Simple Analytics hits $4k MRR and shares its numbers

A discussion about freelances v labor would be interesting.

Congrats on 4k MRR.

How do you earn so much money? I didn't think that starting a startup brought you so much money. Of course, getting clients is not an easy task, but at the same time, I see that they are the businesses that attract more customers.

when did you launch ?

What are the top 3 reasons people buy this? You push the privacy angle pretty hard, but that doesn't seem like enough for people to whip out their card (even at the reasonable price).

My guess is a lot of people are just overwhelmed when they look at Google Analytics and end up going with you for simplicity.

Also, where is server side analytics on your roadmap?

We use it because we want it to be a common term for startups. We copied it from @levelsio who tweeted about it [1].

According to wikipedia the use of the trademark symbol indicates an assertion that a word, image, or other sign is a trademark; it does not indicate registration. It's not super relevant for our page though.

[1] https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/968219339588493312

OP is a close friend of Pieter Levels (of Nomad List) and if you go to nomadlist.com/open you'll see "Open Startup™" as well, linking to open-startup.com which redirects to this tweet:

https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/968219339588493312

The point is the productand therefore the revenue is scalable. Much more than a salary in a 9-5 job.

It's just the start...

It's harder to go from 0 to $4k MRR than from $4k to $40k.

The point is the process. The MRR that sustains a full time job doesn't suddenly appear from nowhere, and there aren't a lot of people talking about the "pre-success" data points.

I myself am much more interested in the data behind the people in the process of going from 0 to successful, even if they fail; not the hindsight blog posts about people who are already successful.

Early days, no? Honestly, to me running my own thing, incl. the possibility of failure and everything else that comes along with it sounds like a way better proposition than getting a mid level 9 to 5 job. So, congrats to OP.

Fair enough if it doesn't sound appealing to you, I can totally see how that might not seem interesting for all types of personalities, but there are all sorts, right?

Either way, I don't think focussing on that figure and dismissing something like this out of hand, assuming others have the same priorities makes a whole lot of sense. I think the world would be quite a bit more boring if people wouldn't try out things, ignoring the temptations that come alonng with job security and all that jazz.

Many of the people running these "Open Startups" are digital nomads and typically have low overheads.

Additionally, many grow to be relatively large businesses with time due to being built from the ground up to be extremely self-sustaining unlike more traditional startups that grow fast then die fast.

You have to start somewhere. Your own startup has a ton of financial upside that a 9-5 job doesn't have (as well as downside). If you could flip the switch and be at $100k ARR your first month, everyone would be running their own business.

No, right?

Because the prospect of financial growth is missing in a mid-level 9-5 job.

Whereas the 4k/month could be 24k/month next year.

This is nice for side income, though! Are they working on it full time?

The thing about SaaS is once you've found those first ~100 customers to give you money, this is a big indicator that your product solves a real problem, has found a place in the market, and will continue to grow. It's really hard to get those first 100 customers, but once you get them, incredibly easier to get the next 100.

Whereas if you're salaried at $48k/yr, the chance of getting a $48k/yr raise, and then another, and another, and 10x'ing or 100x'ing your compensation is effectively zero.

This is speaking from experience, I run a SaaS company currently making $60k/mo, and not too long ago we were making $4k/mo.

$50k is $250k with a 5x multiple (not uncommon for SaaS businesses), and $500k at 10x multiple.

It's noteworthy that relative to expenses, this business is profitable.

It's also noteworthy in that many businesses never achieve profitability.

They just got started. For a salary you are exchanging time for money. Don’t show up to work, don’t get paid.

As a startup you are building a product that other people buy. You are exchanging a product for money. Building a product has a big first time cost but selling to 100 customers vs million customers has a much smaller marginal cost (at-least for software)

In 5 years he could be making 100X median salary or 10X while putting 10% of normal work and let it sit on cruise control. Obviously there is a risk to startups.

But I applaud them sharing the Journey. Owning means of production is a very satisfying feeling.

While agree with you, to advocate for the devil:

How much do you think Google analytics is worth today?

What do you mean? That's a screenshot of the site, not an iframe. Could you further explain how this could be exploited?

We did build a screenshot app for this: https://github.com/simpleanalytics/screenshot-grabber

Good questions, thanks for those.

When working alone on the project I feel like the momentum gets lost sometimes. Sometimes I'm busy building a feature that takes a lot of time and don't have time for other features or bugs. Or when working on marketing there is no time to build new stuff. There might be a future when I'm not coding at all and only responsible for the other aspects of the business. That's why I'm already hiring a freelancer.

Normally the freelancer would work 1 day a week which is about half the time he worked in January. Not sure if I would consider it as essential though, because I can always take over and do it all myself. But I'm not planning to do it all myself.

Freelancer costs will not scale as much as traffic would scale. As the work of the freelancer is related to new features. Most of our systems can handle a lot of traffic and if we can't anymore we need to add more hardware (which will be recurring) or write some software (which is not recurring).

As for recurring gross margin. Would a list/graph of recurring costs be sufficient? Combined with the monthly recurring revenue of course.

Thanks! The hosting costs are a little higher than normal. We moved our servers recently and are paying double for some little ones. We are using a bare metal server for our main database and app. That works very well for us an it doesn't hit any limits.

We use a Dell R240 1x Intel Xeon E-2174G with 64 GB RAM and 2x480GB SSD in RAID 1. We didn't want to use Linode or Digitalocean because they are not based in Europe which has the best privacy laws in place.

I pay about $60/mo on digitalocean for a side project that brings in about $65k/mo now. Digitalocean is severely underrated for startups.

project: https://www.indiehackers.com/product/crave-cookie

Yes! Would love to know this - highly beneficial information sharing.

> It provides too much data and insight to competitors.

I think being confident enough to publicize your cost structure might actually deter competitors. They'll look at it, realize they can't compete on cost and decide to pursue a different avenue.

The challenge is maintaining that cost-effectiveness as you grow.

If you want to see the details: https://simpleanalytics.com/simpleanalytics.com/referrers/ne... (Amsterdam time zone)

Given they’ve reached $50k run rate in under a year I would suggest the answer is: it’s big enough.

VCs obsess over TAM but it’s not the most important thing if you’re not playing that game.

I am also working on a analytics product, and I can confirm that there is a market for software that comes from "indie" developers and not from big companies.

In my case it's a self-hosted analytics platform and the idea of having the your analytics data only for yourself and being certain that it's not used for other purposes (competitors, advertising, etc.) is pretty well received by individuals and businesses of all sizes.

I use a Simple Analytics competitor – not going to name them here out of respect for OP, who is doing great work with his product – but yes, this space seems to be growing. Personally speaking, there are a few reasons I've switched from Google Analytics:

1. The simpler UI is much easier to explain to clients. No training needed.

2. The simpler UI also helps me keep track of my _own_ metrics faster – I can do a 1 minute check at the end of the week instead of clicking through layers of dashboards and setting up custom reports.

3. Now I don't need to show an annoying cookie popup across all of my sites; I also like that it respects my users' privacy.

4. My sites load a bit faster (GA had a larger filesize). This is supposed to help with conversion.

5. Having support, if I need it, is nice. Going with a smaller company is almost an _easier_ sell to my clients because they know they have the option to get help when they need it.

Also, it doesn't matter to everyone, but I like to support indie businesses when I can. Analytics are important, but they're not mission-critical (like payment processing or something), so I'm fine with working with a smaller company in this area.

Congrats OP!

Curios about the targeted market, as well. Is the focus simplicity or privacy. The site says it is for developers ... why?

Focusing on privacy will likely require simplicity. Narrowing the focus may actually be a better marketing option.

1: I don't think it's a thing done in Silicon Valley at all. It didn't even originate from Silicon Valley. OP is based in Europe.

2: Free information is always of value, so how is this making it less valuable to the user? If it works as marketing for the host, so what? Doesn't make it less valuable. I know more now about company X than I would if it wasn't open. It's that simple.

3: Many countries around the world have a very open system where you can go to a government or private website (the information is usually provided by the government) and look up financial information about every company in that country. For example, here is Volvo in Sweden: https://www.allabolag.se/5560125790/aktiebolaget-volvo

When working alone on the project I feel like the momentum gets lost sometimes. Sometimes I'm busy building a feature that takes a lot of time and don't have time for other features or bugs. Or when working on marketing there is no time to build new stuff. There might be a future when I'm not coding at all and only responsible for the other aspects of the business. That's why I'm already hiring a freelancer.

The hiring process did go like this:

- We posted a tweet along the lines of "We are looking for a Node.js programmer to fight for privacy. 8 hours per week for $1000 per month" [1]

- We got ~150 responses via Twitter DM

- We write them all back with a form they needed to fill in

- ~80 of those did fill in the form

- From those we selected 5 applicants to do a paid assignment

- From those we selected 2 for a video call

- Then Dave [2] was selected

To us it's very important to treat your applicants in a very nice way. Take time to respond their questions, let them know why they were not selected and pay for their assignments. We got a lot of great feedback for applicants who didn't got selected because of this.

Although we are still in the starting phase (he started in January) I'm very happy with the output our developer Dave produces.

[1] https://twitter.com/SimpleAnalytic/status/119134189603728998...

[2] https://twitter.com/hellodeibu

Here https://open-startups.xyz/

There is also https://www.indiehackers.com/products

based on the details shown on hover, looks like MRR is gross revenue, and "revenue" might be net revenue (gross revenue minus direct costs).

Love the idea. Keep growing!