May 23, 2021 · 18m · top-founders
Google Analytics Alternative Adds $23k in MRR in 12 Months, Open sourced!
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this interview, Nathan Latka speaks with Plausible Analytics co-founder Marco Saric about bootstrapping an open-source, privacy-focused Google Analytics alternative from $400 to over $23,000 in monthly recurring revenue in just 12 months with a lean two-person team.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Nathan holds 36.6% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Nathan as informed peer 5.2 Guest teaching 2.0 Guest disagreement 1.0 Nathan pushing back 2.4
speaking balance: gold is Nathan, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 14:18 Resisting acquisition lure
Marco dismisses the appeal of selling out to an acquirer for four million dollars cash, asserting a clear preference for independent growth.
Hardest push from Nathan ▶ 14:23 Pressing on partner reaction to turned-down millionsNathan refuses to accept a casual rejection of an acquisition offer and challenges Marco by asking if his partner would support turning down life-changing money.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 6:27 Explaining delayed brand value of viral postsMarco reframes Nathan's expectation of instant trial spikes from Hacker News traffic, educating him on how privacy content drives delayed recall and conversions.
Nathan holds their own ▶ 16:01 Contextualizing expansion MRR via SaaS datasetNathan cites empirical benchmarks from his SaaS database to explain why Plausible's tier model generates unusually high organic expansion revenue.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Nathan as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Nathan pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nathan Latka Subscription Feed Announcement | 2 | 1 | 0 | 1 | The segment begins with an extended promotional feed announcement and transitions into standard introductory questions about launch history and equity split. The exchange is fully cooperative with no friction. | |
| Usage-Based Pricing and Customer Distribution | 5 | 3 | 1 | 2 | Nathan presses to establish an average price point and drills into Hacker News traffic conversions. Marco clarifies that viral content marketing acts as delayed brand equity rather than immediate direct-response conversion. | |
| Open Source Philosophy and Lean Operations | 6 | 2 | 1 | 2 | Nathan performs rapid mental math to determine customer ARPU and calculates monthly revenue per employee. Marco explains the open-source philosophy and why keeping the team at two people prevents operational bloat. | |
| Competitive Positioning and Rejecting Venture Capital | 6 | 2 | 2 | 5 | Nathan tests Marco's commitment to bootstrapping by presenting a hypothetical four million dollar cash buyout and asking how his partner would react to walking away from it. Marco admits the framing makes him think twice but holds firm. | |
| Churn Dynamics and Organic Expansion MRR | 7 | 2 | 1 | 2 | Marco shares live Paddle metrics on churn and expansion revenue, prompting Nathan to benchmark the performance against his proprietary SaaS database and explain why page-view usage tiers create automatic upsell leverage. |
Statements from this episode (14)
Saric: Plausible equity is split 51-49 with his technical co-founder
“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 it felt kind of like a fair thing.”
Saric: Plausible's largest customer pays around $600 monthly for 150M views
“It's actually, that's the 150,000,001, but what are they paying per month? I think it's somewhere around 600 per month, something like that, but don't, could be somewhere, somewhere there. I'm not a hundred percent sure.”
Saric: Product analytics tools charge significantly more per pageview than web analytics
“I think in general, web analytics are a bit more affordable than, say, product analytics, so even when people come from something like a mixed panel and things like that, they're kind of like, They feel, feel comfortable in this kind of price range because, yo…”
Saric: Plausible Analytics publishes live website analytics publicly
“You can actually go to plausible.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.”
Saric: Plausible has 3,300 paying subscribers and 1,000 monthly trial signups
“We're about 3300 subscribers.
Nathan Latka: Those are paying customers.
Marco Saric: Exactly.
Marco Saric: And we get about, I mean, yesterday we got something like 50 trials.
Marco Saric: We get about 1000 some of your trials per month.
Marco Saric: And then,…”
Saric: Plausible grew MRR from $400 to $23,300 in one year
“I think we were, MRR was about 400 or something when I joined. So April last year, about 400.
Nathan Latka: And now we're about.
Nathan Latka: 400 dollars per month?
Marco Saric: MRR, yes.
Nathan Latka: In total MRR? Total, 400.
Nathan Latka: Yeah.
Marco Saric…”
Saric: 80% of Plausible customers are on tiers under 100k pageviews
“Last time I checked, about 80% of customers are on the lower two tiers, so up to a 100,000 page views, which kind of makes sense, I mean, it's not easy to You get a website with more than a 100,000 pages. So about 80% of customers are there in those first two …”
Saric: Open source is essential for privacy-first software to build trust
“I think open source and privacy first, they kind of go together hand in hand. I think if you want to be able to be transparent and trustworthy, you gotta show what you're doing, and kind of, you cannot be, like, Google, our biggest competitor, Google Analytics…”
Saric: Plausible will not hire short-term because onboarding slows growth
“I don't think there's a need short term, at least to hire anyone. It might even slow us down, you know, obviously be training and so on.”
Saric: Plausible has spent zero dollars on marketing since day one
“Our marketing budget has been zero US dollars since day one. We have not spent even one dollar on advertising.”
Saric: Startups make a big mistake hiding their incumbent competitors
“I feel that 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 cus…”
Saric: Plausible rejects VCs daily with no plans to raise capital
“We're saying no, pretty much daily to all these VCs and there's no current plan to raise any”
Saric: Plausible's expansion MRR consistently offsets its monthly churn
“We're using Puddle, and now I'm in the dashboard, and I can see last month, we got expansion of expansion of RR of 400, and churn 400, so that was very even. This month, expansion of RR of 300, and churn of 100. So it's like, and then the previous month, which…”