Simple Analytics - January 2025 Update
Plans for 2025 outlined
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At the start of every year, Adriaan and I have our strategy meeting outlining our 2025 goals. Itâs not about creating a list on what to build and clog our roadmap. This meeting is more high-level to decide our focus areas for the upcoming year.
In addition, we discuss our accomplishments from the previous year. This is a rewarding exercise. Iâd recommend everyone to take a moment to reflect; youâll find out youâve achieved more than you think.
I wrote about our 2024 accomplishments in our Year in Review. In this article, Iâll outline our focus areas for the upcoming year.
Letâs go!
Numbers
As usual, we start with Januaryâs numbers:
đ° $36.183 (+2%)
đ 9.9K Google visitors
âŁď¸ 1085 new accounts
đ 32 New Customers
đĽ 37 churn
Focus on users and growth.
In an AI world where everyone can build a product, the only moats will be distribution and brand. When everyone becomes a builder, your product wonât set you apart. In five years, there will be 10x more competitors. Every feature you have will be copyable in days or weeks, not months.
The only differentiator is what AI canât copy (yet) - your brand and distribution. Building a Simple Analytics competitor with the same specs wonât immediately get you the same customer base or revenue. You still need to find out how to acquire users.
The Simple Analytics brand and our distribution built in the past five years is our moat. Weâll double down on that in 2025.
Here is how:
Inbox zero
It sounds like a small tweak to our workflow, but achieving inbox zero is now our daily goal. We werenât bad at support and fixed most issues within 24 hours, but it didnât feel like part of our strategy to deliver the best possible experience.
Support felt like an afterthought. This year itâs part of our core strategy.
Feedback
We realised weâre not talking to our users as much as weâd like. Being bootstrapped means we need to be careful with our time and resources. Jumping on a call with a user didnât sound like the best use of time. This was a mistake.
Instead of talking to our users we trusted our gut for the past few years. We spent a lot of time on features we thought were important to our users, but clearly were not.
The 2025 goal is to focus on our users more than ever. Every product decision should be influenced by our users. Their input is vital in building the best product and weâve let that slip in the past.
To achieve this weâll be adding more emails, surveys, chat widgets, and customer discovery calls to get the right feedback. However, we need to find a balance between jumping on âquick callsâ and focusing on everything else.
Collaborations
Last year we started working with specialists (freelance basis): Ankit (SEO), Kisalaya (General tasks), and Carlo (Privacy). This month, we added another collaboration with Nick (Youtube).
Nick is an Australian software engineer traveling the world and building cool stuff. Heâs documenting everything on his Youtube channel. I found one of his videos and reached out to see if he was open to shoot some videos for Simple Analytics.
Youtube is the second biggest search engine and its importance will only grow.
Everyone is pushing AI blog content and clogging Google Search rankings, while Youtube remains a more âpureâ search engine. Thereâs still a gap between the appetite for video content and the supply of great videos. Itâs a marketing channel Iâve always wanted to test and our collaboration with Nick is our shot.
We decided to outsource video creation for a few reasons. Iâm not video-native, and I prefer working with specialists instead of figuring it out myself. Weâre also time-limited. Simple Analytics is still a two-person business, and weâre wearing all the heads. Lastly, Nick is a professional who has grown his own Youtube channel. He knows what works and what doesnât, so we can properly test this marketing channel.
Weâll still oversee the content creation, tone, and vibe to make sure the content aligns with our Simple brand.
The partnerships with Ankit, Kisalaya, and Nick will boost our growth efforts in 2025.
Hiring
In addition to working with freelancers, weâre also hiring for a fulltime role for the first time in Simple Analyticsâ history. Weâre hiring a full-stack developer.
Until now, most development fell on Adriaan (basically everything). Hiring a developer improves our âdev manpower" and reduces Adriaanâs âdevâ workload.
Adriaanâs role in the business will change. Instead of being the developer, Adriaan will focus more on product (his vision to create the best analytics product) and product growth.
Iâm really excited for Adriaan to join my side of the business. This will make the ship go even faster.
What did we ship?
Besides squashing bugs, putting out fires, and achieving inbox zero with the best support, we shipped some cool new stuff in January.
Insights
For the first time, we have product insights. We had the high-level numbers, but now we added detailed dashboards. Itâs interesting to get a better view of the business and how people discover or use it.
We should have done this earlier (but thats with so many things). This is just the first step. Looking forward to uncovering interesting insights if we go deeper.
Unified MRR
Our MRR has been growing steadily for the past year until the end of last year. We saw huge fluctuations while our client numbers remained the same. We freaked out, thinking something went wrong. Then we realized: Exchange rates!
Our customers can be billed in three currencies: USD, Pound, and Euro. When the Euro collapsed against the USD, we saw a huge downturn in our MRR. This had nothing to do with our business.
So Adriaan developed the âUnified MRR" concept, meaning every USD, Pound, or Euro counts as 1. If unified MRR goes down, we know its something with the business. The âregularâ MRR shows the actual dollar amount of MRR. Fluctuations here are due to exchange rates.
Team roles
Last year we added roles-based access. It means accounts with multiple websites and team members can decide on access. For example, Agencies might have 10 client websites. They can add clients to see only their website, while the agency owner has access to all.
We launched a beta version, received feedback, and updated it into a full-fledged team management feature.
Honorable mention: Fixing Multi-factor Authentication
We have too many non-critical services that still require SMS for two-factor authentication. This is annoying because Adriaan and I will need to exchange codes from our phones. Imagine needing to do this with more people in the organization.
So what do engineers typically do when they face a problem? They build a solution.
Adriaan fixed this by purchasing an SMS gateway with an Ethernet port. Now, when we receive an SMS, I forward it via a webhook to a company-wide Telegram group. Problem solved.
Final Thoughts
2025 will be an epic year for Simple Analytics. Weâre focusing on our users and growth with Adriaan shifting to a product role. Weâve built the right systems last year (pricing, teams, and server capacity), now itâs time to start the growth engine.
Everything is ready to go full force:
Ankit & Kisalaya (SEO)
Nick (YouTube)
Iron (Marketing & Product Growth)
Adriaan (Product & Product Growth)
Developer (Shipping)
Letâs get it!
Cheers
Iron
Go get them!