The Start:

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

Getting his first customers:

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.

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.

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