Road to 1M ARR - April & May Update
On founder week, in person meets and scaling beyond SEO
š Hi, Iām 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.
Yes, a double edition this time (not extra long though). Iāve been out most of May and lost my writing habit. Visiting different places, even for a long weekend, wrecks my routine. And upon returning, it takes a couple of days to get into it again (first world problems).
In May I went to Lisbon, Birmingham, Berlin, and Verona. For most of the trips I wasnāt away from my keyboard, but still found it hard to get into my āwriting zone.ā
Last week, I pushed an article inspired by Anthony Bourdain. This was the best one so far based on the response. Great motivation!
Now Iām back in Amsterdam. Locked and loaded and ready to work through the summer. Amsterdam in summer is great, so aside from a trip to France, I havenāt planned anything for June, July & August. LFG!
Iām reminding myself this is a business update, so here we go.
- Numbers
- Founder week
- Integrations & Partnerships
- In Person
Letās dive in!
Numbers
Here are Mayās numbers. I didnāt report April, but I will use the percentage to indicate growth/decline compared to April.
š° $40.896 MRR (+1.5%)
š 9.1K Google visitors (-2%)
ā£ļø 1403 new accounts (-8%)
š 43 New Customers
š„ 37 Churn
In April, we surpassed the 40K monthly mark and are nearing 500K yearly! This is halfway to our goal of building a 1M/year company without external funding.
Growth was slower at 1.5%, but Iām happy with the progress!
Founder Week
Twice a year, Adriaan and I plan a Founder Week, a little retreat in the middle of nowhere. We rent a cabin in the woods, stock up on food for 5 days, and talk business.
This time we visited the Veluwe, a nature reserve 1.5 hours from Amsterdam. In the Netherlands, that means youāre at the other side of the country.
Our Founder Week was long overdue. Since the beginning of this year, we hadnāt worked from the same place. I spent the first two months in Cape Town, and when I got back Adriaan was a few weeks off. So it was good to be stuck in the same building again.
The first part of Founder Week is always more creative. We outline our goals for the next six months. This time we even plotted it on a chart, with āimportanceā on the y-axis and āeffortā on the x-axis. Itās a very simple model to prioritise.
Here is what we made of it:
In the second half of the week, we lock in and work. Being in nature without distractions, social responsibilities, and other stuff is the ultimate productivity hack. Thatās why we planned a new Founder Week soon, but this time just to ship.
Partnerships & Integrations
I mentioned before that weāre working on new channels to grow. Getting from 0 to 1 requires a different set of marketing channels than going from 1 to 10.
SEO worked well for us to get from 1 to 10, but it only gets you so far. We feel like weāve hit a plateau. To scale from 10 to 100, weāre exploring new channels like partnerships & integrations.
Integrations
The goal is to integrate with bigger players in the market. We just launched an integration with Netlify, a cloud platform for hosting websites with around 3 million users. Integrating means those users can add Simple Analytics to their projects with just a click in the Netlify platform.
Pretty cool right?
The same applies to our integration with Fine.dev, a āvibe-codingā platform like Lovable and Bolt.
By pushing integrations, we hope to gain more scale and distribution through larger platforms. This is my focus for the coming months.
Partnerships
Same idea here: I want to use the distribution of bigger organisations to reach more potential clients for Simple Analytics.
There is one usecase in particular: Consent Management Platforms (companies that build cookie banner software).
Let me explain:
Simple Analytics doesnāt use any cookies or trackers and collect zero personal data. Meaning you can use Simple Analytics regardless of cookie preferences. Even if a website visitor does not give consent, you can still use Simple Analytics.
If you use Google Analytics and a website visitor indicates they donāt want to be tracked, you miss their visit. So you have a data-gap in your analytics because of the cookiebanner.
By partnering with Consent Management Platforms, they can offer their clients this missing data through us.
Hereās how it looks:
In Person
Travel did fuck up my routine, but it offers some good stuff as well. Apart from great restaurants and local experiences, youāll meet new people.
For example, in Lisbon I met Francesco from Typefully for coffee and got invited to a co-working session in a nearby coastal town with a nice IndieHacker community. Met up with quite a few people Iāve known on Twitter.
In Berlin, I attended the Ubiquiti Conference. Next to Simple Analytics, I run another business called UniHosted with Dries. It was my first conference and it didnāt disappoint.
We met our two biggest customers and talked to many Ubiquiti-related businesses. Weāve gained new insights and ran into a couple of partnership opportunities with other companies in the space.
In a small industry like UniFi (a Ubiquiti product), the major players know each other. We were the odd-ones-out this time, but at least they saw us for the first time.
I plan to do more of these for UniHosted, and it might be worthwhile for Simple Analytics as well. āNetworkingā has a bad rep, because it sounds cringe and forced, but itās a great way to get more name and fame in your industry.
Donāt treat networking like sales. No one goes to a conference to be sold to. People go to learn new stuff and meet others in the industry. Everyone is open for a chat, as long as you donāt pitch.
Final Thoughts
Thatās a wrap for this month. As much as Iād have liked to grow faster, Iām quite happy where we are now. Simple Analytics is doing a steady $40K a month, while UniHosted is growing fast past $10k.
Iāll be pushing forward much of the summer
Life is good āļø
Cheers,
Iron