Episode Transcript
[00:00:09] Speaker A: Just get us started by telling us kind of your story how you got involved with Plausible. Plausible story how we ended up here.
[00:00:14] Speaker B: Yeah, so plausible analytics, yeah, the web analytics alternative to Google Analytics we started now it's more than six years ago or actually my co founder Uku, he is the developer, he started it as a solo developer.
He built it a bit and like released a beta and like he had, he did some indie hacker like kind of post in public, kind of, you know, promotion behind it just to kind of get some traction and think about a year and three, four months into it he saw that the kind of numbers were like stagnated. He got to, I think at that stage was about 400 mrr. So like say a year and a half into it, 400 mrr.
It was like flat for a few months before that as well. It didn't really go anywhere. So it was like he felt that he needs some help on the marketing side of things at least.
And he read some of the blog posts I published.
I published a blog post about Google earnest alternatives. It's just in general how to de Google your life, you know, like useless Chrome and Gmail and all that. And he read that, he liked it, he reached out to me just we didn't know each other. It was just a cold email, I guess you can say. I got it. I clicked on the, you know, he shared the plausible URL. I clicked on it. I really liked what he built. You know, I'm a marketer, I'm also. So I've worked in a large company and a big marketing team but also I'm a blogger on the side. So I kind of know from both perspectives is that as blogger but also as a part of marketing team. And I really liked what he built. Like I, I knew some of the other alternatives obviously I, I had a lot of experience with Google Analytics itself and I, I thought what he built had a lot of potential and I was like yeah, let's, let, let's, let's get on a call. And then we, we spoke a few times and then we decided to work together and, and here we are like so I've been, I've been working with UCO together for five years. No more than a five, five and a half maybe and closed boys. So now like almost seven years I guess. And yeah, we now have a team.
We are about turn 11 in our core team.
11. I think next month we're going to have our 11th person joining the team and we have a few other like four or five others that Work with us kind of part time, helping us building different integrations and plugins. We have more than 15,000 ping subscribers between them, I think on average there's four or five team members. So we have tens of thousands of people using the platform kind of daily logging in and doing their work. So yeah, that's kind of where we are and how we started.
[00:02:52] Speaker A: And you guys are making more than $400 a month right now, right?
[00:02:55] Speaker B: Yeah, so yeah, we've been part of that building public movement. We shared lots of our numbers, especially in the early years. I think the last number we shared was about 1 million or something ARR annual recurring revenue. And that was a couple of years ago. And I think at that stage we were like maybe this sharing it was kind of motivational to people and kind of inspiring, but at some stage it kind of becomes like are we just like what are we doing here bragging or so basically we just stopped sharing. I think after I wrote the blog post, like how we reached the 1 million with lots of details and there's like lots of lessons learned and actual steps taken and yeah, so. So yeah, I think that that was the last number we shared and then yeah, we've grown quite a lot since then I think actually.
Was it May? May was our best month yet. So like even like May a couple of months ago. Yeah, that's basically we're still, still growing very fast and like I mentioned, we're growing the team and then yeah, still doing well.
Fingers crossed it continues.
[00:03:57] Speaker A: Amazing. Yeah. So I think I read that blog post about how you got to a million ARR or something. It was a few years back, but that actually has kind of forms the basis of a lot of the questions I'm curious about today. One of those sort of related to your building in public. So I'm really curious as to your experience building open source. So correct me if I'm wrong. My understanding is that plausible is totally open source. Anyone can fork at any time and just create a competitor. I mean literally tomorrow. So what's your experience there? I think look at that. From the outside it looks and sounds insane of like these guys have made it so easy to compete with them.
What's the deal?
[00:04:32] Speaker B: When I joined Oku, we were not open source, so we open source maybe let's say six months into me joining and this was both of us first time we've worked on any project like as founders and first time we worked on an open source project as well. So we're learning a lot during this journey and we've learned a lot about being open source. And yeah, like every time somebody, some of the other founders ask me like, should we go open source? And like, they're all, they're all kind of afraid of that side of like anyone can fork you and create a competitor just with a few butterflies on GitHub theoretically, or actually, yes, they can. And so, yeah, we've learned, for example, like this started with something that's called a very, like a permissive license, which is like the default that GitHub presents you when you create a new project. And we've learned, for example, that permissive license is not something that fits what we try to achieve. We want to have an open source project because it allows people to transparently look into what we're doing and whether that matches with the words we're using in our marketing and communication. But we also want to be able to make a living from this. And there's this thing in open source that a lot of projects are struggling.
You know, like, they don't get the funding and they rely on like sponsors and it's not very consistent and they're like basically underfunded. Many of the big projects are really underfunded or they rely on like Google or Facebook sponsoring them with or for the reasons if they use them and so on. So basically we were like, we like to be open source for many reasons, but we also like to have a project that's, you know, we can get salaries, we can build a team and it can all work and we can stay independent without sponsors, without investors and so on. So we've learned, for example, that this permissive license that we had was not ideal because it turned out after we went, you know, viral a few times on Hacker News and so on, and we started sharing some of these numbers that it was so easy to actually replicate and create a competitor and just change the name from plosmo to whatever else possible or, or even to use the name plausible, you know, so, so we've changed the license. I think now there's like maybe three years ago or something and there's a blog post there which, which I wrote you, lots of details behind it. I'm thinking behind in what we chose. And that has helped. And then that is so reduced because now the, the new license requires you to actually open source the fork that you forged from us.
So that kind of restricts many from what they wanted to do or what they could do before. And then we still realized that, you know, three years after that change, we helped, but it didn't help that much or not enough because we still had, we still had companies way larger than us, we had way more employees, way more customers. They basically used our work for free.
And they're also not only that they were reselling that work or using that to promote their product or sell to their customers. And so they made a new change. I think it was last year there we actually couple of the features we have, the new features we released last year or the year before I think it was those features, they're transparent, the code is there on GitHub as well. But they are not part of that self hosted release that we have. Which means that any has a different license which means that those 3, 4P features, these companies that want to use our product and our brand and so on to resell, they're not available those 3, 4 features and they cannot use them. So basically yeah, it's nice. We love being open source for being transparent and giving people the freedom to do what they want and being able to look into what we're doing as well. But there are some of these things we've learned over the last four or five years and things we've fixed and things so far so good. I think obviously maybe three years down the line we learned something else and it's still need to make some other changes. But I think our current stage we're pretty happy. We still have this self hosted release and we can still kind of give our product for free to people that want to use it that way on their servers but it doesn't threaten us as much as a whole project and kind of having the 11 people on our team and needing to pay salaries and so on. So I think so far so good.
[00:08:57] Speaker A: So I think we kind of talked about some of the downsides of open source there. But as far as the upsides, could you give me sort of a list of pros versus the cons and then sort of on a more general level, if you were starting something similar to plausible today, would you open source or would you do more closed or kind of how would you set that up if you were starting a business from scratch?
[00:09:15] Speaker B: I think the biggest advantage really and why we really wanted open source was this transparency because we are in the privacy first world. At least plausible is the privacy first product. And there's that thing about trust and transparency because like Google Analytics and most of the other tools that people use on marketing side they're closed source. So you kind of trust what they say. You cannot see anything what's happening and we really wanted to have that kind of break that and kind of open it up so people can actually, I mean people like me, a marketer, I cannot go read that code. But people that actually know how to decode and they can actually go check how plausible works, they can install it and run it on their machine, they can actually test things and look into things way better than they can do Google Analytics or other services. So that was definitely the biggest motivation behind this. And I think I actually went for other. If I, if we were to start a new project, if it was open source, if it was privacy first, I don't think there's any better way really to, to show that trust, to show that transparency and to build that trust them to basically, here's our code and here, here's the code. You can actually inspect it, review it, you can download it, you can install it on your machine, you can run it and you can see does it make calls you're not expecting, does it do this, does it do that? And I think the way the, you know, the web is and the cloud, it just, I don't think there's a better way to do that these days than basically opening the code. And I think, yeah, if, if you really wanted to build trust and show this transparency, I think that that's the best way to do it. So I would, I would recommend it. And, and yeah, just this, some of these downsides you have to think about because yeah, it's, it's not all, all.
[00:11:00] Speaker A: All, all advantages, not all sunshine and rainbows. What if someone was making, you know, not so privacy focused GPT wrapper or I guess those are popular these days or whatever. Would you say open source for marketing purposes? Because it seems like, it seems like it's helped you guys from a marketing standpoint at least somewhat. Or is the downsides just not worth it?
[00:11:19] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean I would say that's, that more depends on the audience, I guess you're targeting, if the audience is more technical.
But yeah, I mean like I, as a marketer, I also before I joined plos, I used open source products, I used Firefox, I used WordPress. So there's this trust in the community. That's what many open source have in common and people love that and that gets them deeper, like a closer connection with the company, with the project, with the brand and they share it more and you know, places like Hacker News are more accessible if you're open. So yeah, I would say and you have something like GitHub is a kind of distribution avenue so yeah, I would say there are, there are positives for, for many other projects and like say all this, all this AI, AI tools for them. Most of them, I think most of them are closed source. So if you can come with one, there are a couple that are more open and then they, they are the ones that actually get a lot more attention from these kind of technical circles. And so yeah, there's that aspect that open source projects can get more word of mouth and build a bigger community than closed source projects in some cases, some niches.
[00:12:37] Speaker A: And going back to. I believe it was that blog post you wrote that was about hitting a million dollars ARR.
And correct me if I'm wrong, but if I remember correctly, I remember reading on that blog post about the time you published it so years ago long I've been aware of Plausible. So it's so cool to talk to you.
[00:12:51] Speaker B: Nice, nice.
[00:12:52] Speaker A: But I remember.
[00:12:52] Speaker B: Glad to hear that.
[00:12:54] Speaker A: I remember something you said in that that was about your marketing strategy and it was basically something like write good content and publish it and it was just very simple or something like that. Could you for one maybe correct me on kind of what that statement was? Because I remember it was like so simple and so beautiful. And then two, I would love to hear about your experience doing that. I think there's so much pressure in the marketing world to just do so many things, whether that's social content, ads, affiliate partnerships, et cetera, et cetera. So I'd love to hear your thoughts. One, kind of what is your marketing philosophy now? Has it changed any? And then two, do you ever feel like you're missing out by not pursuing some channels?
[00:13:31] Speaker B: Good question. I mean when I joined Ooku and joined Plausible, I basically did what I knew how to do. So I previously I worked in content marketing, social media, blogging.
This is what I knew. I knew how to write. I didn't know how to create videos or I didn't. I never did a podcast and fix a lot. I have a very little experience with paid ads and things like that. So I basically just did what I knew how to do and what I have a lot of experience with and what I actually thought that was actually the right channel for plausible being a privacy first alternative to Google. So we basically created tons of content and I just wrote about everything from day one when I joined started, you know, not really, you cannot really call it marketing pages. I just started writing, you know, useful information like educational content, informative content. Basically content that did not promote plausible as the in in the front. It was More like some topics, such as the first blog post I wrote was something like seven reasons why you should remove Google links from your website.
And I list reasons and at the end I will mention okay, we're plausible as the last conclusion. So you could those seven reasons, they can be written by anyone. I could just remove that conclusion, there will be no mention so plausible. So basically I worked content that's educational, informative in general, and then indirectly or at the end and so on, I will kind of mention plausible. And that's what we're working on. So and I think that kind of content marketing angle has been going on for decades now. And I think even with the AI tools and all that kind of the threat the kind of marketing world is facing, I think even without, like if you build content to create content that helps people, answers their questions, teaches them something, I think there's always space for that. And for us it worked.
Now obviously with they become more established, now we have a stronger brand and a lot of people know the name and they just search for us as a name. That's how they found us. But basically early on I think that the day before I joined we had one visitor from Google.
That's it.
So really publishing content was useful in getting, like I mentioned before in communities like hacker news, indie hackers, getting people talk about on Twitter.
And then obviously it helped eventually that we get, I don't know, like 7, 800 people from Google per day these days.
And even ChatGPT is really growing, is our source over the last three months or so. And also that is basically thanks to the brand that we've built over these years of publishing regular useful content and people then learning about us, learning about what we're doing, not necessarily signing up immediately after they read the post, but knowing about the brand. And then maybe three months down the line they may get a need for analytics tool. And then they remember, oh, I remember reading that and those guys are doing this, something that may be useful maybe now go and search for them and find them out.
So I think this is what I knew and I still think if we were to start today, I think despite five years being a long time in the marketing world and AI and things changing, I think it can still be a very powerful way to promote your brand. So even to this day we're not using paid ads, affiliates, we don't really paid anyone, we've never paid anyone to promote us.
So we still only do content and social media and build a lot of good features and have a product that people Love. So that's still what we do, and we're still growing. Like I mentioned, May was our best month yet.
So I think it still works whether to work one year down the line or next month. We don't know whether we need to change something, maybe. But so far, so good.
It continues to deliver.
[00:17:35] Speaker A: What's the rationale behind not doing things like paid ads or affiliates? Because I can't imagine the temptation that's there of always the constant growth. I assume you're. Well, I mean, you have to be acquiring customers profitably right now, so investing some of that profit in acquiring more customers. And I think there's always this, like, I feel like the adage is like, growth or grow or die. And it seems like looking at it from the outside is like, well, if you're not doing these things and you're not growing as fast as you can, is that true? Or how do you resist the temptation and just kind of maintain your lane as far as not doing these other things?
[00:18:10] Speaker B: I don't know. I don't know if we ever had any temptation because we are growing, you know, like, I don't know now if somebody can do like some fancy chart or report and can like, oh, you could grow this much if you did this, or you could, you're losing out on this if you, as you're not doing that. Uh, you know, maybe somebody can do that, but they don't do. They don't have those kind of projections. We don't have any goals actually. Like, we're happy to have a sustainable project that has, you know, 15,000 paying subscribers. And we're growing and we have a team that, that we have now. And so we, I think actually the, the biggest, the biggest source behind this is that we don't have any investors. So I think a lot of this kind of grow, grow, grow insane kind of goals comes from the fact that the investors, venture capitalism is pushing that onto founders. That kind of. Because their whole business model is like, invest in other companies and hopefully two of them will turn into unicorns. And that means that all these hundred companies have to go crazy, crazy aggressive into growing to try to be that unicorn, even though 99 or whatever of them will fail.
So, yeah, I think if you kind of remove yourself out from that world and those kind of pressures, then the temptation doesn't really exist there as much because we are profitable, we are sustainable, we are stable, we're growing still, I guess turning on the ads or whatever, maybe, maybe we can grow faster. But that means we will need to maybe hire somebody to do the ads or maybe get better at the ads or. Yeah, so basically we're a small team and we just haven't really had the time to kind of say, okay, let's explore, you know, content is one and social media, but let's explore all the other channels and see like for example, I've worked as an affiliate manager for I think six years or so in the past life.
And, and yeah, I know that kind of market very deeply.
So yeah, we could say, okay, we should maybe turn on the affiliate and see how it performs. We're plausible because you never know. But maybe you can find that one or two affiliates that deliver outsized return to us. But it's just, yeah, we really haven't felt tempted. Maybe it's because we're growing. Maybe if we kind of stop growing and start declining or become stagnant, maybe we will feel more pressured internally just because we have a team and need to, you know, salaries and raises and bonuses and all that. Maybe we will feel a need for it. But so far we haven't, which is actually good that we have all these options available for us. You know, we have not tried it. Maybe they actually work 10 times better than what we do already for five years, six years now. But we just, we're ignorant in that sense. Like we haven't tried it, so we don't know.
Yeah, I don't really have a better example, better reasoning behind it than what I tried to explain here.
[00:21:08] Speaker A: So when you say there's no temptation, there's no temptation of like, what if we doubled our business, we start running ads, we double our top line revenue.
[00:21:15] Speaker B: What will that mean for us? We're already profitable.
[00:21:19] Speaker A: You don't want more Lamborghinis, they pay good salaries.
[00:21:23] Speaker B: I don't even have the first one.
Um, I don't know.
No, no, I don't, I don't think it's that. I mean it's not like we're saying no like to, to. To, you know, having more revenue. It's more like I guess we kind of content and happy with the way we're growing right now. And that means, you know, that we can run a corn company. Actually like many of, I think actually all of our developers, actually we have eight in the team are developers out of 11.
And I'm pretty sure all of them actually work four days per week.
You know, four days per week. So they don't work like five days, they don't work six days or whatever. The average.
What? You know, like the Crazy hours that you hear about from kind of Silicon Valley startups. So four days per week, flexible working hours, flexible working space, work from anywhere you want. They take competitive salaries.
So basically we have this calm approach which so basically to grow double the fast. I'm pretty sure many of these things will not be able to coexist. You know, we will have to put lots more effort, lots more money into marketing. That means more pressure into delivering new features faster, more risk and more work, more stress.
So basically we've like as a small company that wants to keep kind of control of everything and wants to stay independent and kind of be sane and calm, we've just decided to do things this way. And if that means that somebody can make a report and tells us that we're losing out of growth here and there because we're not doing this and that, so be it. I think we are happy as it is now. Probably stupid or ignorant or whatever.
I don't know. Like it's, it is what it is. It's like, I guess it's like a approach, attitude or philosophy that, that we're just happy the way we are.
[00:23:21] Speaker A: Well, maybe this is my Silicon Valley adjacent marketing speed talking because Turnkey, who runs this podcast, not in Silicon Valley, but video investors.
So maybe take this with a grain of salt. I, I think if I was in your position and running marketing, I would be very nervous. It, it has too high of a risk tolerance for me just publishing content because I think now content's going to be, it's cheaper than ever with LLMs and it's going to get cheaper. And I think say Google or even ChatGPT, social media, it's all going to get flooded. I think it's going to be harder to stand out. So if I was implausible, I'd be like, guys, our risk level in the next one to three years is actually really high that we have to invest in these channels just so that three years down the road that we're confident we can pay other people's salaries, whether that's social ads or Google Ads or whatever.
But that would actually scare me a lot is if I just had, I mean, I know you have different traffic channels. Like it sounds like your content's getting distributed in a lot of different places, but still like it all kind of comes down to content, which to me would just frighten me some.
[00:24:26] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, yeah, could be.
Like I mentioned before, things change so fast that we don't know if we started today.
We don't know if doing content only would have worked. It worked for us. And now we've been here for six years something. And I think at this stage, if you look at the frequency of the content we publish is way slower than it used to be three, four, five years ago. And at this stage we have this brand that's more known and the trusted and we have such a high volume of paying subscribers and between them so many team members that basically like I mentioned before, ChatGPT, which is like the new thing in the marketing as in it's like over the last three years I think they've grown so much in terms of referral traffic and they just refer.
They almost beat Google now in terms of new trial signups for, for plausible with way less, with way less visit. I think Google sends them like 800 per day. ChatGPT is something like 100. But in terms of actually conversions and transfers from those, they're like pretty much equal. And if, if the last three months continue or the next three months, ChatGPT will beat Google in terms of signups. So I think something somewhere has kind of, there's been like something we've kind of gone over some kind of threshold somewhere that now we have this, this brand that's well known and people trust and it ends up kind of, it feels like at this stage it's more like us not screwing it up. Like us kind of following what we stand for and what people expect from us. And you know, what we've been doing for last six years and like continue that, you know, we're open source, simple, we're lightweight and, and fast loading and we were accurate. And that kind of basically continuing what the brand stands for seems like the best investment we can make in trying to keep that growth. And now if something comes and eats us, something new, like again, like I mentioned, I have no idea what's going to happen tomorrow or three months down the line or next year. So because we don't have all these kind of growth goals and pressures, we try kind of not to think about it too much other than do what we can control, which is making sure that our product is the best it can be and that people can trust us.
[00:26:58] Speaker A: And any tips on growing a strong brand? Because I think Foldable does have an incredibly strong brand. I think all over the Internet you're known as very lightweight, simple, honest analytics. Any tips on growing a strong brand other than do good things and publish it?
[00:27:13] Speaker B: Well, it's like, it's like I've never tried to grow, grow a brand before. Like I, I had experience with content marketing from a huge brand. And I was like a tiny piece of the huge marketing team that was doing ads and TV shows and this and that and.
And so I never tried to build a brand before and I didn't really like attend, period. I just started, let's publish the content and tell people what to stand for and kind of push that message. And we've been doing that now for six years. And it feels like that consistency in being true to your word and showing that legacy, not just that six years that nobody can take away from us, that we've been here.
What we said six years ago is actually what we do today. We, we have not changed because many, many startups can. Things change and it's not that reliable and kind of stable, but we've been stable. And the message we sent six years ago is just as valid today as it was then. And I think that's a big part. That kind of the time and the kind of consistency is a big part of how we were able to build this brand. Because we were saying the same message, like, we are free of sippers, we are simple to use, we are accurate and we like remove all the bots and whatever. We are lightweight and fast load and we don't like slow down your website. We are open and transparent. So all that has been that message has been pushed in so many different ways over the last six years. That kind of stays there. It's stuck. And it's like people have heard about it and people trust it because we have not done anything to kind of go against some of these things that we've been talking about for six years. So I think that's actually my best learning, I guess, or advice that I can give is like this consistency in doing and continuing what you're talking about and just basically pushing that same message.
That's what builds you the trust and the kind of the brand in the market space. At least it worked for us. And I assume it could work for others too.
[00:29:21] Speaker A: But yeah, I'm actually curious about one thing. So I was looking on your site earlier and I forgot to mention this to you before the podcast. Let me know if we need to edit this out. You'd rather not answer. I noticed your pricing starts at like nine bucks a month and then the highest pricing I could find, I know you have your enterprise plan, which is hidden, but the highest pricing I could see on the site was like 350amonth, something like that, or 400amonth. I don't know what it was. So it was just a very small gap between your biggest vendors and your smallest vendors.
So, like, if I. If I'm thinking about, like, sort of like your distribution of customers and, like, how much you have, like, a circle that's like, all your customers, like, how much does any one customer fill that circle?
It's not very much. Like, it seems like.
[00:30:00] Speaker B: No, no, no, not at all. I think.
No, I think out of this 15,000 customers, we have, like, a bunch of. Because our pricing is based on, like, usage mostly, like, how many page users your site get. That's how much you pay. So you get little pages. You pay little. You get a lot of pages, you pay more. And it kind of. It kind of makes sense. Like, you know, if you have a business, the more pages you get, the chances are you will probably make more revenue, and then it makes sense that you also have to pay more for analytics. While it also makes sense from our perspective, like, the more pages you get, the more it costs for us to store it, to help you retrieve it at any time, and so on. So it kind of makes sense in that sense. And, yeah, like, we have.
I don't think there's. There's like, maybe 0.1%.
Like, the biggest customer is probably, like, 0.1%. I mean, we have customers that pay thousands per month, but they stand for so little of the whole MRR or NRR that it kind of. You know, we're very happy to have them. We will do everything to kind of keep them. But, you know, it's not like we. Like, the last company I worked with, we had two customers who stood for more than 50% of our revenue. And, you know, in a situation like that, it basically means you work for these two customers.
[00:31:17] Speaker A: You're a consultant.
[00:31:18] Speaker B: Whatever they want you to do, you have to do because you cannot. You just cannot lose either one of them.
And this is another. But I guess by chance it happened to us that we actually don't have somebody that we really have to listen in that sense, like, okay, you have to build this R. We'll leave you if it doesn't. Maybe we will build it because it fits with what we want to build and how we see plausible. But if. If we don't agree with what we have to build next, it. It is what it is. We will. We will never promise you that we will build it if. If it doesn't fit our worldview and. And what we think plausible stands for. So we don't have, like, in that sense, we. We don't have anyone like, Nobody can tell even from that perspective, nobody, nobody can tell us what to do. We do listen to people and we do kind of prioritize according to how many people want what.
But there's not like one customer or a few customers that can kind of like, you know, if you're unlucky, you get a big customer and then they tell you, we want to do this and that. Like, that's not like privacy first. And then you have to do it just because you gotta please them. And then you gotta change the whole positioning of your company. And it's like, luckily for us, we don't have these situations. So the pricing actually worked out that I think like the average revenue per user is something like $30 or something like pretty low, I guess. Like, it's not something people will be like very, very like, oh, wow. And all the other founders, you know, but we start low and we try to keep it affordable. And you know, if you have more traffic, you end up paying more, hopefully because you also have much more revenue because of all that traffic. But you know, if you have a, whatever 5,000 visitors per month, you end up paying $9 or you can even get a discount if you sign up on annual and pay, I don't know, seven and a half or whatever it is. So I think that also kind of they're not free, unfortunately, like Google Analytics is. But I think starting at $9, this kind of makes it affordable. So a decent percentage of businesses and websites out there can afford it in case they find it valuable enough to have a privacy first analytics or accurate analytics or lightweight or easy to understand and easy to read and so on. So, yeah, I think, yeah, I was really grateful that we don't have that kind of situation that I don't know from the past where like one or two customers really determines your roadmap. So yeah, that's the status for us. Like lots of basically smaller customers.
[00:33:42] Speaker A: And you mentioned Google Analytics is free. Not news to anybody.
And I think if you had told me about the idea of for plausible paid analytics before plausible had had existed, I would have called you crazy because Google Analytics was pretty good and it was totally free. So what's that like competing with a giant that is both huge and free?
[00:34:05] Speaker B: Yeah, it's.
I, I mean, again, I did not know what to expect coming into this. I only knew, I never paid for analytics before. I only knew Google Analytics and I was like, like I used Google Analytics on my websites and the companies I worked for, we used them for, I used them for two decades or something.
They did have some analytics tool like about 10 years ago in another company roll for where we had to pay, but that was more like product analytics and things like that.
So I didn't know what to expect here. And I think there's been like the movement over the last few years like this previously first movement, starting with the GDPR and some of these scandals around data privacy and that.
And somehow also at the same time, people started getting more comfortable at paying for tools. Like I want to pay for quality tool that really works for me rather than try to fit mold some other tool that's for free but doesn't really work for me, trying to mold my kind of work life around it. And there's enough people at this stage that they're happy to pay for quality tools and happy to pay for privacy and a lot of these things that we stand for that.
But yeah, I think maybe if we started 20 years ago, whatever, there will be nowhere to go. But I think at this stage I actually don't know if there's any tool that any kind of niche, any market where you can go and say, oh, people don't want to pay for this at all.
I think there should be enough people out there that are happy to pay for somebody who can dedicate themselves to something special and kind of build it and kind of focus really on that little niche that you really care about. And then you're happy to give them a percentage of your revenue or of your earnings on your website or in your company because they really tick those boxes.
And then if that's the case, then really that there are free alternatives doesn't really make a difference for us.
If there are free accounts and you don't care about these things that we do, then okay, you're not really, we have no hope in kind of getting you to pay as our fees if you don't care about what we do. And then you can. Not our customer, not our target audience at all. But if you have some issues with Google, some of these things that we actually do, then it's likely actually that you will want to solve those issues. And then you know that Google is free because of all the data collection and all the, you know, surveillance capitalism and whatever runs Google.
And we don't do any of that. That means that if we don't sell your data or don't monetize your data in any way, how do we, how do we exist as a company? How do we pay the salaries? How do we do the, how do we improve the product Every day that means somebody has to pay somewhere and we have no investors either. We're not like looking for a big sale down the line and being on unicorn. So that basically means if you want to have a product like plausible, you basically have to kind of contribute a little bit if we kind of make your life better and make your business run more efficiently or help your marketing to better. So I think it's, it ended up being kind of nice again. Again. I don't know like what will happen the three months down the line, whether something will change. But I think we've found like I mentioned 15, I think 15,700 something active paying subscribers with you know, tens of thousands different team members within, within those 15,000 or so subscribers. So we found a bunch of people around the web, around the world that kind of align with our interests, with what we believe in and that are happy to kind of pay us even though they have alternatives that they can use for free.
[00:37:41] Speaker A: Amazing. And I think so. I know we're running out of time here. So if people want to learn more about you, what you're doing, where should they go?
[00:37:49] Speaker B: Yeah, Plausible analytics. You can search for our brand. Plausible IO is the URL, the domain name and that's where we are. I have some social media profiles as well, but I'm really not that active anymore. Really these days we're really focused on plausible and we have this team that we're working on and that we're working with to, to build a better product. And yeah we have now actually we have a reach out with our social media person. So we also have like social media is active plausible social media which I used to write in the first five years. Now we have a, there's, there's that actually if you want to follow like and get recent updates you can actually follow it. Plausible. The brand on social media. But yeah, basically I have my own profiles but you may get like a 1, 1 update per month or something like that. If I, if I, oh this is interesting to share or we achieve this, let me share it.
When I see some of the other like they have so much content I just like I get a bit overwhelmed thinking like how, how do I actually get to, should I get an assistant or AI to write me all these, all these social media posts or something.
But no. So basically I just write here and there and basically most of my effort and time goes into plausible. So that's where the highest chance you will hear from me.
[00:39:02] Speaker A: Amazing. Well Marco, thank you so much. It's been a great episode. And, yeah, I really appreciate your time.
[00:39:07] Speaker B: Thanks, Brady.
