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Comment by AdriaanvRossum | Hacker News Reader

We always have been open about our metrics as we are building a company based on trust. This time we went a step further and did break down our revenue and costs. We did go through all our transaction to build the chart you see with the last 4 months. We divided the costs up by banking (Stripe), hosting, services and freelancers.

If there are any numbers missing, please let us know. We would love to add more data points that interest you.

The open page has a Twitter thread combined with more details: https://twitter.com/AdriaanvRossum/status/122552812562013388...

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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?

- Simplicity

- Privacy friendliness

- Features (like bypassing ad-blockers [1], see which tweets got traffic [2], events, ...)

We have customers like banks and governments who really care about the privacy part. Most of our customers use our tool because it has a very simple interface. One thing that also plays a big role is the likability of the brand. People seem to like it and are willing to pay money for its mission. We even had customers that didn't use our tool but where actively keeping the subscription active.

PS: Server side tracking is already possible [3].

[1] https://docs.simpleanalytics.com/bypass-ad-blockers

[2] https://simpleanalytics.com/simpleanalytics.com/referrers/tw...

[3] https://docs.simpleanalytics.com/server-side-tracking

You have banks as customers but only $4k MRR?! Something is going wrong here. Where's patio11 to tell you to raise prices.

I agree! I would have expected the banks to pay on the order of $4k/month each.

Maybe the enterprise plan isn't aggressively enough priced, or aggressively enough differentiated..?

I think by "banks" he meant "bank".

And by "bank" I mean "credit union".

That or the Enterprise customers have some sort of extended free trial thing going on.

And by "creidt union" he means one from North Dakota.

And by "one from North Dakota" he means "only in departament of immigration" of them.

Google Analytics doesn't report visits for users that have ad-blockers on, right?

I own a website with about 50k pageviews a month. This could mean that actual viewership could be -much- higher?

It's insane that GA doesn't offer a server-side solution like SimpleAnalytics does.

They don't have a CNAME style option; but it's possible to interact with their API: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...

>Google Analytics doesn't report visits for users that have ad-blockers on, right?

It's not really on GA but rather the ad blocking plugin you use (Or even if you are using some browsers that try and block trackers).

As an example, if you use UBlock Origin, I think by default it uses the "Pete Lowe" list to block, which by the looks of it Simple Analytics is also blocked on : https://github.com/simpleanalytics/roadmap/issues/200

Typically UBlock is just a "block all" type thing. Adblock is a little different in that they started allowing through "Acceptable Ads" (Not sure if that extends to trackers), which people went absolute ape about because now "Ad Block" doesn't block "all" ads, just ones that it deems not acceptable.

But anyway. TL;DR; Any tracker, ad, CDN, hell even HTML Fingerprint can be blocked in ad blocking plugins, just depends on the will of the people maintaining the block lists to add it.

Most adblockers can be tricked just by changing request URLs, but uBlock goes one step more and overwrites Google Analytics functions with `null`, so it doesn't work at all. See https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/blob/master/src/web_access...

smart move on the "bypass ad-blockers", good luck!

The privacy friendliness was the killer for me

I'm trying to parse this - are you saying it was the killer feature that convinced you to be a customer, or the lack of more detailed information of the user that "killed" your interest in the product?

The former

A discussion about freelances v labor would be interesting.

Congrats on 4k MRR.

Labour in NL is extremely high risk. You can be on the line for paying a salary for two years if someone is ill. No matter the cause of the illness or the length of service (yes, one day of service is enough).

Freelancers cost more up front however they don't have that risk. Also, the actual freelancers in general come from the top 10% of developers, so they're usually better.

Good point. I also didn't include my own fee. I guess profit is kind of what I get at the moment. We are planning on sharing our profit with our freelancer when it hits a certain level.

Adriaan, I wanted to ask this last time you posted but forgot to ask. How did you sort out the business side? Did you start straight out as an LLC (BV), or are you working in a freelance structure?

I have a side project but I'm hesitant to release it because I'm not in a BV. Doing a BV means losing some really nice tax benefits that I'd rather not lose.

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.

Since when is $4k MRR a lot of money? They are off to a great start, but that is far from making it.

Agreed, and given available data from Baremetrics, that's actually quite a bit above average:

https://baremetrics.com/blog/how-fast-saas-companies-hit-arr...

On average it takes a company a year(ish) to hit $4kMRR.

EDIT: I mistakenly thought they launched on Oct 2019, but a comment further down puts launch at Dec 2018. Which means they're doing well but not spectacularly...which means they maybe should raise prices.

Or lower prices and expand the base??

From my view, their pricing is still mostly in the "sticky" area between free and the hassle of pulling out your wallet (or getting accounting) to pay for the service.

They are charging on average $12/mo - to a business with hundreds of thousands of visitors a month, that's sophisticated enough to consider tracking implications, etc. that's indistinguishable from a monetary point of view from $50/mo.

Not a lot of money for where Simple Analysis is based (Netherlands). A reasonably talented developer with a few years experience makes more than that, especially if you consider social security, pension etc being included in a typical job.

But a company has to start somewhere, if they keep up the growth it could get to significant revenue within this year.

Oh sorry, I am a developer but I forgot to take into account the cost of living too, in my country the minimum salary for a junior developer is 400 dollars, taking into account the cost of living, only the rent and basic services cover almost 3 / 4 of the salary. I don't know how the cost of living in the Netherlands will be, but in my country it is very expensive.

This is the big factor between locations. Rent for a two bedroom apartment in Amsterdam is 1500 euro/month. And income tax in the Netherlands is 40-52%. So a 4000 gross per month isn't much.

He only has 322 customers. Tech generally has good profit margins. The cost of hosting a server is cheap, and can usually accommodate up to millions of requests a second.

One of the risks of starting a start up is there is no demand for your service (among a million other factors for success).

You may have misstated this as commodity hardware is very capable these days but "millions of requests a second" is never cheap.

Hardware purchase is very expensive, but web hosting does not usually reach very high prices.

Check out https://indiehackers.com, there are a lot more startups making big money than you think. Specifically, this page: https://www.indiehackers.com/products?sorting=highest-revenu...

You definitely make a lot more money, some companies also surprised me with how quickly they make money after the first year.

Get to the front page of HN I guess?

when did you launch ?

December 19, 2018

Relevant thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18024277

nice, congrats!

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