Milestones

Case Study: How Adriaan makes $36k/mo taking on Google Analytics.

My name is Adriaan van Rossum. I have a business called Simple Analytics. Basically, what we do is an alternative to Google Analytics. If you're familiar with Google Analytics, you'll know they track cookies, have an annoying cookie banner, and collect a lot of data for ad systems. Simple Analytics does none of that. We just track your visitors without cookies and without a cookie banner.

How did you get your first 10 customers, subscribers, or patrons?

Yeah. So getting the first customers for Simple Analytics was a bit of luck, but also like making sure you were in the places where luck happens, you know? Not just waiting around and seeing if it works, but doing the effort and seeing what works.

For me, it was posting it on Product Hunt. I think it was 2018, September. I was really excited. I was like, 'Okay, this is my first business I'm going to post on Product Hunt. I have some friends who will vote for me, and I will become like the product of the day.'

That didn't happen, but I got like third. I was like, 'Ah, that's not great.' Like, 'Ah, I want something better.' I put so much time in it. I also had a video created with some friends. They were studying videography, I think it was in Belgium. They have a great school there, and they were happy to make a video for me. So we made a great video of a guy being tracked all the time. I was just working on my computer, and then there was someone snooping around me or watching me from the back and stuff like that. It's still on the website of Simple Analytics, so you can still watch it. It's kind of a funny video.

I thought, 'Okay, this is maybe something that people enjoy,' and then maybe they'll start to think about the business behind it. But for Product Hunt, it didn't really work. So then I went to Hacker News the next day. I was sitting on a park bench somewhere in Amsterdam. A friend of mine was there, and we were like, 'Okay, let's put it online and then we can talk.'

I put it online on Hacker News, and then I thought something was wrong with the website. It was on the first spot of the website, but maybe that's just because it's the new page or something. So I was like, 'Okay, there's nothing going on yet.' But then I realized it got a lot of upvotes. I was like, 'Oh, wait a minute, this is going well.' And then I realized it was on the front page in the first place, number one spot, and stayed there for nine hours.

I got a ton of traffic from that. I think it was 30,000 visitors or something like that. Well, I'm not a hundred percent sure because my platform at that time didn't track visitors - we only had page views. So it was a bare-metal platform, and it was only page views. I think 30,000 page views from Hacker News. It was insane.

I was like, 'Oh, this is working.' And that was also directly the moment where I got paying customers. I think I got, I'm not sure how many, but I think 30 paying customers after that moment. So it means that the homepage wasn't great yet and wasn't perfect, but I got customers from it.

Yeah, that's how I got my first customers. Just trying different places and seeing what works and where it works. It was quite a nice surprise for me as well.

I think Hacker News works better than Product Hunt because the readers of Hacker News are more of a technical background. Product Hunt is more for, I think, more shiny, beautiful products. Simple Analytics was more of a mission like beating Google and removing all the tracking, and who knows the best about tracking? Developers. Developers are building the tracking, so they know what is possible within a browser. I think they know more about why this could be important, and they care more about privacy as well. So my whole business is about privacy, and developers know a bit more about privacy than the people on Product Hunt, I think.

What was your first big win, and how did it shape your business?

One of the events that really helped me push to the next level was the product's Hacker News launch. It got some traffic, and I realised that those people loved my product. I needed to focus more on that platform. Subsequently, I targeted more developers that I needed to convince on my platform. Later, I realised this was also how companies would switch from Google Analytics to Simple Analytics, for example, because the developer knows they can change to something like this. They read Hacker News, so they think, "I know about Simple Analytics and it's a great platform."

They will tell their boss, "Hey, maybe we should switch to something that's more privacy-friendly."

I think that way of sales, I hadn't realised before, but through Hacker News, I realised these are the people that actually sell within the business.

For example, later I got some people saying, "Oh, my husband's a programmer, and he told me about Simple Analytics. I'm a marketer, but I want to have it in my business too." That was, I think, the first moment where I actually realised that maybe the developers are salespeople. That's not normally the case - they're not typically salesy.

Much later in the business, last year, we tried to make this even bigger by giving everybody a free plan so that anyone could use Simple Analytics for free.

We hope, and we're seeing this in our data now, that these people are using Simple Analytics for free for their blog posts or something else. It may be a small website, but when they discuss analytics in their business, they're going to say, "Oh, I use this at home, and it's great. Maybe we should use it in our business."

Then we charge a fee. So the developers get it free, but the people who actually use it as a company will pay for it. Sometimes when we get a sales request, we look up the person on LinkedIn, and we can see that this person already had an account with us on a small website with a free plan but is now talking inside a business. So you can actually see that it worked.

It's really cool. You make a few assumptions, and you don't know if they'll work. When you see some results and think, "Oh, this is actually working," then you're super happy. That's nice in business - you can go two ways, and sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't.

To push people in the right direction for helping us and making our business known in companies, we have some things in place, like an affiliate programme, but I don't really think it works that well because if people enjoy your product, they're going to share it anyway. If they can make money with it, they share it on a different basis than if they were really excited about the product. So I'm a bit on the fence about that strategy.

I think it's good if you want to attract lots of customers through another party. For example, we are in some boilerplate codes so that you have a boilerplate for your website and you just build your website starting with a few lines of code. Being in those boilerplates is super nice because they already use Simple Analytics with a few lines of code. So for those people, it makes sense to have an incentive of making money based on that little script that we add. But I think for general word of mouth, it's not that important.

How do you structure and manage your week?

Yeah, we manage our time quite differently every year or month. I think if I need to answer something like this in a year, it will be completely different than if I answer it now. So take that into account.

At the moment, or rather last year, we needed to do a lot of things that just needed to be done. We had a new free plan, which required lots of coding and system design work. So we had quite a pile of tasks to complete.

I remember when we went to Bali in November, I was trying to make the experience a bit nicer. I said to my business partner, Iron, "Let's go to Bali and do fun projects that maybe aren't the most profitable, but are enjoyable to build." I think it's important in a business to have fun projects or elements that make people smile. For example, in our emails, we have GIFs of Iron and me reacting to different situations - positive ones, when people leave, or when payments are late.

These fun things don't necessarily make more money, but they give people a smirk for a second, and that's worth something. Regarding time management - I'm drifting a bit - but in Bali, we really wanted to do those fun projects. However, there was still this list of essential tasks that needed completing. I decided to focus the first week on finishing those tasks, which extended throughout the month until everything was done.

So our plan to do fun projects in Bali changed to "let's just finish these tasks". That was the theme of last year - we just needed to do a lot of stuff. This year is different because last year we set up more of a platform for growth, and now we're focusing on the growth itself.

Last year we implemented the free plan, and this year we're ensuring perfect conversion and increasing user acquisition. This allows more time to think about the business rather than just working in it. We're now at a point where we can think more about the next steps instead of just completing tasks.

For tools, we use Trello - it's super simple. We just drag items to "done". We have one column for bigger ideas, another for specific tasks we want to complete within a few weeks, and a "done" column. It's a very simple system, but it works best for our small team of two people plus some freelancers.

We have an agreement that if it's in Trello, it's the truth and will get done at some point. If it's not in Trello, you can talk about it, but it needs to be added to Trello to become a reality.

What’s the most surprising insight you’ve gained from your audience’s feedback?

The most surprising response, I think, was for Simple Analytics to build this ad blocker bypassing feature. Like Simple Analytics and many other analytics tools, though not as much as Google Analytics, are blocked by ad blockers, right? So when you install an ad blocker in your browser, it blocks Google Analytics. Some of those ad blockers also block Simple Analytics. We thought, "Okay, this is not great. We want to share our mission, and these ad blockers are blocking our mission because we are trying to do good. We don't track people." So it felt a bit like a punch in the face. We're trying to be good, and you're still blocking us.

We thought, "Okay, let's bypass ad blockers." I'm quite proud of that solution because it's just a creative idea that I thought could work, so let's try it out. Basically, what it does is, if you have a domain like example.com, you can prefix that with a subdomain. So you can say analytics.example.com and link that domain to our platform. If you link the domain to our platform, for an ad blocker, it doesn't look like it's our platform, but it looks like it's analytics.example.com. So you kind of trick the ad blocker into thinking it's on their website instead of our website. And that works quite well.

This is also a feature where I didn't realise that a lot of people actually needed it. Later, I heard from a few customers, "Oh, the reason why I'm with Simple Analytics is because of this feature." I was like, "Oh, that's big. I didn't know that." Then a lot of other companies tried to build the same thing. So that's also a bit where my pride came in because I was like, "Oh, people are just copying this feature." But it's kind of nice because it shows that other people think it's cool too.

So I think that's the feature where we got the most feedback, and where I was a bit surprised. Yeah.

What’s your most successful marketing channel and why?

I don't want to admit it, but our most successful marketing channel is Google search. Search is our most important marketing channel because people look for 'Google Analytics alternative' or 'privacy analytics'. That's still the main source of our customers.

There's also a lot of word of mouth, but it's much less than search. Search is still the biggest one, though we see a little uptick in AI search basically. OpenAI gives us some results as well, which is nice to see, but I think all the AI systems still use Google search or Bing search for ranking their answers. So SEO is still super important for us. That's one of our bigger goals for this year - to improve our SEO significantly.

At the same time, we're dependent on Google whilst also fighting against them. There's this weird imbalance of wanting their search capability but not their bad behaviour. It's funny because if they want, they could just close our revenue income from search by putting us on page 50, and we'd be done. But I don't think they'll ever do that - it wouldn't be best for a company that people trust for search.

I think the free plan is also an important change, but we don't have enough data yet to see if that's the main source. Word of mouth is increasing though. We measure how people select their source during onboarding - they have options like search, LinkedIn, word of mouth, etc. Word of mouth has been increasing over the last few months, but we don't have enough data yet to draw firm conclusions.

LinkedIn and Twitter are important sources too, but they work slightly differently because we're a very open business. When we have a new feature, free trial, or strategic changes, we share it. People then know what we're doing. While it might not generate sales directly, when someone needs analytics, they'll think of us. It's hard to measure exactly how much comes from that - it's relatively low compared to search, but it's also fun to share on LinkedIn and Twitter (or X).

It's nice because now my friends know what I do too. Otherwise, they wouldn't understand. LinkedIn is often the only connection we still have because most people use it in their office jobs. I hear back from friends saying, 'Oh, you're doing this now with your business', which they wouldn't know otherwise.

I think it will become more important in the future as well. The more we build with AI, the more important the story and distribution become. If you can't reach people, you're done. I think influencers and people who have distribution are becoming much more important because they can just request a nice app to be built and they already have the distribution. That will be a big change in the future.

What’s the most effective way you’ve increased your revenue without increasing your workload?

I don't really believe in the concept of low effort and big impact. For me and my business, it doesn't work like that. You need to build something, then build on top of that, then try something else. If it doesn't work, take a step back, go further, and try something else. It's quite a slow process.

I think a lot of people are looking for big wins. They want to get a thousand customers in two days and be successful. But if you keep comparing yourself with those extreme examples, you're never going to be happy about where you are at the moment. I made the same mistake when I started with Simple Analytics. In the second and third year, I was really comparing myself to businesses that were doing way better than I was. That's quite heavy on a personal level; it makes it difficult to enjoy your own work.

I would advise not trying to grow too hard, which is a bit odd to say because everyone wants to grow fast. But I would say try to do what works, and then increase the effort on that every time. Did you have a successful blog post? Try to improve it. Did you have a great feature that people really love? Make sure all your customers know about it. Or write a use case with a customer who's using that feature. Try to build on the things that work within your business.

These aren't the things that will make you a millionaire in a few months, but I think these efforts will work for most businesses more often than not. So just go deeper into what already works in your business. That's more of a strategy that we use now, and I feel more comfortable with it because you can grow slower, and that's okay. You don't have to be the next unicorn. You just work on your business and, for example, last year we grew by 30%. For us, that's great. For some businesses, that's way too slow, but for us, it's okay.

We just want to grow every year and improve. We also want to create lives that are nice for ourselves, so we can go on holiday or take a few days off. We don't work more than four days a week in our business. You can make your life nicer than just focusing purely on rapid growth. This fits well with a bootstrapped business; you're not dependent on VCs, so there's not a lot of stress about needing to grow super fast. You can just grow at your own pace and be happy about it.

I think that's a little different from the culture in the US, perhaps, with VC-funded startups. Bootstrapped businesses are a good example of how you can do things differently.

What’s the smallest change you’ve made that’s had the biggest financial impact?

Yeah. So, as simple as you can, at events. If you click on a button, you can send an event or submit a form, stuff like that. And it's kind of a hidden feature. So not many people actually see the events.

There are a lot of companies that build something like a funnel that you can drag events into and stuff like that. That's a feature that we call 'goals'. So then you can have that type of funnel.

But the feature that people enjoy more is the events explorer. We built this feature where you can see all the events. It's just one table. You can filter on it. You can add metadata to it. So if your event happened on this page, that page, whatever. It seems like a very simple feature, but all of a sudden people realise that they have this mental model of events, but they just have it all on one page.

I feel like a lot of people are really, really happy with that feature. Most of the feedback we get is like, "Hey, can you improve this on the events page?" or "Can you improve this on the events explorer?" I didn't really realise that people would enjoy it so much. It's such a simple way of interacting with the data you have. I've underestimated how many people would like this.

So, yeah, in hindsight, I should have built this way earlier. It's a really cool feature. It sounds super simple. It's just a table with numbers and that's it. I added a few nice buttons. So download to Excel, download to CSV and stuff. And that's just such an easy interaction.

Sometimes a feature doesn't have to be complicated or have a lot of UI and fancy things; sometimes just a page with a table is what people want. So that surprised me quite a bit.

What’s your best advice for attracting and keeping your most loyal customers?

At Simple Analytics, we try to make most people happy, but you can't please everyone. When you remove or change a feature, some people will love it while others will hate it because they used it differently. There's always a balance between how many people you'll make happy and how many you won't.

I think the most important thing we try to do well is giving people a "wow" experience when they ask for something in support. For example, last week a big customer gave feedback on our team member roles management. They had a different use case that our version one feature didn't accommodate well. They also had questions about the Events Explorer, wanting to include page views and other things.

Although I had other items on my to-do list, I decided to prioritise their requests. I implemented all their recommendations and feature requests, then sent them an email with screenshots explaining everything we'd done. I asked for their feedback, and they were amazed that we'd actually built what they asked for.

This kind of experience is only possible if you respond quickly to customer requests. If you wait too long, they might not even be a customer anymore. I implemented their additional feedback immediately, and they said it was the best experience they'd ever had with a software company or SaaS tool. They wouldn't expect this level of service from larger companies like Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics, which are often too big to respond to individual customer feedback.

These are the moments where you can really shine as a company. You can be agile and make things happen on the spot. As you mentioned earlier, having a story or being the face behind the company makes a huge difference in how customers see you. Suddenly, you're a human being rather than just a faceless system.

What purchase for under $100 has most positively impacted your business?

Yeah, the easiest thing to say is ChatGPT because it has improved so many parts of the business. On a feature level, we now offer AI results. So if you don't want to look at your data, but you just have a question like, "How many people from Belgium are looking at this specific page?", in the UI you need to click a few things, but with AI, you just type the question.

On a personal level, if someone asks something in customer support and some people can be quite rough with their feedback, you want to answer in a nice way. You always want to have some filter between what you actually think and what you type. AI is a perfect filter for me. I can just type in however I feel, and it will respond nicely. You always need to treat your customers as angels, right? So that's a perfect filter between me and the angels.

For other things in the business, like writing documentation or having a question about code that doesn't work, AI tools are also helpful. I think AI tools are the most productive tools ever. We use them a lot for coding too, which is just perfect.

There's lovable.dev, a beautiful tool to create a very easy MVP on the spot. You have features for creating UI with AI. There are so many tools out there that the work you actually do as a technical founder is shifting more towards generating ideas and thinking of how to implement them, or making and playing with designs, rather than actually executing. That shift is beautiful, I think.

So yeah, thanks to AI. I pay those bucks with love.

What’s a recurring habit, process, or system you have that you couldn’t function without?

Yeah, for me, the most important thing is experiencing my freedom within the business. One of the things that I can't really function without is going to a coffee place, opening my laptop and doing some work, and then not knowing where I'll go next. Maybe I'll go to the office - we have a nice office in Amsterdam - or go home and work a little bit more there, or go to a different coffee place, or have a nice walk and think about things. That kind of freedom is essential for me to function well.

The more I go to coffee places, for example, the more successful it is. Although other habits like personal health are super important for the business too. I go to some kind of CrossFit training three times a week. Those are the moments where I know I wake up early because it's at eight o'clock in the morning. Then you go to your class, have a shower, and start working or have a coffee with your business partner or things like that.

It's these little things that aren't very important by themselves, but within the whole work style, they make it really nice actually. You also create some moments with your business partner, for example. He goes to the same workouts, so afterwards you can have a coffee together and talk about random things. Those moments are actually important because you can talk about all sorts of things, not just the business.

I think that's also what I kind of have in coffee places. You're not in a work environment, so you're not only thinking about work, work, work. You're also thinking about other things, like "Oh, there are other people around" or "That's a nice coffee" or "I see a nice bar" or whatever. So your mind is not just focused on one thing. I think that's important for having enough creativity in your business and making your life more fun as well.

What’s a unique strategy in your business that you’re particularly proud of?

I'm quite proud of the strategy regarding the free plan. We were thinking about whether it would work. I was scared to start a free plan because we have paying customers. If all those paying customers said, "Oh, nice, a free plan. Let's go to the free plan," and then we don't have paying customers anymore, that's not good. So it was a bit scary to do that.

We launched it very low-key. We didn't really share it online and such. I think my first mention of the free plan was just a tweet where I asked for advice on the onboarding for our free plan, not really announcing it because I was too scared of sharing it. I didn't want people to use us for free instead of paying, so I was always a bit hesitant about that.

We started with the free plan and then realised it wasn't giving us the same revenue increase that we normally got without a free plan. My business partner, Iron, who's more responsible for growth while I'm more responsible for product, started researching what we could do about it. He's really good at looking online for solutions and finding better options.

He found this "reverse trial" solution. What it basically means is that during the trial, you can use everything in the product. But after the trial ends, the product is closed down and you need to either go with the free plan but delete all the features you were using (like added team members, bypassed ad blockers, etc.), or pay for a plan that fits your needs. There's a big red button saying, "Delete all my extra team members, delete all my extra websites," and so on.

We're trying this now. We don't have much data on it yet, but we already see it's working a lot better than the free trial or the freemium model we had before.

These kinds of changes show how you can be very adaptive to whatever happens in your business. If this doesn't work out, we'll try something else. I'm really proud of our changes in strategy and that we can still change our whole business if we want to. Even after five years, we can rearrange the whole free plan. Maybe in a year, we'll realise the free plan didn't work out for us and we'll just kill it. That's a possibility too.

I'm really happy and proud of our process in changing these kinds of critical decisions in our business and that we're still agile enough to do this. It's much harder to convince people that a feature is really nice to use than to let them use the feature for free and let them discover for themselves if they like it or not. It just makes sense.

What book, podcast, or YouTube channel do you recommend the most, and why?

Yeah, when I first started, there were a lot of questions regarding what resources I use - videos I watch, podcasts I listen to, and so on. For me, it's relatively low - I don't read that many business books, I don't listen to a lot of business podcasts, and I don't watch many videos on how to grow your business and stuff like that. I use a lot of logical thinking in how things work. I use X (formerly Twitter), for example, to get some information from other businesses, like "Oh, this works for them. Okay, maybe I should try it too." But I know a lot of people are way more into gathering information from other sources.

I'm from a very stubborn family, so we always think we know what's best. That's definitely not the case - it's not the best solution, but we think it is. And that's also maybe where my eagerness to really learn from others is limited. I kind of have a feeling that I know what's good. That's also the biggest pitfall in my business - you need to listen to your customers to know what's best for them. So yeah, that's a difficult one. But I learned that along the way.

As for other resources, I love to take my bike and go for a ride, or go for a run and listen to a podcast about history, stuff like that. But it's a very Dutch-oriented podcast, so I don't think it's relevant for the outside world. One of my favourite Dutch people is Maarten van Rossum. He has a similar last name to mine. He's very grumpy all the time, and that's kind of his thing. But he's actually a very nice person that puts you back on the ground with both feet.

So if, I don't know, Russia is invading Ukraine or if something else is happening in the world, he will always try to explain what's going on. He'll explain that it's not as bad for the world as it seems, that these things have already happened in the past and that it's already been solved, or that we don't need to worry about it. I think the not worrying part is what I like the most about his podcast.

He's just a very simple guy. He records the podcast in his car because he doesn't want to go to a podcast studio. There's another guy who's interviewing him, and he just talks. It's just nice. It's something I like to listen to, and it doesn't gain me much, but it's just easy entertainment with a bit of learning on how we handled things in the past.

What’s a mistake you’ve made, and what did it teach you?

Yeah, I think the biggest mistake that we made with Simple Analytics was in the very beginning. There are two things, actually.

The first thing is when I launched, and I kept doing this for four years, I think. The only option was to just have a free trial and after the free trial, you would pay and then you're in or out. In hindsight, especially with the launch on Hacker News, I could have converted so many more people into something that's not being a paid platform, but would work better in the long term. I didn't have any email addresses of people that might be interested in our product; I would only have the 30 new customers that ended up in our product and left their email address.

It's kind of a balance between wanting paying customers and free customers. If you make it free, you don't really know if people are willing to pay. So there's this balance between knowing if people are willing to pay or wanting as many accounts on your website. In hindsight, I should have gone for the email addresses and accounts - I should have offered some kind of free plan or at least gotten more of those interested users.

It scared me a bit because a lot of people around me were saying you should always have a paid plan because then you actually know if your product is being validated by people who want to pay. They said having a free plan with a lot of free users and converting those users into a paid plan is way too difficult. I'm not sure if that's true though. Maybe if I knew about reverse trials or something like that, I would have done it differently. That was one of the things I would see as a mistake if I had known more about running a business in the long term.

Another mistake was we had one customer who had a list of things he really wanted in our product. I remember saying things like, "Oh, if this feature and that feature are there, then it's amazing." At that time, I was too stubborn. I was like, "No, we need to go in a different direction. We need to make it a bit simpler." But I think all the things on his list are now integrated into the tool, just not back then. I think that was not a great move. I should have listened to that feedback carefully and implemented all the things he said, because he was, in hindsight, our target customer. I was more focused on developers and other kinds of customers that I thought I knew better.

So yeah, that's another mistake I made, I think. Listen to your customers a bit more, especially if those customers are not like yourself. You usually pick the things that you're already a fan of, right? So then you only pick things that you like, but you don't really listen to the other things the customer is suggesting. So I think that's an important thing to take into account.

What’s a common misconception people have about your industry or type of business?

I think my friends don't really know what I do. When I say I run a SaaS, they're like, "Yeah, well, what's a SaaS". And then when I say we have this MRR, they ask, "What is MRR?" Even when you explain MRR, it still doesn't make sense. They just compare it to their salary and ask how they should see it. So it's very interesting to talk with people who have no idea what SaaS is or what your business does.

I always find it funny that most of my friends still don't know what I do. Even my girlfriend, I think she knows a bit, but it's still just a bit too far off for most people. So you're kind of working in this world that a lot of people are not part of. But online, there are enough people who are part of that world. You connect with them on X or something, and then you see them in real life and go to events and stuff like that. So there's always room for connecting with people who do understand what you're doing. And I think that's great. I think it's great to have two worlds where you can actually live in both and they don't understand each other. I think that's an interesting addition to businesses like this.

A common misconception within the business, I think, is that a lot of people, especially at the start with Simple Analytics, don't understand that when you don't use cookies, you are still not allowed to track. They will come to you and say, "Oh, you're a cookieless solution, but I still want to attribute my sales campaign through all these funnels and steps, and I want to see what the user does in between, but without cookies." And then I always have to explain, "What you're describing is tracking a user. You can use different technology. You can use fingerprinting or local storage, which is another type of storage in the browser. But then you're just trying to work your way around it while actually using the same kind of technology."

So it needs some convincing sometimes for certain businesses or people that you can't track a person because we don't use cookies. You can't track them another way either. And I think that is kind of changing in recent years too. There are a lot of businesses that now come to us and ask, "We don't want tracking. Can you help us with this?" And then I explain, "Okay, we don't do tracking across pages." And then usually they understand directly that that's also not why they're here. So most businesses now understand as well that we don't want tracking and they also know what it entails for them.

But most people don't know, right? And it's also a complex thing. For most people, it's just the cookie banner. And that's the thing that you agree on. I'm trying to get people around me to hit the "no" button more often, but it's just the easiest way to click "yes" because then it's gone. But it's an annoying thing that needs to have a better solution than just clicking "yes" all the time.

What skill have you learned that’s had the biggest positive impact on your business?

Yeah, I think my most useful skill for the business is putting my creativity into work. If there's a problem where the ad blocker detects our server behind someone else's, those are the moments where I think, "Oh, I can build a solution for this because I can change it in a different way." There's always something complicated to fix, and in those moments, I really shine.

Also, when a customer asks us something like, "Hey, we want to be able to do this," and I respond, "We can't really do it because of tracking, but we can offer you a similar way which works without tracking, and you'll still have relatable insights that you otherwise would have gotten." I think those things are really fun to do, and they're the things I bring to the business that really help.

This also applies to the marketing side. When my business partner, Iron, has ideas about marketing, he asks me to check them. Usually, we can improve them significantly because I'm more of a technical person. So I can take it to the next level, and together we can go super far with whatever feature we think is useful for our customers or for attracting people.

I believe the creative part is the most valuable skill within a business and in running a business. You want to be creative to build a business, to stand out, and to have a story that people like to share. Otherwise, you can just work at a company. But if you run your own business, you need to be creative.

My parents always told me that I was creative, and I think that's just something that stuck with me, so I always tried to be creative as well. I'm not sure what came first - maybe I was creative and got acknowledged for that, or someone said I was creative, and then I wanted to be more creative. But I think it's also a part of who I am.

For example, I was creative at school in a mischievous way. There were tests being handed out to different classes, but the test would always be the same across different classes. So I would ask the other classes, "Can you give me the test so we can learn it and then get straight A's?" That's what we did, but then I made a website around it where people could upload those tests. The whole school system didn't work anymore because the classes that didn't have the first test would all be super successful in completing all the tests. That didn't get me grounded, but it did raise some questions from the higher-ups in the school.

Things like that, just trying to solve a problem in a creative way, have been part of my life since the start.

How do you approach long-term goals and planning?

Yeah, we plan our long-term goals with meetings. It's usually every quarter, but not strictly so. We try to have a meeting every quarter. My business partner and I go to an Airbnb somewhere in the Netherlands and sit there for a week. We try to figure out what we should do in the coming months. We always have a broad idea of where we want to go, and then we continue in that direction. Sometimes we need to go back completely and rethink everything. We ask ourselves, "How are we going from here?" instead of continuing in the direction we're already going.

At the moment, we're at that stage. My business partner is in Cape Town, South Africa, for two months and will be back in a few weeks. Then we'll have another one of those sessions. We're going to go a bit deeper and think, "Okay, we want to grow, but let's go back to the starting level. Let's start with a blank canvas instead of going into the task list and seeing if we're following this vision or direction or mission." Sometimes you need to do that, and it's always a bit random when it happens.

If you have those meetings in place every three months, there's at least a moment where you really need to think about what you're going to do next. Otherwise, you're just doing whatever you were doing in the previous months, which can be a bit boring. You're also not going to get to the next level where you could have been if you'd put some thought into it. I think this works well for us.

Once in a while, we think, "Okay, let's rethink it all and start over." We don't do that often. Usually, we know where we want to go, but especially this time, last year we focused so much on building the infrastructure for growth. We improved our server systems significantly, so we can handle much bigger customers. We added a free plan. We did so many things to make it work. So now this year is purely about growth - how can we make those things actually work for us? Then we can start a bit fresher at the beginning of the coming year.

I think it's also good for your mind to be in a different location. It's similar to having sleepless nights when you bring your phone to bed. Eventually, you learn that in your bed, you're on your phone, so you don't have to sleep. But if you leave your phone out completely, your mind will think, "Oh, there's nothing else to do in bed, so let's go to sleep." The next time, you sleep better because you don't bring your phone every time.

I think it's the same with working somewhere for weeks or months and then going somewhere else to be creative again. Your mind shifts and thinks, "We do the creative thing here and the work thing there." You become more creative because you're forcing your mind to change. Yeah, literally.

What do you do when you feel overwhelmed?

I have been feeling overwhelmed and stressed, especially not in the first year, but also in the second and third years. I saw so many businesses progressing faster than I was, and I became fixated on their success compared to mine. That's super stressful because you can't do anything about it. It's completely out of your hands. You see someone being more successful, and then you think, "Oh, but I'm not there yet. I need to work harder." But that drive to work harder isn't coming from a place of building a better product; it's more from wanting to be as good as those other businesses, for example. I think that's quite stressful.

The moment where that stress ended was because I was doing everything myself. I was building the product, doing the marketing, handling the administration - everything that comes with running a business. At some point, I felt stuck with how to grow further and how to build enough features. If I was working on features, I would feel like I wasn't working on marketing. If I worked on marketing, I would think that those features needed to be finished too. There was always this feeling of never being enough.

Then I found my business partner, and he started working on the marketing part. Suddenly, I only had to take care of the product side, and he handled the marketing. That was such a shift in my brain and mental health. I changed to thinking, "Oh, I can now focus on whatever I'm doing in the product and still feel like that's okay." Instead of always feeling like I was missing out or not putting enough time or effort into the other aspects of the business.

For me, getting another business partner who really contributes to the same values but also enjoys the things that I don't like as much was crucial. He loves to build things in marketing and work on growth strategies, while I love to build a great product and a great business. It's fantastic if you have those separate qualities inside a business and in a partnership.

My mental health was basically perfect after he joined, just because it's not like fighting the big guys with the feeling that you're not doing enough. It's just that you're doing enough, and that's a great feeling.

If you lost your business today, what's the first thing you'd focus on to get back to where you are now?

So what I would do to get back to this level of business is, of course, applying all the learnings that I applied here.

The first learning is that instead of starting by myself, I would start with two. First thing I would go to Iron like, "Hey, let's start a new business and let's build it together." So that's the first thing I would do differently - start together instead of solo.

That way, maybe it's not with every business partner, right? I just have luck that I have a good business partner, and I want to start the next business with him too. But that would be a big difference, I think, and way better for growth.

I would listen better to my customers, so building a better feedback system from the start instead of like during five years in. I think that's an important difference.

I would definitely try to keep it business-to-business. That's way, way easier than selling to consumers. So yeah, if you want to make money, you probably want to go business-to-business.

I wouldn't be afraid that much anymore from enterprise. Like before, I started, I would have an enterprise business button on my website. They contact us, but maybe the next business would be only enterprise because it's way easier to solve a problem for enterprise and let them pay for it, than trying to create a solution for people that don't really think they have a problem yet. Because that needs way more convincing.

The easiest sales are from enterprises that come to us and say, "Hey, we have this problem. I think you have the solution." And then you just name a number and they say, "Okay, we're happy with it or not." That's an easier sales process. It's not that all those sales processes work fine, but it's an easier way to get more money faster, I think.

But at the same time, you also want to build a product that you put love in, and people are going to notice that. So also for your own motivation, you probably want to put love in the product. In the next business, I might balance between that a bit more, between putting love in the business and still going fast for the enterprise customers.

But I still wouldn't - like the things that I would do the same - is keeping VC funding out. Staying bootstrapped. So also being okay with not going that fast.

I'm growing Simple Analytics now for five years. We're now at 36K MRR, which is, for us, it's great. But if you want to be there in one year, you need to have a different strategy than I do have now. I'm not sure if I want to change that part. I kind of like our strategy of building a business, growing it, and not going from one to a thousand in a few days.

And I think I would definitely focus on something AI-related. I feel so much eagerness to do something with AI. And yeah, it's of course also this nice bubble we live in now. Everybody in the entrepreneurial areas is doing something with AI. There's a lot of successful businesses. So maybe something like that, that would be really cool.

But yeah, that's something for the future. And I think those kinds of tools are easier to be sold than an analytics platform. Like an analytics platform, the moment where you buy it is not a moment where you have to contact the people behind it, usually. What I'm trying to say is if you reach out to a person and say, "Hey, we are a great analytics tool," and they say, "Yeah, we are super nice," but we're not right now busy with or working on changing our analytics tools.

And I think with other products, it's way easier. With ours, it's like at some point they will need it, and then they need to reach out to you. So it's a bit the other way around. You can't really do cold sales or something because people are not looking for an analytics tool at that time. They're just like, I don't know, doing something else.

But then two months later, they realise, "Oh, our cookie banner is blocking 20% of our customers." Maybe you want to know it and then they need an analytics platform like ours. And yeah, that's a bit different from other businesses, but I'm drifting off a bit. But yeah, just thought I needed to say that.

What's a controversial opinion you have about starting a business?

Yeah, I think a lot of people make the mistake of trying all new things when they start a business. That's probably the biggest mistake you can make. Just use the things you already know.

For example, I'm a developer by trade, and that's a common pitfall for developers. They have a new framework or language they want to try, and they think, "Oh, I have a new project. I can use all this new technology to build it." But at the end, you're just stuck because you didn't find the solution for your problem in this framework. You're trying to build a business - nobody cares about your framework. People care about how it looks, if it loads okay, and if it solves their problem. If it does, then it's a good product. I needed to unlearn that quite a bit as a developer.

Another thing is that a lot of people want to grow fast, and I think it's a good way to see what's important in your business. But I don't think it's the best way to have that as your only goal. Try to find a different goal, like making the world more privacy-friendly, or something a bit bigger than just numbers. Although I'm not practicing what I preach because we have an open page with all our numbers shared, and we share new milestones online. It's a bit of both, I think. Those open numbers can be used for perfect marketing, right? There's always a new thing you can share.

I think it's important to have something that keeps you motivated for running a business for a longer period of time. Running a business for one year, I think everybody can do that. Running it for five years is really much more complicated, especially if you're not that invested in the values of the business. If your main motivation is money and it plateaus a bit, or goes down a bit, you're instantly unhappy. But if your motivation also comes from wanting to make the world a more privacy-friendly place, then I can say with my free plan, "Oh, a lot more people are using us now instead of Google Analytics, I'm contributing to that goal already." So if I dip a bit in MRR, that's okay. It's not the end of the world because I'm still getting motivation from other things as well. I think that's an important thing to consider when you're having a business or starting a business.

You feel it more as well. Like we talked about earlier, the story and the people behind it. If you feel that someone is really motivated for a certain cause or really enjoys talking or getting things out of other people, then you're going to feel that. I think that's an important thing to have, because then people see more of the value or something. I don't know.

What is a truth about business or life that you have learned that you wish more people understood?

Yeah, the truth about my life, I think, is that being stubborn is great, but this is a bit dangerous because it's not for everybody. For people like me, it's brilliant, because I'm super stubborn and, coming from a stubborn family, this really helps me make decisions in my life.

For example, I started digital nomading. Nobody in my area was doing that, so it was weird. I started my own business. Not many people were doing it. I wanted to drop out of school. That was not something that people did. There are a lot of things that may make you not fit in with the normal world. But it doesn't mean that there's no place for you in that world.

For me, there was this one teacher in school that understood me. He was a really fun teacher. When I was coming late to class, he would say, "Hey, why are you already in class? Because if you're late, you're registered as being late. So why not come in the last five minutes? Then you can sleep longer and you still have your 'being late in class' checkbox next to your name. So it doesn't matter." I was like, "Yeah, I like this kind of thinking." He was the one teacher that understood how you can think about life in a slightly different way than just being rigid in the structure that people set out for you.

Breaking out of the structure might feel uncomfortable, or people might feel it's not expected of them, but I think most of the time it's great because it gives you a much better feeling and you feel so much more like yourself. I think that's super important and way more important than following whatever structure is being set in place for you on this planet.