Part 2: How to get your first 1000 customers
Long-term growth tactics on how we reached 35K MRR
👋 Hi, I’m Iron from Simple Analytics, and welcome to my newsletter, The Road to 1 Million ARR. Sign up for weekly insights, growth strategies, and playbooks on how we are growing our business to 1 Million ARR. Fully transparent.
Two weeks ago, I published Part 1 on how to get your first 100 customers. I promised a follow-up, so here we are.
I just got back from a little holiday break in Greece 🇬🇷, so this issue took a bit longer. Anyway, let’s dive in. Hope you like it!
For people who don’t know me, a little introduction about me and our business: My business partner Adriaan and I founded Simple Analytics. It’s a simple Google Analytics alternative. It started as a side project, but here we are five years later:
💸 35K MRR
❤️ 1350+ users
🧑🤝🧑 Team of Two
✊ Zero VC Dollar raised
During the five years at Simple Analytics, we’ve seen two phases of growth:
Phase 1: Get traction - Going from 0 to 1
Phase 2: Long-term Growth - Going from 1 to 10
This article is about phase 2: Building long-term growth strategies.
Here is how we did that at Simple Analytics 👇
Growing a Bootstrapped business
Simple Analytics is bootstrapped, meaning we did not receive any VC funding.
In my previous business, I badly wanted to raise VC money. I thought it would be the ultimate validation—not just of my business but also of me as an entrepreneur. I would prove to my parents that I was pursuing something big.
At Simple Analytics, we value other things. We want to work on our own terms, create our own rules, and make our own decisions.
Going either way has implications for growth. It’s a money vs no-money situation.
Being bootstrapped means you are constrained. You can't spend money on advertising or hiring a growth team.
You can’t buy your way to product/market fit by throwing money at it. However, this can be a good thing. It pressures you to make it work with limited. You can’t hide behind your big pile of cash.
We learned to be scrappy and do things that don’t scale (like in Part 1). However, this also influenced our long-term growth decisions (part 2).
Here is how 👇
Long-term Growth: Growing from 1 - 10
Before deciding on a long-term growth strategy, you need to clarify the big picture. Get your fundamentals in check.
To do this, I studied the Four Fits by Brian Balfour. It’s a framework for understanding how to grow a product or business, especially in the context of SaaS. The model breaks down growth into four critical factors:
✅ Market/Product Fit: This is the foundation. It refers to how well your product meets the needs and solves the pain points of your target market.
For example, we concluded that a privacy-friendly and simple analytics tool was needed since people were complaining about Google Analytics.
✅ Model/Market Fit: Check if your business model (e.g., SaaS subscription, freemium) aligns well with the market dynamics.
For example, Simple Analytics uses a privacy-first, subscription-based model instead of “free, but selling your data model” Google Analytics applies. This fits with a growing market of privacy-conscious companies.
✅ Product/Channel Fit: Do elements of your product naturally match with a specific channel? Certain products do well in specific channels or bad in others.
For example, a viral marketing campaign might not attract many users for a complex product like Salesforce.
✅ Channel/Model Fit: This fit assesses whether the chosen marketing channels suit the business model. Different business models work better with different channels, and the right combination of channels and models leads to better growth.
For example: Doing outbound sales (channel) for a $9/mo product (model) is not very effective.
Make sure to tick the boxes before you start thinking about long-term growth. You need to figure out all four to make it work! If you're not there yet, read part 1!
After this exercise, it becomes clearer which growth strategies might work for your business in the long term. For Simple Analytics, we decided to focus on SEO as our main growth lever.
Here is why:
People were already looking for a “Google Analytics alternative” online.
Outbound sales was not feasible for our business model. (At $9 per subscription plan)
SEO is long-term focused. It takes a while to get traffic, but it sticks long-term.
We are bootstrapped. So we’re looking for a cost-effective growth strategy.
SEO
SEO is the foundation for many durable SaaS businesses—especially those with low prices (and zero money to spend). After doing some research (checking keywords, competitors, volume, etc.), we decided to invest heavily in SEO.
It’s important not to skip the research step here:
Are people already looking for your solution? “Google Analytics alternative”
Is it difficult to rank for certain keywords?
Does your product fit with this channel?
SEO got us from 1k to 13k monthly visitors per month from Google over two years.
The beauty of SEO is that it works compounding. It's like investing. Invest a lot in quality content once and see it grow and attract more users over time.
The only downside of SEO is that it takes time to see results. In the first few months, it will seem like you are working hard without getting any return.
It's only relevant to start with SEO when you are sure there is a need for your product since it costs time to see results. You need to figure this out in phase 1 before going all in on SEO.
Where do you start with SEO
SEO can be anything, from writing a “how-to” blog post to optimizing your website speed or building backlinks to your homepage.
Here are the things I would get started with:
1. Answer questions in your niche
The easiest way to start thinking about SEO is to answer questions relevant to your niche. Don’t overthink this.
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? Go to forums, Reddit, Twitter, etc., and look for “how-to” questions in your niche.
These questions are actionable (people are looking to solve this) and most often long-tail, meaning there is little competition.
Another way to do this is to use a keyword analytics tool like Answer The Public. It will give you an overview of questions about a specific topic.
For example, here is the output it gives website analytics:
To make it even more concrete, I would download all the keywords and questions I can find and upload them in a keyword analyzer GPT, with the question:
“Hey, my company does X, and I want to write informative “how to” guides on topic Y. Here is a list of relevant keywords and questions. Provide me with a list of blog topics.”
Alternative pages
There are three types of content: TOFU, MOFU, and BOFU, or top, middle, and bottom-of-funnel content.
Initially, you want to focus on BOFU content. Write content for a small group of users who are ready to buy your solution.
If you start with SEO, don't focus on just getting website traffic. Focus on getting the “right” traffic—traffic that converts.
I would rather have ten website visitors, of whom two convert, than 1000 website visitors, of whom none become your customers.
You want to go after BOFU content first. A great example of this is “Alternative Pages.”
This is especially true if you are in a crowded market. Use Semrush (or any other SEO tool) to determine if people want an alternative to your competitor. (Because that's you!)
For example, for Simple Analytics, there is a lot of search volume for “Google Analytics alternative” and for smaller ones such as “Hotjar Alternative.”
If you create blogs explaining why you are the best “Hotjar Alternative,” you will start to rank for this search query. People actively looking for a “Hotjar Alternative” will find out about you.
It doesn’t stop here.
What about “Pricing + {CompetitorName}” and “Review + {CompetitorName}”.
Check search volumes for those as well and create pages. Someone looking for a review of your competitor might also be interested to read what you offer.
Getting backlinks
Backlinks always sound like this vague thing you need to rank in Google.
You can never have enough backlinks, but the marginal return gets lower at some point.
There are some rules of thumb you should follow.
When you are starting, Google knows nothing about your website. By including a few backlinks from websites with a high “Domain Authority,” you can improve your rankings quite fast.
Using Semrush, you can also check your competitors' domain authority. This is where you want to be eventually.
The best way to get backlinks is to write quality content. If you write content that helps solve a problem, people will start linking to your solution on their websites.
In addition, you can add your website to directories, forums, etc. Just to get that first push. Check out backl.io for this.
You can also “hunt” for backlinks by looking for broken links on websites relevant to your niche. However, I would not spend too much time on this. It’s time-consuming, and the success rate is low.
I don’t want to go too deep here. Just know that you should get some backlinks as early as possible. It’s important to get that initial push in your search rankings.
Programmatic SEO
Programmatic SEO does not apply to every business, but you should evaluate it at least. If it works for your business, it can be a goldmine.
Programmatic SEO is the art of creating scalable content. It requires creativity and is different for every business.
Let me explain:
For Simple Analytics, we have created 100s of 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, you will start ranking for search queries about “Google Analytics + country.”
Obviously, it still needs to be accurate, but if you have a “base content” and a set of “variables,” you can create 100s of pages instantly.
My first business was a website for students to find internships. Here, we created hundreds of pages that looked like this: Internship + {job category} + {City}
For example: “Internship Marketing Amsterdam”
There are 1000s of combinations you can make here.
Think about how programmatic SEO might work for your business. Feel free to reach out if you want me to have a look.
Quality tops everything
To conclude the SEO topic, you should always keep quality in mind.
Don’t bother too much about your meta tags, website speed, breadcrumbs, length, etc. These are all optimizations. They do help, so you might as well get them right. (I’m using a Brave/Chrome extension called Detailed SEO Extension for this)
However, take into account that this doesn’t replace quality content.
Try to serve the related search query in the best possible way.
Final Thoughts
This is how we scaled Simple Analytics to 35K MRR. This is surely not the only way to do it, but it worked for us.
We are at 35K now and growing steadily. However, we feel we need to enter a new phase of growth.
We passed growing from 0 to 1 and 1 to 10, but what about growing from 10 to infinity?
Different strategies are required to grow from 10 to infinity and beyond. We are currently in the process of this, and I’ll write about it in part 3 next week!
Phase 1: Getting traction - Going to 10K MRR
Phase 2: Long-term growth - Going to 32K MRR
Phase 3: Scale to infinity - ♾️ (Coming soon)
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Cheers ✌️✌️
Iron