The Exchanges

Q Where are all these thousand trials per month coming from them? All content marketing?

A Content marketing, social media, word of mouth, obviously. It's, it's, 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, 8000 likes, you know, those stars on GitHub and Lots of developers know about us, lots of people in this kind of field know about us, and, and if you go to Twitter and search for us, you can see daily people are recommending us, and people are saying, oh, I have now moved my clients, or I have now moved my own website from Google Analytics to plausible. This is something, uh, that happens daily. It's easy to see on Twitter.

AI assessment note: “Content marketing, social media, word of mouth, obviously.”

Q No problem. So, so you come in as the marketer, you get 49% of the business. How'd you sign up the first hundred customers?

A Basically, uh, we're bootstrapped, self-funded, So, you know, ads are out of the, the kind of the question, uh, what we did, I mean, what, what I have experienced in and what I felt was the good, uh, solution for privacy first open source product is to go content marketing side. So I started creating content. I think in, in, on the third week or so when I joined, I published my first blog post after doing some kind of more marketing side on the positioning on 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, 10, 10 different reasons. All there, you know, a couple of thousand words. Published it, went on top of the Hacker News. Got, you know, I don't know, 20, 30,000 visitors on the first day or two. Got, I don't know, somewhere about 60, 70 by now. But basically, content is how we got our first, and still, still are getting our, our, our, you know, trials to this day.

AI assessment note: “Basically, content is how we got our first, and still, still are getting”

Q Yep. Yep. This is such a cool story. Why did you guys decide to build, you know, a lot of people go, 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?

A Fully open source. 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, you gotta show what you're doing, and kind of, you cannot be, like, Google, our biggest competitor, Google Analytics is like a black box, You know, you have no idea what they're doing while they're complete 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 privacy first and kind of that we have nothing to hide kind of thing.

AI assessment note: “I think if you want to be able to be transparent and trustworthy”

Q have done this together. Here's, here's my big question. 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 with only two people? No more hires.

A You know, if you asked me this last year, I will have sent no chance, 3000 customers. We can be our two of us. So I, right now I don't want to predict it, but I think it's, it's comfortable because we've optimized so many things. And, you know, I was thinking it would go crazy with customer support at 3000 customers, but, uh, Uh, you know, we have like very, very, you know, simple and easy to understand documentation and everything is out there. And, and I think we're kind of rolling and it's, it's going well. And I don't think there's a, 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.

AI assessment note: “right now I don't want to predict it, but I think it's, it's comfortable”

Q Okay. And how many new trial signups? Do you remember?

A I will have to go backwards, but I think, uh, let's say, you know, blogging is, is not like you get, you know, You know, 10% of this, it's not like an ad, you know, so it's a, 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 brand. The brand awareness and kind of the kind of us getting us into this, this field and people then, you know, a few weeks down the line, 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, 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,

AI assessment note: “let's say we got 50 to 100 out of that”

Q What would you value the business at today?

A I have no idea. No, I think there was somebody, somebody said that we could raise, what was it? They said between seven and fifteen million. And without, kind of, any, without, kind of, like, no strings attached, kind of. He mentioned that a few months ago when we, because we tweet, we share the public, you know, the MRR and so on, so every time I share this, there's, like, you know, several emails from VCs, kind of, like, oh, you want to take funding? And one of them was a bit more concrete, so he mentioned, I think he mentioned something about seven to fifteen million, and, like, he was like, we will just give you the money, you do what you want, but, uh, Yeah. Uh, so nothing better that I, no better calculation other than that fact.

AI assessment note: “I have no idea. No, I think there was somebody, somebody said”