Simple Analytics - February update

Slow Feb. Balancing focus with social. Ready for March.

Mar 14, 2025

👋 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.

The second update of the year. After two months, I’m back from Cape Town. Back in the cold, but the sun is shining, so we good. It’s nice to see friends & family again and be back home. Behind my own desk. Writing this update.

February was slow. We relaxed a bit more for our last days in Cape Town, couple of friends visited, Adriaan took time off skiing, and to top it off I celebrated Carnaval in my home city Maastricht.

In March, we’re back in business. Less social activities. More focus. Looking forward to getting in the zone and getting more shit done.

Let’s get to it.

Numbers

Let’s start with the numbers. Slow month. We grew $665 MRR (around 2%). This is nowhere near our target, but we’re moving in the right direction. I’m finishing this on March 13th and current MRR is over $38K already (+3%)

💰 $36.848 MRR (+1.8%)
📊 9.7K Google visitors (-2%)
❣️ 1295 new accounts (+20%)
👏 45 New Customers
😥 46 Churn

Back from Cape Town.

Last week I returned from Cape Town, where I stayed with my girlfriend to escape the Dutch winter. It was amazing. It’s the fifth time we did this and it keeps getting better. Also, in terms of public safety, cleanliness and infrastructure, the city is really improving.

Many avoid Cape Town because of safety concerns, but you don’t need to be afraid (if you don’t take stupid risks). Yes, you can’t walk at night in most places, but Uber is cheap, so you good. If you plan to visit Cape Town, don’t be discouraged by safety issues. You’re missing out on so much the city has to offer. Really one of the best place i’ve ever been.

After a few days back home, I reflected on time in Cape Town. It struck me that the months of January and February in terms of productivity couldn’t be further apart.

Focus vs Social struggle

In Cape Town, our social circle is non-existent compared to Amsterdam. After five years of visiting, we know a few people to hang out with, but social responsibilities are near zero. I fucking loved this.

When I’m here, I feel I can do whatever I want all the time. I dedicated January to going to the gym, working a lot, and eating healthy. It felt great. It was just me and my girlfriend designing life without any social responsibilities to take into account.

I went to the gym 19 times in January. I read books everyday and started writing. I’ve never felt more fit and “in the zone.”

My habit tracker results. Using Futureland

Last November, we went to Bali with some internet friends (weird sentence btw). We got so much more done that month than in a usual month back home. I wrote about it here, stating our trip to Bali was the ultimate productivity hack. No boring birthdays. No events, double dates with your girlfriend’s best friend and her new boyfriend... (y’all know the drill)

January was focus. Just focus. Focus on the business. Focus on me and my writing, my fitness and my eating. No temptations to go for a drink (which leads to several drinks and a hangover).

Then came February…..

I’ve been telling all my friends how insanely nice Cape Town is, so 4 of them + partners decided to visit us for two weeks.

My focus, productivity, no-alcohol and gym routine went down the drain. Yes, I was bumped about that, because I was feeling so good about my January routine.

but... we had so much fun!

Those weeks with my friends from The Netherlands visiting us were sooo good! They also loved everything about Cape Town and spending time with us there.

Now, there are two sides of me: One that wants to cut off everything and focus on the business and the other that wants to enjoy friends’ company, go to birthdays, and drink a few beers with the lads.

Since I don’t want to give up any, I desperately need to figure out how to balance this better.

Sorry, here’s the real business update.

Ah yes you are here to get a business update, not me ranting about my personal live. So let’s get it. What did we do in February:

Focus Week

Adriaan pushed harder than me this month. Not in the last place because of “Focus Week”. I’m always very happy when Adriaan decides he needs a “Focus Week".

He rents an AirBnB somewhere in The Netherlands, buys food for a week and just gets in the zone. No distractions. Just shipping code. He puts in 4 weeks of work into 1.

It’s incredible how much shit gets done. This could mean two things:

1. Focus Week is an insane productivity hack.

2. Adriaan doesn’t do anything in the other weeks.

Let’s keep it to number 1 shall we 🤣🤣

Emails

The main focus for this focus week was implementing a new email system. We’ve been sending a few transactional and onboarding emails, but they weren’t optimized.

Since we have a free plan now, we need to educate our users differently on using Simple Analytics. We’ve added a whole new category of users and a new userflow so we desperately needed better emails.

Well… emails are a bitch.

Users can have different “states” and different users should receive different emails with different actions. You definitely need a focus week to figure this out.

Luckily Adriaan’s giga brain fixed it and we implemented the new system. As always, nothing goes right the first time but our users will happily notify us when something seems off:

After polishing, this is a big box ticked off in our quest to create the best onboarding as part of our “Product-Led Growth” efforts.

Growth

In terms of our growth efforts in February, I decided to stick with whats already working:

Update SEO pages
Create new pages in collboration with our freelancers Ankit and Kisalaya.
Nick is still working those videos. We haven’t cracked the Youtube algorithm yet, but we are in it for the long haul.

Sometimes you gotta do the boring stuff!

Partnerships

Since I returned, I’ve been focusing on partnerships. I accidentally read an article about one of our bigger rivals that got acquired. Piwik Analytics was bought by Cookieinformation (a Consent Management Platform). This made me realize there might be synergies between analytics tools and other parts of the marketing stack.

So, I contacted a few CEO’s in the CMP space to share my thoughts. I showed them the article about Piwik (told them we’re not for sale), and that I’m open to explore opportunities to help each other. We got some really positive replies and have something cooking!

Sometimes something just clicks or makes sense. Case is to validate it quickly and scrappy to test the waters.

I might automate outreach in the future if I see its working well doing manually.

Will share the results in the next update.

Smart Emails

Back to emails. Next to your standard onboarding emails, you can leverage emails even better if you think about it. We call it our “Smart Emails Strategy". For example, I started sending some emails to free users with an offer: Write a blog about us on their website in exchange for an account upgrade.

The results:

Great testimonials and reviews. Not bad ey! Now lets automate this!

Disclaimer: (Yes, I told them to be honest and critique us and also that they could disclose they were asked in exchange for a plan upgrade).

Another idea I have is to ask a favor from free users that exceed our fair usage policy (they have to many pageviews). What if I email them that they can still use our free plan if they add our badge in the footer of their high-traffic website? That would give us some exposure! Like this:

To trial this, I always manually send sending emails to users that fit the description. If it works, I’ll start thinking about automation. Any other ideas? Let me know!

Final Thoughts

To sum it up, February was a bit slow. My internal struggle between focus and social life feels like a luxurious struggle to have (and it is), but I’ll need to work on balancing it.

The numbers aren’t going as fast as I hoped. But zooming out I know we’re working on the right things. For the current month, we’re at 38K MRR and I’m confident about the potential for Simple Analytics with partnerships, but we’ll see how that’s going to play out. I’ll report back.

Life is good.

Cheers ✌️✌️

Iron

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