Simple Analytics - 2024 year in review
As the title says: Our year in review (yes, with numbers)
👋 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.
It took a bit longer than expected, but here we are: Our year in review.
There are a few reasons (excuses) why it took me so long: First, I took some time off. No working. No computering. Just chilling with the misses, the lads, and the family. I find it very hard to spend time away from my laptop, but when I do, it always feels great. Then, we also moved to Cape Town 🇿🇦, to escape European winter.
→ 2025 resolution: Find a hobby that doesn’t involve computering.
Another excuse for the delay is that I need to prioritize my writing. I promised to send this newsletter monthly (ideally bi-weekly), but I’m not hitting that.
Writing to me still feels like it’s not considered “working.” I only do it when everything else in the business is done and going well. I don’t see it as part of my work but rather as a “business-related hobby.” I need to change that.
→ 2025 resolution: Prioritize writing.
Now, let’s discuss the good stuff. Here is how Simple Analytics fared in 2024:
Overview in numbers
What did we accomplish
What didn’t we accomplish
Going into 2025
As most of you know, Simple Analytics is a two-man, lean, mean fighting machine. Before writing this, I sat down with Adriaan (my co-founder) to discuss the previous year.
It’s a super insightful conversation to have with your co-founder. We do this every year. It’s good to reflect on our feelings and what went well (and didn’t) to plan for next year.
This write-up is a distillation of what came out of that conversation.
Overview in Numbers
💰 35.5K MRR (+36%)
🧑🤝🧑 >10K users
🤝 1330 paying customers
📊 1.3 Million website visitors (+32%)
🐦 4250 Twitter/X followers (+100%)
🗞️ 1 Newsletter launched with almost 400 subs (Thank you!)
✊ 0 dollars in funding
What did we accomplish
Engineering (Adriaan)
It was a big year for Adriaan. He wrote the most lines of code in the history of Simple Analytics.
So what did he ship?
Free plan
We now have a free plan. I feel this will be a great strategy for future growth. You can read more about it here.
Usage-based pricing
We also employed a new pricing model based on your monthly usage instead of the regular tiers.
New UI for pricing page and onboarding flow
Updated the pricing and onboarding flow to improve conversion.
Server upgrades
We can scale so much faster
Plenty of bugs
Man, there were a lot of nasty ones
Marketing (Iron)
Enterprise clients
We secured our first big enterprise client for the first time. Like 5 five-figure yearly deal.
Scale Marketing
In 2023, I did everything myself; last year, I started outsourcing tasks to really skilled people: SEO (Ankit), Privacy Newsletter (Carlo), and General tasks (Kisalaya). I’m managing a bit more, but I like this setup better.
Newsletters
Started this newsletter & the privacy newsletter
Socials
Went viral on Reddit a couple of times. I wrote this playbook around it. Something really tangible you could copy for your business to go viral. Here you go.
Elon Musk retweet. This was probably the most insane moment last year.
I wrote a blog and posted it on Reddit → went viral
Someone reposted it on Twitter (with a screenshot) → went viral
Founder AirBnB retweeted it → Went even more viral
Elon Musk retweeted
WTF 😂
Internet Friends
One of the most fulfilling activities in 2024 is the rebirth of Internet Friends. It’s basically a group of ultra nerds (that build cool shit) coming together for a beer and pizza.
No format. No recruiters. No corporate bullshit. Just hanging out and talking about VS Code with some NextJS and a bit of DNS.
We started in 2021 with five of us who knew each other from Twitter (man, this sounds so sad when you read it, haha). Anyway, it died down, but in 2024, we decided to pick it up again.
Now, we host it monthly. For the last meetup, Mollie invited us, and it was 40 of us. It’s turning into a real community.
Time for merch?
Bali & Cape Town
Bali
Like last year, we decided to work from Bali in November. Not only is it really nice to skip November in The Netherlands, but it also proved to be a massive productivity hack.
Three main reasons:
There are no social responsibilities. Empty calendar.
Bali is a convenience paradise.
We can work shirtless
But really, there are no social responsibilities to attend to. Heck, there are no responsibilities at all. In Bali, you don’t cook, you don’t do your laundry, and you don’t clean.
Back home, my agenda is packed with social stuff (which I value). But if you throw that away for a month, you can get so much more shit done.
Cape Town
Bali is for the boys; Cape Town is for the misses. It was the fourth time we spent February and March in Cape Town. Luckily, my gf can work remotely as well (Thanks Lepaya 🙏)
The main reason for being here is the sun instead of winter. Other than that, Cape Town is just incredible. See for yourself:
The food is excellent and cheap. Nature is beautiful. There are beaches in abundance and lots of stuff going on.
I’m writing this from Cape Town right now, meaning we came back a fifth time!
What didn’t we accomplish
Okay it was not all fun and games. We fucked up a few times.
The main issue is we did not reach our MRR goal. Yes, we still grew quite nicely and did a lot of stuff that will help us grow in the future, but it felt slow for the first time.
There is really nothing to complain about if you're a high-margin, bootstrapped SaaS making 35K a month, and it’s just the two of you doing something you love. However, I had this overarching feeling I couldn’t let go of.
I felt I worked a lot but had less impact on the business than I wanted. I also discussed this with Adriaan, and we figured out why I felt this way.
In most of the stuff I do, I need Adriaan's engineering skills at some point. Whether it’s implementing new emails, fixing technical SEO stuff, adding integrations or design updates, at some point I need Adriaan to put it into “production”.
Since our priorities were the scalability of our servers and implementing a new pricing model, there wasn’t much room and engineering headspace left for marketing tasks.
Result: I did a lot of shit we haven’t implemented (yet).
We chose other priorities, and I still feel they were the right calls. It just meant for me, personally, that my part of the business got a little less attention.
Going into 2025, I have this feeling of build-up marketing energy that couldn’t be released last year.
→ 2025 resolution: Release that build-up energy and let’s fucking go!
Looking back on my personal goals
Here are the goals from the start of the year. It’s a mix of professional goals and some personal stuff (but still kinda business-related). Let’s do a quick rundown.
To be fair, it looks good, only a few reds, but the biggest ones are still red… 🫠
We didn’t manage to push Simple Analytics to 40K MRR
I sometimes felt my efforts didn’t have the expected impact
It wasn’t the most fun for Adriaan. Heads down coding. Less space for creative work.
I still can’t build a website or do anything else technical
I didn’t grow my Twitter audience to 10K (not even to 5K)
Then again,
I managed to live a lot healthier. Going to the gym at least 4 times, eating properly, and drinking less (still enough. no worries).
We still grew to 36K MRR
We worked hard and set Simple Analytics up for growth in 2025 (hopefully)
Met tons of internet friends
Work remotely from Bali with the boys and Cape Town with the misses
Automated/outsourced a look of work
To sum it all up, here’s the summary I posted on x.
Yes, life is good.
Cheers ✌️✌️
Iron