Today's interview is with Iron Brands (he's Dutch, that is his actual name), who joined a privacy analytics startups as a co-founder after it had already launched. We talked about how he met the original founder of Simple Analytics, how they negotiated the new ownership structure, the benefits of ditching Google Analytics and how to grow a bootstrapped startup.
Can you tell us what Simple Analytics is?
Sure! Simple Analytics is a privacy-friendly Google Analytics alternative. It gives you the insights you need in a straightforward dashboard. We don’t use any trackers or cookies.
We have two advantages over Google Analytics: simplicity and privacy. Google Analytics is free, but your website data is not yours. They own your website data, and they earn a shit ton of money by selling this to advertisers.
Also, Google Analytics is complex. They welcome you with 50 custom dashboards and make it very complex to navigate. For regular people, 95% of the functionality is unnecessary clutter and clunky. So, Adriaan, the original founder, decided there should be an alternative option.
An analytics tool that looks slick, is easy to use, and respects your visitors’ privacy. At Simple Analytics, your website data is yours. We store it safely in the EU and don’t sell it to third parties. This also means we are not free and ask a small fee for our service.
But… there is a free plan incoming (you can sign up for the waitlist here)! So stay tuned!
What are some achievements of Simple Analytics?
It’s probably good to mention that I joined Simple Analytics after it was founded. Adriaan started it 5 years ago. An indie hacker that was fed up with Google and decided to built something better. I joined only 2 years ago. Now we’re with the two of us and looking to assemble a small team. Currently, Dries (engineer) and Carlo (copywriter) are working part-time for us as well.
These are our MRR numbers for the past 5 years:
We are also an “open startup,” which means that we share our numbers publicly. You can see our numbers here. We currently have 1240 paying customers. Our website traffic is open as well. You can check those here. As you can see from the graph above, we are growing faster now but it's still very much steady growth.
There is also this misconception when building businesses. Everyone sees these AI wrapper startups going from zero to 50K MRR overnight. However, these are the outliers; most businesses don’t even reach 1K MRR, and then the founder gives up.
You need to stay in the game. Show up every day and do the little boring stuff that improves your business. It’s little steps. Putting up with this is our biggest achievement.
Why should people ditch Google Analytics?
If you don’t want to support a money-grabbing tech monopolist that earns billions selling your data, then that’s one reason. From a product standpoint: GA4 just sucks. We built a easy to use alternative that gives you the insights you need.
Overall, we believe the internet should be independent and friendly towards website visitors. If this resonates with you, feel free to give us a try!
How did you meet the founder Adriaan and get working at Simple Analytics?
This is quite an interesting story.
// pop-up with indie acquisitions offer