Alright, October was a big big month!
Dries (follow on X) joined Simple Analytics!
Yes, the same Dries, who is also our co-founder at UniHosted. I will explain how this came together in a bit. Other than that, it's interesting to note that I’m writing this from Bali. Indie Hacker Disneyland. Working on both UniHosted and Simple Analytics.
Let’s get to it!
- Dries at Simple Analytics
- Pricing update
- Product Roadmap
- Numbers
- Final Thoughts
Michelin chose Simple AnalyticsJoin them
Dries at Simple Analytics
To understand this 4D-chess move, we must go back in time a bit. Adriaan and I have an office in Amsterdam with Simple Analytics. We have a bit of space, so it's more like a co-working. Dries joined the office, and we launched UniHosted together after a while.
Dries was still working full-time as a software engineer for Q42, but deep inside, he wanted to be a full-time Indie Hacker. Meanwhile, Adriaan and I discussed that we wanted to grow our little two-man team, and the first to join should be someone technical.
I asked Adriaan what the profile of that person should look like, and he said:
Someone like me but then younger
-Good luck finding that.
Working together with Dries on UniHosted was a super nice experience. Since I can magically pick up senses, I concluded that maybe Dries was the engineer we were looking for.
I figured out a plan that would work for Simple Analytics and be interesting for Dries. The next day, I lured Dries into a “company meeting trap” and proposed the plan.
Dries was excited but wanted to think about it since he also liked the agency he worked for. Plus, that’s a much more sustainable source of income.
After two weeks, he returned to us saying he quit his job and accepted our offer. We then proceeded to book three tickets to Bali, and here we are. Living the dream team.
Dries started last week of October, and we couldn’t be happier.
Pricing update
I’ve previously mentioned our struggles with our pricing, but now we’re finally at the implementation stage of the new pricing.
We’ve thought long and hard about a pricing structure aligning with our business and luckily found it.
Not by thinking long and hard ourselves but by talking to people who know how to change pricing and have done it before. This comes back every time we run into something: Find someone and talk to someone who has done it before. Learn from their experience.
I asked Dennis (CEO of Convert.com) if he was open to a 15-minute chat about this subject. He gladly wanted to help, and we talked for an hour. I also reached out to Eric from Recruitee. He is the team lead for their new pricing.
Those chats formed the basis of our new pricing.
I won’t bore you with the details, but a few interesting points came up that helped us a lot:
- Respect your current users. A small pricing bump is not bad, but don’t juggle with the trust of your early supporters.
- Add yearly inflation correction to your pricing. It's more normal than you think, and you’re leaving money on the table if you don't do it. Lesson learned here.
- Focus your pricing on your Ideal customer. We have 1200 customers ranging from Indie Hackers to Fortune 500 companies. Creating a focus on such a broad range is difficult, but you have to nail pricing.
- Change your pricing every 12 months. Pricing is not something you do once; it's an ever-evolving thing. Especially when you launch new features, rethink your pricing packages.
Product Roadmap
Our product roadmap has always been open but hasn’t been refreshed in the last few months. We even got this message haha:
It seems funny, but not really nice to hear if you work your ass off. So let me clarify: Adriaan has been working non-stop on things people don’t see but are super vital: Scaling our servers, pricing implementation, and our teams' feature.
However, it needs to be clearer that we are doing stuff and have an updated roadmap.
This is the roadmap for the coming months. I will add it to our roadmap page sometime next week.
- Before we implement our pricing, we might launch an AI feature in the dashboard 👀👀
- Then pricing. Since it touches our teams' feature, we’ll launch both together, hopefully in two months.
- Once that’s done (and bugs are fixed), we’ll focus on improving our conversion rate. This means we’ll be critically looking at our website navigation and onboarding flow. These haven’t changed in a couple of years, and there is much room for improvement.
- Then, we’ll finally get to the stuff that our current users will benefit from directly:
- Creating better email reports
- Traffic spike alerts
- And a V2 for our Goals dashboard
Numbers
Alright, let's get to the juicy part: The numbers. We grew 4.38% in the last month—better growth than the previous two months (around 2.5%). However, the growth mostly came from current customers expanding our business offering.
💰 $ 24,165 MRR
📈 +$1014
👋 169 Signups
😍 50 New Customers
💔 35 Churn
✅Best month to date in terms of revenue ($29k).
But it was not all fun and games. There is enough to improve!
❌ Growth came from existing customers. New business is lower than expected.
❌ Google traffic is down for a couple of months now
❌ Churn still too high
Final Thoughts
Alright, that’s it for the month. Will create a massive update next month about building businesses in Bali. Until now, it has been epic!
Bali beach to my left, cold Bintang to my right, and a dashboard that respects user privacy straight ahead. Life’s good.
See you next month.