Code Story

Jul 6, 2023

This is the creation story of Simple Analytics. Adriaan van Rossum, Founder of Simple Analytics, shares how he and his team built a privacy-friendly alternative to Google Analytics.

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Automated transcript

Noah Labhart (02:31):

Adriaan van Rossum is a tech guy even at home. He likes to tinker with home automation like turning on and off the lights, which his girlfriend doesn't like the experiments at times outside of tech. He does kite surfing and travels around the world. He really enjoys Thailand, specifically the food there as he's a vegetarian for several years. Adriaan was a freelancer each time he built an application for his clients. He did the usual song and dance with Google Analytics. He copied and pasted the script. This didn't feel right and his girlfriend prompted him to build his own solution, so he did. This is the creation story of simple Analytics.

Adriaan van Rossum (03:15):

So what we do at Simple Analytics, we basically are a competitor of Google Analytics and there's a few things that I don't really like about Google Analytics, and it started almost five years ago and I was installing Google Analytics for customers of me. I was freelancer at the time and I needed to instal the Google Analytics script for them because I was building websites. I was a front-end developer or full stack, and it didn't really feel right to add that little script every time because I knew it was sending all the data to Google Analytics and to Google Google's ad networks. I was like, yeah, it doesn't feel right. So I said something about it to my girlfriend and she said, yeah, you always build your own stuff, so why don't you build something for this? And I was like, well, that's actually a really good idea.

(04:02):

Then I started building a very simple version, hence the name Simple Analytics and the simple version was just the page views showing on a charge. Think it was showing the pages, the referrals, but not much more. So it was very limited view of a dashboard. And then I launched it and it got on Hacker News on the first spot for nine hours on the front page and even it stayed on the front page for a whole day. And that really gave me so much, so much traffic and also my first customers and then I realised like, oh, this is really a product that people really want. And it was also, the timing was right, right, because the GDPR came to in effect and more privacy regulations and more strict rules. So yeah, I was just lucky to launch it at that time. And since then we grew the product into full dashboard with a lot of features.

(04:54):

You can set up goals, you can see conversions, you can see much more. You can download all the data into different systems or data lakes if you're really advanced with a huge privacy angle. So we don't place cookies and it's still a simple understandable dashboard instead of 500 pages of Google Analytics where you get lost need to have a course to really understand the dashboard or to know how to use it. And especially now with Google Analytics four, a lot of people hate it because they need to recode a lot of integrations. So there's a lot of people saying, no, I don't want to do that anymore. And some of them go to simple Analytics. So that's a good moment for us for sure.

Noah Labhart (05:39):

Okay, let's dive into the MVP then for a minute. You mentioned it, that first version of the product to build. How long did it take you to build and what sort of tools did you use to bring it to life?

Adriaan van Rossum (05:49):

I used a lot of tools that I already knew because in the previous products that I tried to launch, I always try to learn something new along the way and it always got me stuck at some point. So this time I was like, okay, I'm going to really finish this product and I'm going to launch it. So I only used the things I knew and there was Node.js, Postgres, maybe a bit of Vue.js, but I don't think there was even in place. So I think I was using handlebars or something like that for charts, I use Chart.js, still use that because it's a great library. That was one of the reasons why it actually succeeded because the tools that I already knew didn't limit me in everything I wanted to build. So eventually the product or the MVP, I think it was done in three months. I worked three months on it and at the end of the three months I was like, okay, we're going to launch it. And then I launched it on Product Hunt and Hacker News.

Noah Labhart (06:45):

With any MVP, you got to make certain decisions and trade-offs alluding to some of those and using technology that you knew, right? Tell me about some more of those when you were building that first version of the product. Maybe it's around technical debt approach or feature limitation or anything like that, and specifically how you coped with those decisions.

Adriaan van Rossum (07:06):

When you are small or when you're just launching, you don't have any issues with a lot of data. For example, if you would launch our product as it is now, you wouldn't be able to build it in three months, only the data structure because there's so much traffic, so so much data is coming in, but when you start, there's not much data because you don't have that many customers. So the beautiful thing is that you can just build a product with a very limited feature set, but also with a very limited database behind it and stuff like that. So Postgres worked fine, but it had some limitations. You couldn't search fast all on the pages, for example or stuff like that, so I just didn't offer it. And another thing like visitors, we didn't have unique page views at the time, which we call visitors because we don't track people.

(07:57):

So we don't know if someone comes back to your website the next day. For us it's a new visitor and stuff like that. We didn't offer any of those and people were yeah, okay with like, okay, we can only see shoes and that's okay for them. And not everybody is maybe happy with it, but the first people were happy with it. And I think those trade-offs are super important. Don't build everything you really want to have in the product, but the limited feature set is probably good for some of the people that will be a potential buyer.

Adriaan van Rossum (11:03):

What we always did was being very transparent, so we are transparent about our own metrics, but also with the roadmap. So I created a repository for GitHub issues and then people could actually file new features and stuff like that. So I built a page on slash roadmap and people could actually vote on features on the roadmap. So at certain point the features that people really wanted were flowing on top or floating on top, and then you can easily pick the features that you want. And sometimes it's a feature where you think, ah, maybe it doesn't really fit with the product, so I will not build it. And some features you think like, oh yeah, I didn't know that was a requirement, or that was something that people really wanted and then that has a higher priority than the other ones. So that was one of the reasons or one of the ways to know what to build next.

(11:57):

And also I had had quite a clear view on what I think was important for the product as well. And there's also a few logical things like team features. For example. People really wanted that or session tracking, stuff like that. With session tracking for example, it's a funny one because we didn't want to place any cookies, so it's very hard to have a session and some competitors do it with a hash version of the IP address, but for us, it's still tracking a user and we think that the GDPR thinks the same way. So then you need to find out a different way to offer a feature like that. So yeah, you need to be quite creative to get to a product that's actually still something that people want and still something that ethically is okay with me as the founder.

Noah Labhart (12:48):

Okay. Let's switch to team then. So how did you build your team and what did you look for in those people to indicate that they were the winning horses to join

Adriaan van Rossum (12:55):

You? Yeah, the first moment I needed a developer because I was working on the features and I felt like, okay, we need to work harder on the features. So the first thing hired was a developer. I put out a tweet in the first few months that the business started and I got already 150 applicants through the tweet. So I all DMed them back like, okay, this is the form and this is a few questions, please answer them and then I can filter on them. One of the questions was, what do you think is more important pushing this feature out or making it code wise optimised? And that's quite a good question for a lot of developers. I'm not looking for a developer that has the best way of writing its code. I want to have a developer that is fast with building a feature, and that's usually not a mindset of the efforts developer.

(13:46):

So yeah, that was one of the ways to filter between all the applicants. So then I had my first technical freelancer, now a year before I started talking with someone from a marketing background, and this person was really excited like, oh, you have a really great product and I'm working on a product as well, he said, but that kind of had a limitation because it was only limited to the Netherlands. And he was like, maybe we could work together. So it was not really looking for each other or something, but we just found each other and then we realised, hey, maybe we should be partners. And now we are partners and we are going way faster and we also hired content writer and we do a lot of work with freelancers as well. When the money allows, we hire more people, but also still keep in mind is it really necessary to hire those people because we also want to make a profit from the business.

Adriaan van Rossum (16:41):

We definitely didn't build it with scaling in mind because then I would have to learn something new and then I wouldn't have my MVP ready on time and I probably would never have launched it. So I'm very glad that I didn't think of the future that much. I just thought, will this product sell in the current form? So then the next question was, okay, now we're getting way more customers. How are we going to handle all this data? First thing that came to mind was using Elasticsearch. I didn't know much about Elastic Search, I never worked with it, but all my digital nomad travels. I met a few people and one of them said, yeah, I have experience with Elastic Search, so if you need some freelance work or something, then I can be your guy. And that was the first iteration after Postgres. And then we could build a lot of extra features like search on pages, but also better aggregations and way faster, and also getting the data out of the system in a fast way. So it improved a lot in performance and in features, and I'm very happy that we did it this late in the process because otherwise, yeah, like I said, we probably wouldn't have finished the first product.

Noah Labhart (17:57):

So as you step out on the balcony, you look across all that you've built, what are you most proud of?

Adriaan van Rossum (18:03):

Yeah, what I really like is the original features that we have, and it's kind of fun. The first time when I saw people copying our features, I was a bit frustrated, why do you do that? But now in hindsight I think, oh, it is actually quite positive. So all the people think it's really good that they even need to copy it in their products. So one of the things that I was proud of was bypass ad blockers because ad blockers would block all our requests, which is okay, that's their choice, but as a privacy solution, we wanted to like, okay, we are not an ad network, we're actually not collecting personal data. It would help these kind of businesses a lot if you would not block us, but that was not a negotiable. So then we thought, okay, we need to find a different way.

(18:54):

And that was with CNAME-records. So then in the DNS, you could as a customer set up a CNAME, they linked them to our servers and we send them through their CNAME. So then for ad blockers, it doesn't look like traffic from a different ad blocker, but it looks like it's traffic from that website, actually. Yeah, we were one of the first people doing that, and now it's integrated in a lot of other businesses as well. Or we have, for example, a tweet viewer. So in Google Analytics you have t.co URLs and it doesn't say anything about where it's coming from. And we built something smart that would convert those URLs into actual tweets. So you would see the tweets that people are sending about your product and sending visitors to your website. And yeah, those features give me the most energy I would say.

Noah Labhart (19:42):

Okay. Let's flip the script a little bit. Tell me about a mistake you made and how you and your team responded to it.

Adriaan van Rossum (19:50):

When we just started, we were launching on Hacker News and we got so much traffic and we really asked for a credit card before people could use our product. In hindsight, this was a mistake. There were so many people interested in our product and we only had accounts for the people that entered their credit card. I think it would be way better to have a list of email addresses from all the people that were interested so we could actually convert them into paying later. And also the same is for freemium model. We never did any freemium only for, I think it was 12 minutes during launch, and then I chickened out and I was like, okay, now too many free signups. I want to have real customers and then close the freemium again. But in hindsight, I would say the freemium model is probably the best model to get people using your product and to get advocates sharing about your product, something that we will still integrate, but it would've been way better when we did that before. And there's one other thing that I really did wrong marketing wise, because I was talking with some journalists from Fast Company and she didn't know much about products like mine. So she asked like, oh, very cool, what other competitors do you have? And I shared two other competitors that were not super known but was nice for article. And then in her article, those two competitors were listed first and then I was listed somewhere at the bottom. So yeah, in hindsight, never name your competitors if the interviewer doesn't know about them.

Noah Labhart (21:35):

So what does the future look like for Simple Analytics, the product and for your team?

Adriaan van Rossum (21:40):

The future for Simple Analytics is super bright because Google Analytics is doing quite a lot of things to help us grow, and we are building a lot of cool features, as in we want to build an alert system where we are building features for agencies to make our product nicer for them, shareability of dashboards and stuff like that. So that's something I'm really excited about. And I'm also very excited about the team, as in how we're making a lot of more ways in trying to find better developers around us and better people to write our content. We really see a lot of value in finding the right people, and we found quite a lot of good people and a few not so good people. And it's super exciting to work with the people that really work well with the team and with our product. So I'm really excited about what else we can do also marketing wise, but also product wise. And at some point I would set up this team to also build something like a product studio. And internally we already have talks about it to build maybe other products because we have a great team, so why not use it also for new products and try out more MVPs because building new stuff or thinking about new products that excites us the most. So yeah, that would be our dream.

Noah Labhart (23:07):

Let's switch to you Adriaan. Who influences the way that you work, name a person or many persons or something you look up to and why?

Adriaan van Rossum (23:14):

I don't really have that many role models that I really think about right now, but what inspired me was a lot of people that were transparent about what they did or building in public, for example, where you inspire others, but also, yeah, you can really learn from other people. I'm scrolling to Twitter quite a bit and I think you learn a lot from that as well. Also, it takes a lot of time, so I shouldn't do it that much, but it really helps you filtering on what all the people are building and getting you excited for that. In the Netherlands, I don't think there's a big scene of entrepreneurs or founders. So most people that really helped me in the beginning were the Indie hackers, so the Indi Hacker community, the people that are building little products or MVPs and trying to make a profit with it. Those people really excited me. And also those groups where you talk with other people, it's really nice to be able to get some accountability because if you share to other people like, Hey, I'm going to launch, launch next week, then you really need to do it. And if you are not having those conversations, you can easily say, okay, I will do it in two weeks, or even never. So it's nice for accountability, and I think those groups helped me a lot, especially in the beginning.

Noah Labhart (24:39):

So we talked about a mistake earlier, but this is a little different spin. If you could go back to the beginning, what would you do different or where would you consider taking a different approach?

Adriaan van Rossum (24:48):

I think I would take a different approach in hiring marketing people earlier on, because as a tech founder, it's really easy to see what needs to be done feature wise or performance wise or stuff like that, or you want to, I don't know, upgrade your stack or stuff like that. The most important thing is selling your product. And as a technical founder, it's a bit difficult to sell your product because your biggest love is with tech and not so much with marketing, or at least that's for me. So finding someone that does the marketing and really knows what they're doing, I think that would've been way better early on. If I would change something, I would definitely try to find or a marketing co-founder or higher great marketers and try to sell the product from the start because all the features is super nice. Product improvements are also super nice, but it's way better if you can actually sell the product, and that's more important than any new feature.

Noah Labhart (25:58):

So last question. You're getting on a plane and you're sitting next to a young entrepreneur who's built the next big thing. They're jazzed about it, they can't, we shut off the world, we shut off to you right there on the plane. What advice do you give that person having gone down this road a bit?

Adriaan van Rossum (26:12):

I think I would advise them to really listen to multiple people giving advice, but be really careful on what advice to follow. Because on the road, you get so many people that think they know what they're talking about, but if you really, really dig deeper, it's not really based on their own experience with something maybe they read or something they believe. And I don't think that's the best advice you can get. So try to get advice from people have actually something done in the past where you can learn from. And usually that helps a lot to make sure you're friends with people that are, I don't know, longer in the business like yourself or have more experience or have a bigger team or something like that. So try to surround you with people that are further down the path.

Noah Labhart (27:06):

That's great advice. Well, Adriaan, thank you for being on the show today, and thank you for telling the creation story of Simple Analytics.

Adriaan van Rossum (27:12):

Thank you. That was really fun. Thank you.

Noah Labhart (27:18):

And this concludes another chapter of Code Story. Code Story is hosted and produced by Noah Labhart. Be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or the podcasting app at your choice. And when you get a chance, leave us a review. Both things help us out tremendously and thanks again for listening.

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