Summer Update - Double edition

From Lithuania to Andre Rieu, hiring our first engineer and acquiring a business!

👋 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.

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Hey! I’m alive. It’s been a while. I did a June update, then went on holiday for a week, and poef.. it was September. But we’re back with a big fat double edition update! with some announcements 👀

But first of all, why did this edition take so long? Well… habits… I’m focusing on two: Working out and Writing. However, the writing habit seems harder to keep. Going to the gym daily is fine, but writing daily....

I feel it has to do with two things: Importance and External factors, or translated from Dutch: “a stick behind the door.”

On track do to 200 Gym sessions this year. Writing not so much…. I use Futureland to track

If I sign up for workout classes and I skip them, I pay a fine. I also find my fitness important and see improvement. I love writing, but it still feels like something I allow myself to do when I “have time,” and of course I never do.

Combine this with holidays and summertime in Amsterdam and my keyboard seems far away.

Well then. Summer is over. The weather is shit again. So I compressed 2 months of updates into one: 2025 Summer update!

Numbers

First things first: Numbers. Summers are always slower. In July we didn’t grow (or 0.1%), but in August we grew 3.3%. Not bad but not the hyper growth of AI startups reporting 100M ARR in 7 weeks.

My good friend Sam tweeted that “Summer slump” isn’t real. If your product is great, you’ll keep growing. Even in summer.

My friend Sam’s tweet.

I believe that to a certain extent. Maybe we need to reinvent Simple Analytics’ growth model , but I’m pretty sure “Summer slump” is real in some industries.

Take my other company UniHosted. We support IT-service businesses and in this industry really fucking nothing happens during summer. Everything is picking up now as we speak.

Aah yes, the latest numbers:

💰 $43.884 MRR (+4.9% since last edition)
📊 7.0K Google visitors (0%)
❣️ 1287 new accounts (-4.4%)
👏 42 New Customers (August)
😥 31 Churn (August)

Acquisition

We didn’t grow or write much during summer, but that doesn’t mean nothing happened. This summer was actually quite insane…

We bought another business! 🥂 🥂

Yes you read that right. Next to Simple Analytics and UniHosted, we bought another business: Leadsontrees.

Wow wow going a bit fast? Let me explain how this came together…

I spend a lot of time on X, especially in the “indie hacker developer nerds bubble.” People share their work, and I found a guy from Lithuania 🇱🇹 named Tadas, who shared something interesting: Leadsontrees.

I started chatting with him about it and offered some growth advice (that’s how it always begins). We hopped on a call and I became super intrigued.

Long story short, Tadas was quitting his job while also starting another business. This was his main focus. So I pitched Adriaan on Leadsontrees, and when he was convinced, we offered Tadas to buy it. We agreed on a price and structure and did the deal 🎊

Vilnius

It was a really nice process and Tadas agreed to stay on board for an easy transition and help with product/tech stuff. So Adriaan and I decided to visit Tadas in Vilnius, Lithuania.

Funny enough, I knew one other guy from Lithuania who happened to be the founder of Buildspace. This is a Lithuanian community of builders/engineers with a big badass Sovjet factory as office. Tadas happened to work from this place as well, so the Buildspace guys invited us over to chill/work from their office.

The boys in the buildspace office

To be fair, I didn’t have any expectation about Vilnius, but man there is a lot happening in tech! Great place to be if you’re building cool stuff.

Together with Tadas we worked on Leadsontrees, and he showed us around providing us with lots of potatoes and pork meat.

According to chatGPT its called: Draniki

So we bought a business, now what?

For now, we just leave it as is until November. The product works, the website gets traffic, and users keep signing up. We changed the pricing from lifetime deals to monthly recurring revenue, but everything else stayed the same.

But we have big plans...

November is when we fully focus on this project. Everything we’re doing now is basically setting up for a big push in November!

We booked our flights to Chiang Mai, Thailand for 30 days to build a new version. Better product, full rebrand (new name 👀), new website, new marketing playbooks, etc.

Stay tuned!

Simple Studio

You might see a pattern here. We’re betting on more businesses than Simple Analytics.

→ In 2022 I partnered with Adriaan to grow Simple Analytics

→ In 2023 Adriaan and I partnered with Dries to grow UniHosted.

→ In 2025 Adriaan and I buy Leadsontrees.

I know that the probability of success is higher when focusing on one project. This is a constant debate, but I see it this way:

I’m a growth person. I enjoy growing software products. I knew I needed to partner with people who enjoy the tech side.

I met Adriaan over drinks at a developer meetup. Since then, I got more involved in builder/developer communities (read: Twitter). I kept meeting incredible engineers who build great products but couldn’t grow them (or didn’t want to themselves) .

I met Dries when he joined our little co-working office in Amsterdam. He was working full-time at a development agency, but on the side he was building a… here it comes… a “Managed hosting service for UniFi controllers.”....

I hear you think: Haha, wtf is that?

When he told me more about it, I felt a dejavu.

Like Simple Analytics, this was a great product. If we only could improve it + add my marketing playbook….

Now two years in, UniHosted is nearing 15K Monthly Recurring Revenue. Dries is working fulltime and we used the same playbook as for Simple Analytics.

I work on UniHosted one day a week. I’m certain if I focused all my time on Simple Analytics, I wouldn’t have added 15K MRR to Simple Analytics at the same rate.

And when you spot this opportunity once, you see it everywhere.

Me, Adriaan and Dries launching UniHosted

I’m aware of the risk of spreading myself too thin and losing my focus. But there’s a little nuance: I believe product people shouldn’t spread too thin, but growth people can. Every product is a different beast, but marketing playbooks are generally the same.

Adriaan focuses on Simple Analytics. Dries fully focuses on UniHosted. They’re deep in the product. I’m the only one spreading a bit thinner to apply the same playbook to both. This way, the product improves while the growth playbook is added.

I won’t spill all the beans this edition, but you haven’t seen the last of this. We’re calling this model “Simple Studio,” and there’s more to come.

Simple Analytics

All of the above, doesn’t mean we didn’t spend time on Simple Analytics. If anything, we just hired our first fulltime employee 🥂

Alexander started in September as a software engineer, and after two weeks this feels like the best business decision we made in a long time (knock on wood).

Simple Analytics has grown to 500K ARR and 1500+ paying customers relying on me and Adriaan for a functional product (actually just Adriaan to be fair).

For a long time, we could manage with just two people, but it left us in a “reactive state.” Adriaan’s time was mostly spent fixing bugs and helping customers.

At one point, it not only felt very stressed but also dangerous for the business. With Alexander on board this is changing again. It feels really good to exit a reactive state and become “active” again, and let Adriaan to think about product vision again.

Even with my divided focus, Simple Analytics is in a stronger position than ever to grow.

Life Outside Work

Pretty eventful summer…

Let’s end with something non-work related because I also did a lot of fun stuff during summer.

I spent most of my time in Amsterdam, hanging out in parks, boat trips through the canals, chilling at the beach, and having dinner with friends. I’m not a big fan of going on holiday in summer, because it’s absolutely amazing to be in Amsterdam then. I’ll just need to get out when the rain starts coming in again.

This period, I also visit my hometown Maastricht more often because it feels like France in summer.

Especially when Andre Rieu plays on the Vrijthof, I make sure to secure a table at my uncle’s bar for the best evening. Home sweet home!

Life is good ✌️

Cheers,

Iron

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The Road to 1 Million ARR