How Adriaan & Iron bootstrapped Simple Analytics from zero to $380k ARR in 5 years.
Episode 90
Hello hello!
First off, apologies for the delay in publishing the newsletter - I’ve gotten a lot of love because of this & I wanna keep this going for as long as I can. I have gotten some feedback from readers that there is a lot of interest in studying founders who are just ahead of the curve so to speak - not the big guys like Webflow or Brex (although their story is worth telling & I will) but the more under-the-radar types SaaS businesses that are quietly making huge ripples.
So moving forward, I will also be bringing you the juice from these under-the-radar SaaS companies & how they went about their startup journey.
This week, I spoke with Iron Brands, the founder of Simple Analytics, a privacy-friendly, simple Google Analytics alternative that’s making $384k in annual revenue.
Iron was kind enough to share his insights with me & I have tried to reproduce the entire conversation with all the juicy details.
Let’s dive in!
Brought to you by:
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The idea
Simple Analytics started in October 2018 when Adriaan, the founder decided to make a privacy-friendly Google Analytics alternative.
Adrian was a developer by trade but despite that, he took Simple Analytics to $10k MRR by July 2021 - taking roughly 2 years & 9 months.
When Adriaan started building Simple Analytics, he was freelancing to pay the bills a few days a week while spending the rest of his time on Simple Analytics. The idea was that once Simple Analytics took off, he would leave the freelancing work behind.
Within 2 months, the first version of Simple Analytics was ready.
There was a statistics page where users could see:
page views of the last month
top performing pages
top referrers
screen sizes
He also created a landing page where users could:
see the promotional video
read the features
create an account
pay for a plan
Going from zero to one.
So how did Adriaan go from zero to $10k MRR in 2.5 years? It's a bit of luck & timing as Iron puts it (who joined as cofounder shortly after the 10k milestone). Like most startup founders, Adriaan did things that didn't scale. This included promoting on Twitter, Reddit, and HackerNews.
One thing worth noting is that he charged users for the product from the very beginning (since he was bootstrapping the entire thing). While pulling at these strings, Adriaan found that his Hacker News launch post went viral - this spike alone got him his first few thousand dollars in revenue.
And while this may seem like a stroke of luck, if you look closely, you can see some interesting patterns emerge The first, is that Adriaan posted to the show HN page - the lower frequency of posts means you will have more chance of being seen.
The second thing Adriaan did is that he posted a thoughtful comment by showing a technical hurdle he overcame while building this. The HN crowd finds this very endearing as it ties into their personal narrative of struggling with something & overcoming it.
And while this specific example worked, the broader takeaway here is to trigger a powerful emotion within your community that will make you more relatable.
The third thing Adriaan did was to comment under posts - he found a relevant post to his domain, offered thoughtful advice, and then linked his own product. The result: 590 Hacker News users check out his website. See this example.
Adriaan also posted on Product Hunt & he did the basics right - he prepared his promo video, had a nice GIF in place, wrote a solid product description & prepared an interesting first comment.
The day before launch, he prepared his Product Hunt post on Preview Hunt to see how the final post would look and used this to get feedback from fellow indie-hacker founders. The launch was super successful & got 864 upvotes, got voted the number #3 product of the day & was even nominated for the 2018 Golden Kitty awards.
Together, the PH launch & the HN launch got him a wave of new customers. ~ 80,000 visitors came from these 2 launches. After this, word of mouth began to spread with other users recommending like-minded customers. This created a nice recommendation growth loop which fuelled Simple Analytics growth. During this time, he talked to more developers, and indie hackers who would become future customers of Simple Analytics & received valuable feedback from them.
Teaming up with a co-founder.
It was at this stage that Adriaan met Iron Brands, the latter who would join Simple Analytics as the marketing/sales co-founder. Iron was from a marketing/sales background & had been running a marketplace biz which he was planning to quit.
The two of them hit things off instantly at a bar meet-up in Amsterdam. Right off the bat, Iron liked the idea & saw the potential of the product – he wanted to work with Adriaan on Simple Analytics.
6 months later, Iron called up Adriaan & reminded him of their conversation & proposed an action plan. He would work with Adriaan for 1-2 days a week & help him out with marketing/sales-related stuff. If they vibed & enjoyed working together, he would join as a cofounder. Adriaan agreed & the two of them got to work.
Iron soon realized that a vast majority of traffic to the Simple Analytics website was coming in from Hacker News. So Iron thought - "Hey let's double down on this & see what happens". So they did. And the strategy worked wonders. Here's what they did:
Adriaan built a small bot that notified the founders whenever a news piece dropped around Google Analytics & its privacy concerns. Big publications often covered these news pieces & Iron observed that these news-type posts went the most viral on HackerNews.
So whenever a new publication dropped a news piece related to Google Analytics & privacy, Iron wrote up an article on that, published it on the SI website & posted it on HackerNews with the blog URL. And each time, it blew up.
Iron says that 60% of his posts on HackerNews went viral & that brought in a large chunk of revenue & users consistently each week. This became so popular that Hackernews banned them from posting because they had "hacked" the HN algo lol. Iron even wrote a post & called it "how to hack Hackernews".
This experiment was great for 2 reasons - it brought in new users and gave Iron & Adriaan time to work together. And after the 3 months got over, Iron officially came on board as the marketing/sales co-founder.
How they used SEO to go to $30k MRR
The next goal was to increase the MRR - and the founders decided to stick to the basics & use SEO as a distribution channel with precise positioning.
Once again, they did the basics right & their SEO strategy had 3 main pillars:
Long-tail how-to articles
Alternative pages
Programmatic SEO pages
Long-tail SEO
Iron says that the easiest way to start thinking about SEO is to answer questions relevant to your niche and target audience – Show people how to solve their problems in a blog article. Then, explain how your business can do this for them at the end of the article.
Want to find relevant questions to answer? Look for “how to” questions relevant to your niche. “How to” questions are actionable (people are looking to solve this) and most often long-tail, meaning there is not a lot of competition. (tip: In Semrush, navigate to “keyword magic tool” and search for “how to.” By using your keyword as a filter, you’ll get a list of relevant “how to” questions to answer.)
One of the main tricks they used was to answer common user questions, stuff like, "how do I do XYZ in Google Analytics" - these indicated that there was a customer base that found Google Analytics too overwhelming. These blog posts presented Simple Analytics as a simpler alternative.
For example, for SEO they created the following pages:
- How to do X in Google Analytics
- How to integrate X with Google Analytics
Iron calls it product-led-SEO. Each of these content pillars had multiple variations & created long-tail SEO value bringing in tons of traffic.
Alternative Pages:
In addition to the product-led-SEO approach, they also created alternative pages. Alternative pages work because they directly show how your product is different from the competitors & it captures high-intent buyers organically.
For example, for Simple Analytics, there is a lot of search volume for “Google Analytics alternative” but also for smaller ones such as “Hotjar Alternative.” They created blogs outlining why they are the best “Hotjar Alternative,” & soon started to rank for this search query, and people actively looking for a “Hotjar Alternative” soon found out about Simple Analytics.
Programmatic SEO pages
Programmatic SEO is SEO on steroids - you can generate multiple pages instantly and rank for thousands of keywords by tweaking just a few variables. These variables are key to create these programmatic pages in bulk.
For Simple Analytics, they created 100 pages from a template text that answered this question: “Is Google Analytics illegal in {Country X}?”
The country is the variable here. You can recycle the template text and change the country variable. By creating a page for every country, soon they started ranking for search queries about “Google Analytics + country.”
All these 3 approaches worked incredibly well for Simple Analytics – take a look at these graphs below.
How crystal clear positioning helped them attract the right users.
Speaking of simpler, the founders nailed positioning from the very start - it was a simpler version of Google Analytics that was privacy-first. This positioning statement resonated with customers and consequently, all blogs & content were created with this positioning in mind.
At first glance, this may seem obvious or rather "meh" but this positioning played a significant advantage in getting Simple Analytics up and running.
When there's an incumbent as big as Google, the best way to capture a market is to slice up the bloated market and position it as a simple product that does one thing very well. And that is exactly what Simple Analytics did - they stripped down GA and confined it to a few simple but necessary things & positioned it as a simpler alternative.
This resonated with the subset of customers who were happy to pay a fee for a cleaner, privacy-friendly & simpler alternative. For Simple Analytics, they were indie hackers, developers & solopreneurs who needed a simple product for their use case.
This also created a flywheel effect - when these developers or indie hackers worked with clients or went in-house, they recommended Simple Analytics over Google Analytics which got the company high-ticket customers.
This flywheel meant that users of Simple Analytics became a distribution channel in itself while increasing expansion revenue as well. A solopreneur customer would probably just sign up for an individual plan but when that same solopreneur referred Simple Analytics to his employers, they would sign up for a team plan (with more users) & boost expansion revenue.
This flywheel reduced the customer acquisition cost (CAC) significantly while directly increasing revenue. The company also reduced switching costs users could face by having them import all their data to Simple Analytics in just a few clicks.
The privacy-first positioning statement attracted a different type of customer - customers like Hyundai. For these enterprises, privacy & compliance was a big deal so Google Analytics was a no-go for them. Once they realized the compliance feature of Simple Analytics, it became a no-brainer for them to use. SEO & word of mouth brought in a lot of these enterprise clients.
The team hired a part-time writer to write legal & compliance-related blogs that were centered around privacy & positioned Simple Analytics as a privacy-friendly alternative.
The road to $1 million ARR.
Now, as they scale up, the next goal for the founders is to reach the fabled $83k MRR aka $1 million in ARR. And to do this, they will double down on SEO while activating another lever - Product-led growth.
PLG is the perfect lever for Simple Analytics since it's a simple product with a huge TAM. Iron identified that between the two extremes of indie hackers/solopreneurs & enterprise customers, there was a massive middle market waiting to be captured. PLG seemed like a good choice to target these customers.
Once again, they are betting on the flywheel to help them acquire these customers. The objective here is to capture a large chunk of the solopreneurs/indie hackers and offer them value for free & in return they will refer Simple Analytics to their clients/employers, which would in turn bring in even more expansion revenue.
Since there's a huge middle market, Simple Analytics wants to capture as much of that market as fast as possible. The freemium PLG model is great for making that happen. Once that market is captured, they can move upwards & monetize that segment via upsells, cross-sells & referrals.
This is not dissimilar to how Webflow monetized their user base as well. The early Webflow user can use it for free but when he upgrades to an agency model, he will sign up for the more expensive Webflow team plan. Not just that, he will also refer Webflow to his clients who will sign up for a premium team plan triggering recurring revenue and expansion revenue.
PLG works best when there is a huge TAM. The most successful PLG companies (think Loom, Zoom, Airtable, Notion, Trello) all have a massive TAM so it makes sense to capture a large chunk of the market at first for free and monetize a small section of it. Trello pulled this off brilliantly. Simple Analytics aspires to do something similar.
They opened up a free plan for Simple Analytics so they could capture more top-of-the-funnel users. They optimized their onboarding so they could trigger key buying events & upsell users at the right time.
They are doubling down on SEO, and content, going on podcasts & experimenting with different strategies to capture users. If this goes well, it isnt too far off to suggest that they will hit their landmark of $1m ARR sooner rather than later.
7 Key Takeaways:
If you don't have a particular skill, find a cofounder to partner with that complements your skillset.
Study what works & double down on it.
Do things that don't scale in the 0-1 phase.
Constraints breed creativity.
SEO is a great channel to go from 1-10.
Specific positioning for specific customers.
PLG is great for SaaS products with a big TAM.
You gotta do your own thing to figure out your product's evolution.
Keep at it & iterate constantly while keeping an open mind.
Do more with less. Keep 80-20 in mind.