All their marketing seems to be pitching the product against Google Analytics. But they don't spend any time differentiating themselves from other privacy-first analytics companies, of which there are many.
I mean, when they started in 2018:
> Uku’s first thought was, “Ugh. Can we just use something other than Google Analytics?”. This is how the idea for Plausible was born.
Surely they must have looked around and seen that there were already quite a few products doing privacy-first analytics? But yet they started anyway? And had success even though their marketing doesn't really state any reasons why the user should use them not the many other privacy-first analytics offerings out there?
I mean I'm happy for them that they're successful, but I think there must be more to it than alluded to in this blog post, both in (a) the decision to start in the face of lots of competition and (b) success despite not trying to differentiate themselves from the competition.
99.999% of their potential customer base is still using Google Analytics. I'm not sure the comparison to anything else matters at this point.
When you buy a Tesla you won't find comparisons about potential savings or benefits over other electric cars. Instead it is compared to the cost of ownership of a gas powered car.
I'm not sure. If you are convinced you need privacy-first analytics, and thus need to get off Google Analytics (e.g. because you've heard about Plausible) wouldn't you at least do a quick google to find other products (which might be better/cheaper - not saying they are, but you'd at least look?) And then you'd need reasons to choose one over the other.
And, when they started up, they must have googled and found other products and decide to start up anyway? I'd love to know more about that decision. Seems like it'd be difficult to justify, but obviously it worked out for them so maybe I'm just overthinking it.
Having lots of competition doesn't mean they have equal market share. It doesn't matter than there are lots of competitors if all of them are fighting for less than 1% of the market share. In fact, you don't even need to worry about them since none of them have figured out how to wrestle market share away from Google.
As for competition, you want to enter a market with competition. If there is no competition, then there must be a reason. Either a) there is no market at all, b) the market is not profitable or c) you are inventing a new market. I have seen many founders try to do c) because of your reasoning of finding something with no competition and fail.
Competition also shows you might have timing correct. If they had no competition except Google, then why would Plausible be the only ones to see the market opportunity? That's extremely unlikely and would indicate to me that Google still had a stronghold on the market.
I second this, it's better to enter a market with some competition and turnover, if you are trying to invent a new market, even if yhe need is real, you need to explain to people why they need this new wiered thing they never considered. unless you have tremendously deep pockets, you probably can't afford customer education at scale.
also you dont have any data to enable you to separate potential customers fron people who just want to waste your time because they are curious but wont buy. you dony know the buy cycle in that markrt, etc.
thanks for sharing! there's this saying in marketing that you should ignore anyone who's not much bigger than you so that's how we think about it. we focus on the tools with a large audience and ignore the rest as few people in our target audience would have heard about them. people tell us all the time how they didn't even know alternatives to GA existed before they found us and that tells a lot about the state of the market for millions of sites that use GA
> When I looked around I was fully ready to pick up another tool and install it on Gigride immediately.
>
> Turns out there are some alternatives for Google Analytics but I didn’t find any of them compelling. Simple Analytics and Fathom are the closest to my ideal but they are a bit too barebones to be useful for my use-case. For example, it’s quite important to me what browsers versions my users are on – if I use a css rule that isn’t supported in IE7, how many users does it affect? Neither Fathom or Simple Analytics provide that answer currently.
>
> This seems like an opportunity to build the tool that I really want.
We capture browser version in Squeaky analytics at the moment, but we don't surface it cause nobody ever asked for it haha. If you want to try/use it I'm happy to visualise it for you!
I also started a privacy-friendly analytics SaaS without looking at the market. Sometimes it's better to just get started. Otherwise you probably won't start doing anything, as there are existing products most of the time. In my case, I was looking for a Go (golang) solution that I could embed in my website, as a library so to speak, and just turned it into a product later as I was looking for a new project to work on.
We're now at $1500 MRR and growing. I'm also opposing the position of "just being against GA" now and we try to differentiate more. It's almost impossible to get anyone away from GA who does do performance marketing. So I don't quite see how Plausible or other privacy-friendly products are a replacement. But most websites that use GA just don't have to, because they don't rely so much on ads or personal data to get value.
I mean, when they started in 2018:
> Uku’s first thought was, “Ugh. Can we just use something other than Google Analytics?”. This is how the idea for Plausible was born.
Surely they must have looked around and seen that there were already quite a few products doing privacy-first analytics? But yet they started anyway? And had success even though their marketing doesn't really state any reasons why the user should use them not the many other privacy-first analytics offerings out there?
I mean I'm happy for them that they're successful, but I think there must be more to it than alluded to in this blog post, both in (a) the decision to start in the face of lots of competition and (b) success despite not trying to differentiate themselves from the competition.