The Road to 1 Million ARR - November Update
About Bali life as productivity unlock and Elon Musk retweeting me.
👋 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.
New month. New update. Although, I skipped the October one. I didn’t find the time and headspace to write a coherent update on what’s happening in the business (don’t worry, that’s a good thing :).
Since getting to Bali (Indonesia 🇮🇩), we’ve been heads down in building new stuff for Simple Analytics. And when we’re not building, we’re doing fun stuff with the boys here.
As I’m writing this, it’s raining like hell. Haven’t seen this much water coming from the sky in such a short period ever. But this makes for a good time to write a business update.
Working from Bali is a productivity (and life) hack
Like last year, we also decided to relocate our office to Bali for November. A yearly “business” trip to “digital nomad land.” Last time, it was just me, Adriaan, and Dries, and this year, we went with eight Amsterdam-based builders. We rented two villas and bought eight unlimited Bwork (co-working) grinding passes.
Everyone I’ve told about going to Bali treats it like I'm on vacation. And while it’s nice here, we seem to be working twice as much as we do back home.
Two main reasons:
There are no social responsibilities. Empty calendar.
Bali is a convenience paradise.
Combine this with the fact that everyone is working on their own business (and therefore enjoys working), and you have the ultimate productivity hack.
When I'm in Amsterdam, my agenda is packed with social stuff–eating with a friend, playing football with the boys, nice stuff with the misses, visiting family, etc. Here, my agenda is empty. And my default state when my agenda is empty is to work. Get more shit done!
Not only are there no social responsibilities. There are no responsibilities at all. In Bali, you don’t cook, you don’t do your laundry, and you don’t clean.
It’s eat, sleep, work, gym (sometimes) and repeat. The productivity cycle. And everything together with the boys.
It feels like I’m back in university again, studying for an exam.
🏠 Living together with your friends
📚 Go to the library (co-working) to study (work)
🍚 Have dinner together after
The only difference is I'm working on shit that I actually like.
I’m certain we’re doing two months of work in one month. And when the rare situation happens that I don’t feel like working, I can disconnect easily - more easily than at home. Different environment, and new experiences make it easy to disconnect!
Pretty good for a “vacation”.
How to do PR for your SaaS
This was the title of the previous edition. Well… something happened.
I applied my own “PR playbook,” and… we just got Elon Musk involved (yeah, I’m not even joking).
Our newsbot pinged me about an article titled “Europeans spend 575 million hours clicking cookie banners”. So, I wrote an article about it and posted it on Reddit.
It exploded:
Then, someone (Daniel Jeffries) decided to tweet about it. And this tweet got picked up by the founder of Airbnb:
It gets weirder:
Elon Musk picked it up by retweeting the Airbnb founder.
Fucking insane, right? I guess that’s the power of social media. And also why you need to read and apply my last article.
MRR update
As you’d expect, let’s do a numbers roundup. Well, we’re stuck a bit… our MRR is hovering around 34k/35k per month. I mean, it’s a great place to get stuck. Don’t get me wrong. We’re a two-person company without too many costs, but still. Getting stuck doesn’t feel right.
At one point, our MRR even started decreasing, and I started to freak out. I tried to find the cause but couldn’t find any. We were getting normal signups, normal churn, etc. Then I found it…
After Trump was elected, the Euro/Dollar conversion started to tumble, which impacted our business.
It’s an understatement to say I was relieved to find out it was “just” Trump messing with our revenue and not actual customers leaving. However, currency risk is something to keep in mind.
Quick napkin math:
Let’s say you have 30.000 euros.
On November 1st, this was worth:
$32.700
On November 26th, this was worth:
$31,460
That’s a $1240 difference.
Business-wise, we’re still not growing as we should, but we knew this would likely be in the short term when we introduced our free plan.
It’s still too early to say how this will play out, but we’re seeing some positive results already.
We 4x’ed the number of sign-ups, and since most of our biggest clients find us through word-of-mouth, more accounts should help stimulate that more as well. Our NPS is at a record high, meaning many current users would recommend Simple Analytics to their friends/colleagues.
That’s it for this month. Also, it has stopped raining, so I’m heading out to get some sun.
Greetings from Bali. Life is good.
Cheers ✌️✌️
Iron
Hi guys! Love your posts and updates. Would be cool to hear your story from 0 to 10k on how you were able to build that first milestone. If you get a chance, would be a great post to read.