Simple Analytics - January 2025 Update

👋 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.

At the start of every year, Adriaan and I have our strategy meeting outlining our 2025 goals. It’s 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. I’d recommend everyone to take a moment to reflect; you’ll find out you’ve achieved more than you think.

I wrote about our 2024 accomplishments in our Year in Review. In this article, I’ll outline our focus areas for the upcoming year.

Let’s go!

As usual, we start with January’s numbers:

💰 $36.183 (+2%)
📊 9.9K Google visitors
❣️ 1085 new accounts
👏 32 New Customers
😥 37 churn

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 won’t 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 can’t copy (yet) - your brand and distribution. Building a Simple Analytics competitor with the same specs won’t 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. We’ll double down on that in 2025.

Here is how:

It sounds like a small tweak to our workflow, but achieving inbox zero is now our daily goal. We weren’t bad at support and fixed most issues within 24 hours, but it didn’t feel like part of our strategy to deliver the best possible experience.

Support felt like an afterthought. This year it’s part of our core strategy.

We realised we’re not talking to our users as much as we’d like. Being bootstrapped means we need to be careful with our time and resources. Jumping on a call with a user didn’t 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 we’ve let that slip in the past.

To achieve this we’ll 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 “quick calls” and focusing on everything else.

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. He’s 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 “pure” search engine. There’s still a gap between the appetite for video content and the supply of great videos. It’s a marketing channel I’ve always wanted to test and our collaboration with Nick is our shot.

We decided to outsource video creation for a few reasons. I’m not video-native, and I prefer working with specialists instead of figuring it out myself. We’re also time-limited. Simple Analytics is still a two-person business, and we’re wearing all the heads. Lastly, Nick is a professional who has grown his own Youtube channel. He knows what works and what doesn’t, so we can properly test this marketing channel.

We’ll 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.

In addition to working with freelancers, we’re also hiring for a fulltime role for the first time in Simple Analytics’ history. We’re hiring a full-stack developer.

Until now, most development fell on Adriaan (basically everything). Hiring a developer improves our “dev manpower" and reduces Adriaan’s “dev” workload.

Adriaan’s 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.

I’m really excited for Adriaan to join my side of the business. This will make the ship go even faster.

Besides squashing bugs, putting out fires, and achieving inbox zero with the best support, we shipped some cool new stuff in January.

For the first time, we have product insights. We had the high-level numbers, but now we added detailed dashboards. It’s 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.

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 “Unified MRR" concept, meaning every USD, Pound, or Euro counts as 1. If unified MRR goes down, we know its something with the business. The “regular” MRR shows the actual dollar amount of MRR. Fluctuations here are due to exchange rates.

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.

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.

2025 will be an epic year for Simple Analytics. We’re focusing on our users and growth with Adriaan shifting to a product role. We’ve built the right systems last year (pricing, teams, and server capacity), now it’s 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)

Let’s get it!

Cheers
Iron