

Marko Saric

08:07>> Both full time. I mean, first few months or so, we didn't get paid. Then for a few months, we kinda got a little bit of a salary, but I think since since January or February this year, we're kind of getting to to to reaching the salary levels we got used to, you know, you know, in a in a real world kind of.

Nathan Latka

08:23So 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 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

08:41with only two people? No more hires.

Marko Saric

08:44>> You know, if you asked me this last year, I will have said no chance 3,000 customers that can be or our two two two of us. So I I right now, don't wanna predict it, but I think it's it's comfortable because we've optimized so many things. And I was thinking it will go crazy with customer support at 3,000 customers, but we have like very, very simple and easy to understand documentation, and everything is out there, and

09:09>> I think we're kind of rolling and it's going well, and I don't think 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.

Nathan Latka

09:18Yeah. So are you are you guys profitable today?

Marko Saric

09:21>> Yes. Yeah. Mean, we're we're bootstrapped. We don't do any our marketing budget has been 0 US dollars since day one. We have not spent even one dollar on advertising or marketing.

Nathan Latka

09:30So where are all these thousand trials per month coming from them? All content marketing?

Marko Saric

09:34>> Content marketing, social media, word-of-mouth, obviously. 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, the stars on GitHub, lots of developers know about us. Lots of people in this kind of field know about us, and if you go Twitter and search for us, you can see daily people are recommending us and people are saying, oh,

09:57>> I have now moved my clients or I have now moved my own website from Google Analytics to Plausible. This is something that happens daily. It's easy to see on Twitter. Yeah, yeah, is a big

Positioning Against Google Analytics

Nathan Latka

10:05great You've got and you've got a great following there. I mean, you got 18,000 followers. You know, you guys do something really well that I think a lot of founders are scared to do, which is you've 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, which is way more powerful to build

10:27a community with that enemy publicly out there.

Marko Saric

10:30>> A 100%. So when I joined, first thing I did was positioning over the homepage because before my co founder did not really consider Google Analytics that much. There was a mention of Google Analytics, but it was not that clear. And I was like, we gotta make this clear so in one second you understand it because I feel that that's one of the biggest mistakes startups do because they kind of try to hide the fact that this

10:50>> big company exists, while all of their potential customers know that there is this company that exists. So why not help your potential customers and just straight up tell them 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 and tell it like it is. It's it's like, you know, it's information for your customers. You're helping them out.

Bootstrapped Philosophy and VC Approach

Nathan Latka

11:11Yep. No. I totally agree with that. Now let me ask you a question. You guys are obviously growing quickly. Would will you stay bootstrapped? Do have plans to raise?

Marko Saric

11:19>> We're 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 there's no need either. I mean, yeah, we we would not even if we had the the funding, we would not go and hire somebody new right now because we we plan to take it a bit slower, so no plans.

Valuation Thoughts

Nathan Latka

11:36What would you value the business at today?

Marko Saric

11:39>> I have no idea.

Nathan Latka

11:40No. I think that

Marko Saric

11:41>> there was somebody somebody said that we could raise what was it they said? Between 7,000,000 and 15,000,000 and without kind of any without kinda like no strings attached kind of. He he mentioned that a few months ago when we because we tweet we we share the public, you know, the MRR and so on. So every time I share this, there's like several emails from VCs kind of like, oh, you wanna take funding? And one of them

12:03>> was a bit more concrete. So he mentioned I think he mentioned something about seven to fifteen million, and he was like, we will just give you the money. You do what you want, but yeah. So nothing better than that. No better calculation other than that fact.

Nathan Latka

12:14Well, your annual run rate, if you're doing $23,000 a month right now in revenue is what? To about $270,000 per year. Let me me you a question. Right? If somebody that also like, I could see a Klipfolio 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, $4,000,000 all cash upfront to sell the business, would you take it?

Marko Saric

12:36>> Probably not.

Nathan Latka

12:38Are you in a spouse? Are you in a relationship?

Marko Saric

12:40>> Yeah. Yeah. I'm in a relationship.

Nathan Latka

12:43Would they if you came home tonight to dinner and told them that you were gonna get 49 you turned down 49% of a $4,000,000 all cash offer, would they leave you immediately or would they be supportive?

Marko Saric

12:54>> 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, we 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 more like, Maybe I should think about it twice. But yeah, no plans really for investors

13:15>> or sales.

Churn Rate and Expansion MRR

Nathan Latka

13:16That's great. Hey, let's touch on churn real quick. What's your churn rate today?

Marko Saric

13:20>> I think it's about 2%.

Nathan Latka

13:21Okay. 2% per month.

Marko Saric

13:23>> Is that good?

Nathan Latka

13:24It doesn't really matter if it's good or bad. The question is like, do the economics work? And you guys are profitable and you're growing nicely.

Marko Saric

13:29>> Oh, mean, like one thing that I I look at our expansion MRR, I always want that to be bigger than churn, and that's that's covered quite quite well every month.

Nathan Latka

13:38So what is your expansion? If you look at the customers from one year ago, how much have they expanded on average?

Marko Saric

13:42>> So let me just quickly

13:45>> don't I don't spend much time on this one.

Nathan Latka

13:47In your dashboard?

Marko Saric

13:49>> Yes. I've been using Paddle and now I'm in the dashboard. And I can see last month, we got expansion of around 400 and churn 400. So that was very even. This month, expansion MRR of 300 and churn of 100. So it's like and then the previous month, which was March, expansion 800 and churn 300. So like that's one that I care about. I mean, new MRR always covers obviously both, but I'm curious that the the churn

14:17>> gets covered by expansion

Nathan Latka

14:18to kind of even it out. I I would personally just think this is anecdotal based on the interviews that I've done and the database that I run. 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

14:41in, and that's a very healthy thing.

Marko Saric

14:43>> And we don't actually even enforce it so strongly. We send an email a couple months in, and we kindly ask you to upgrade, and it it works well and people respect that, then people upgrade. And, yeah, like you say, it's a natural thing. You you wanna 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 kinda makes sense because

15:02>> also our costs are are larger with storage and all that stuff.

Famous Five Rapid Fire Questions

Nathan Latka

15:05Yep. Very good. Alright, Marko. Let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite book?

Marko Saric

15:10>> Rework, I would say. Basecamp.

Nathan Latka

15:12Number two, is there a founder you're following or studying right now?

Marko Saric

15:16>> Not right now, but I've been following the Rand Fishkin for years now. I I love his thinking.

Nathan Latka

15:21And he's got a great book, Lost and Founder. Highly recommend it. Another great one. Yes. Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building Plausible?

Marko Saric

15:34>> Twitter, I guess.

Nathan Latka

15:36Twitter, if

Marko Saric

15:36>> I don't really have a a favorite one.

Nathan Latka

15:38Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night?

Marko Saric

15:40>> How much what?

Nathan Latka

15:41Sleep.

Marko Saric

15:42>> Ah, okay. Seven seven hours, approximately.

Nathan Latka

15:45What's your what's your situation? Married, single, kids?

Marko Saric

15:50>> No kids, girlfriend, live together. Not married.

Nathan Latka

15:53Not married yet. No kids. And how old are you, Marko?

Marko Saric

15:56>> I'm 38, I think.

Nathan Latka

15:5838, he says, and with a with a question mark on the end. Last question. What's something you wish you knew when you were 20?

Marko Saric

16:05>> I I wish I I started to start ups faster, as in co owner, owners, founder. I was until last year, was basically an I'm more like an employee.

Nathan Latka

16:15Plausible.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 $23,000 per month, over 3,300 customers. Marko got 49% of the business. His technical cofounder took 51%. They're off to the races, bootstrapped and building in public. Marko, thanks for taking us to the top.

Marko Saric

16:34>> Thanks, Nathan.

Nathan Latka

16:36One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. 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, 1PM

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17:43that at nathanlatka.com/slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty minutes. Feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode. And if you enjoyed it, click the thumbs up. We get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows, but I do it so that we can all learn. We have to counter those people. We gotta

18:02push them away. Click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys' support. Alright. I'll be in the comments.

Marko Saric

18:08>> See you.