Road to 1M ARR - July Update

First "Build in public". MRR update. Free plans and enterprise sales.

Aug 06, 2024

👋 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.

This is the first “Build in public” in a long time. I haven’t done a write-up in very long. I can think of 100 reasons why I didn’t, but it’s just difficult to stick to something, I guess.

I actually really like to write these, so I’m trying again—now in a different format: I created a newsletter 🥳🥳

It makes it easier for me to publish, and I can see subscribers. This feels motivating.

Let’s see if I can pull it off.

In this update:

Simple Analytics July update
Introducing our Free Plan
How to deal with Enterprise clients
Product week vs. Growth engineering week
Focus more on writing

Let’s get it.

Simple Analytics July Numbers

Let’s start with the juicy stuff. Our numbers for July:

Here are the July stats for Simple Analytics:

💰 $32.707
📊 11K website visitors from Google
❣️ 865 new accounts
👏 80 New Customers
😥 52 churn

Our MRR has been somewhat stable in the last few months. Currently, we’re averaging around 3.4% growth per month (12-month average). We aim for 5%, but we seem a bit stuck here.

The main reason for this is a pricing change:

We discontinued an old plan for business customers

We added a free plan.

Some users switched to the free plan or quit using Simple Analytics.

Normally, we’d be around 200 signups a month, but now we’re at almost 900 and haven’t even launched the free plan properly.

That is why we added a free plan: More people getting to experience Simple Analytics.

Hopefully, this will pay us back in the long term.

Free Plan

We’ve always considered a free plan, but it felt super scary. Now, we feel it is the right time to introduce one.

We are a bootstrapped company, meaning we need actual paying customers to survive. We do not have VC money to keep us afloat, so it always felt risky to add a free plan.

We have 1300 customers and are growing steadily. Over the last couple of years, we have invested heavily in our product and marketing and have reached 32K MRR.

Now, we feel ready to take a big swing.

We feel that SEO will only take us so far. From 10k to 30k, SEO worked wonders, but if we want to grow to 83.33333K, we need a different strategy.

A free plan brings a risk but also a big opportunity.

Our market is massive—like massive, massive, massive. Everyone is still using Google Analytics (90%+ market share), which is an awful product if you’re just looking for something simple.

Why does everyone stick with Google?

Cause it’s the only thing they know
Cause it’s free!

We are leveling the playing field by offering free analytics. However, unlike Google Analytics, our analytics is clean, simple, and straightforward.

My hypothesis:

More people experience simple analytics
More people like using simple analytics
More people talk about simple analytics
More businesses start using the paid version of simple analytics because people talked about it to them.

Why do I think this?

We are already seeing this. Last week a big company planned a demo. I asked them how they found out about us.

They told me that one of their developers used us for a side project. He liked it and told the company they should check it out as well.

I want more of that!

That’s why I want to offer our service for free to developers with side projects who will tell their companies or friends with companies about us!

I don’t care if these developers ever convert. I just need them to tell about us.

The free plan is live, but we haven’t launched it properly yet. Even without a proper launch, last month, 900 accounts were created instead of 200 on average before we had a free plan.

Let’s get that flywheel flying!

Enterprise clients

It's a bit of a switch to go from the Free plan to Enterprise clients, but last month was our best month in terms of interest from big companies.

Since I dropped the bottle once on an enterprise deal (see below), I needed to get better at this.

Here is what I learned from doing more enterprise calls + an amazing podcast on this topic:

Don't say yes to everything. Say no to things and end with, but always ask something like, “Is this a dealbreaker for you?” to keep the conversation going.
Your quote for an enterprise deal should make you feel a bit uncomfortable.
Use developers to sell to their managers. Usually, a developer or someone else wants to use our product, but he/she needs to sell it to the manager. You are basically on the same side here. Talk with the developer on how to approach the deal.
Charge a shit ton for SSO. (First, we need to build it)
Add an expiry date to the offer. Don’t put an offer out without an expiry date. You need momentum.
Dodge discounts but gives something in return, like quarterly payments instead of yearly in return.
When you do a discount, ask for something in return as well: for example, a case study.
They need a signature, a custom contract, or any changes in your terms and conditions. €10000 minimum!

These guidelines make Enterprise sales a bit easier. It’s still a drag sometimes, and you need to fill in 200+ vendor sign-up questions, etc., but a big contract makes it worth it.

Product week vs. Growth engineering week

Every quarter, Adriaan and I have a “strategy day.” We go to some random place outside Amsterdam and book a meeting room (preferably in nature) for a day.

Here, we plan our strategy, to-do’s, features, etc, for the upcoming quarter.

Our biggest discussion last time was about balancing product and growth.

Building features requested by our current paying customers is important, but so is attracting new business. For example, Improving the conversion rate of your homepage by just 1% can have an insane impact on your business.

We found a solution: Product Week vs Growth Engineering Week.

Every week, we alternate between working on the product and working on growth. Since I’m working mostly on growth (and business stuff) anyway, the alternating weeks are mainly for Adriaan.

During the Growth Engineering week we are both working on the same project.

We’re currently working on improving the conversion rate of our pricing page. Here is how that looks:

I provide a mock-up with best practices and improvements.
We discuss it together and provide feedback.
Adriaan starts building.

Every “Growth project” must be scoped and built that week.

We’re a few weeks in now, and this strategy seems to work for us.

Focus more on writing

For the past couple of years, I’ve focused heavily on SEO. We grew from 1,000 website visitors from Google to 13,500.

This growth also significantly increased our MRR, but I feel we’ve hit a ceiling here.

Obviously, it’s important to keep the content up to date, so that’s definitely still happening. We’ll also create new SEO pages, but those are not the most engaging to work on.

I missed creating real content.

I actually like to write, but not about the difference between Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics or whatever.

From now on, I’m dedicating more time to writing interesting stuff. I created the 1 Million ARR newsletter to do this (sign up bitchazz).

I’ll write about updates on the business and what's happening here, but also about things I read or think that might help people.

Once a week, I’ll send a newsletter issue. Leave your email to get notified when it’s online.

Questions or thoughts? Find me on X

Cheers ✌️✌️
Iron

The Road to 1 Million ARR