
How we hit our $30k ARR milestone - AdriaanvRossum
https://blog.simpleanalytics.com/how-we-hit-our-30k-annual-recurring-revenue-milestone
======
encoderer
Congrats on the milestone.  As I’ve grown a SaaS over the last 5 years I’ve
found there are enough MRR and ARR milestones that we can celebrate something
real every few months.  It’s a great feedback loop. ( Eg 10k arr, 1k mrr, 25k
arr, 3k mrr, 50k arr, etc)

Advice given to me, taken in my own way, and now I’m passing on: to get from
1k mrr to 10k mrr double down on everything that has worked for you.  Once you
hit 1k (or in your case about 3k) you obviously have at least one thing that
is working. 

After 10k we were forced to get more creative. ( Feeder products, paid
advertising, etc)

This is the era of the Micro SaaS.

~~~
yoshyosh
Assuming you're talking about cronitor, curious what feeder products you guys
created, and how did that work out? 

~~~
encoderer
We acquired and grew crontab.guru

It’s worked out very well. 

~~~
patio11
That's genius. 

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AdriaanvRossum
I think it would be interesting for Hacker News to know what happened with the
company that they made famous from the start:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18024277](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18024277)

~~~
AdriaanvRossum
Very meta information:
[https://simpleanalytics.com/blog.simpleanalytics.com?start=2...](https://simpleanalytics.com/blog.simpleanalytics.com?start=2019-10-15&end=2019-10-15)

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larrysalibra
Congrats on the huge milestone! 

I really like how you respect the Do Not Track flag.  I wish companies had done
this before browser makers started removing the feature. 

[https://www.macrumors.com/2019/02/06/apple-removes-safari-
do...](https://www.macrumors.com/2019/02/06/apple-removes-safari-do-not-track-
option/)

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gnicholas
Curious about the focus on revenue versus profitability.  I get that most VC-
backed businesses are measured primarily against revenue targets, but this
seems like a bootstrapped startup and I'd think they'd be more interested in
metrics that factor in margins, profitability, etc. 

I totally get that when people see "$30K ARR" in the title of an article, they
know what it's about.  Are there other metrics that relate more to
sustainability that we can use/popularize?  Not trying to be critical of this
founder — just thinking of ways we can change the conversation to be more
relevant to/appropriate for bootstrapped startups. 

~~~
ssutch3
It appears to be a side project at this point.  They have revenue against
expenses on their "open" page here:
[https://simpleanalytics.com/open](https://simpleanalytics.com/open) but as
you can see salary is ~$500/mo

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lukeqsee
We (my startup in my profile) switched over to Simple Analytics when we redid
our website.  While they don't have all the features we might want, the
experience and privacy guarantees are fantastic. 

Major congratulations to the team! 

~~~
codysc
This is a timely submission for me.  I'm ramping up for a launch and was
looking for the same privacy respecting analytics solution.  Good to see
feedback. 

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Yuval_Halevi
Adriaan

Did you ever compare traffic results between GA and Simpleanalytics? 

I know that many times GA has a difficult time recognizing traffic from Reddit
and HN so it shows it only as direct. 

I have Jetpack on a few of my sites and it shows completely different results
than GA, mainly because I think GA can filter by default bots traffic which is
kinda common on bookmark sites (when a post becomes viral)

Will try your tool... looks great

~~~
soared
Researching 'dark social' can help you solve some of that

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fs2
Don't use it myself but this is great news.  I'm happy to see Adriaan is so
open about everything that goes on (also the bad things).  Something that I
always find difficult for projects like this. 

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barbellguy97
I still remember reading about your company on HN, Adriaan.  Gefeliciteerd!! 

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mxuribe
This was a great write-up; thanks for sharing!!! 

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jacquesm
Ga zo door.  Op naar de ton :)

