[mg]

Compare that to Plausible: Over $2M in revenue last year.

Plausible started in 2019. Not sure when [name redacted] started. Clicking on "blame" for the readme file in the repo, I see a commit from 5 years ago.

I can very much empathize that adding a "buy" button is a hump to get over when you just wanna build something cool and share it with like-minded people. I have the same issue with every project I build. I guess one should train to jump over one's shadow in this regard.

[adrianmsmith]

> Over $2M in revenue last year.

Plausible also has a co-founder who does marketing, and is evidently very good at it. That's perhaps a more important factor in success than simply offering a paid plan.

It looks like success was far from guaranteed before he was hired ($400 MRR and not growing). https://plausible.io/blog/open-source-saas#february-looking-...

[RunSet]

Marketing is like juicing in athletics.

It undermines the nominal reason for the enterprise's existence (competition) but once a single competitor begins practicing it, everyone else also has to- not to any benefit, but just to maintain their status quo.

[pakitan]

One of the dumbest takes I've seen in a while. Good customer service is like juicing in athletics. You can get away just fine without it but once those pesky competitors stop yelling at their customers, you're kinda forced to do the same as well. Not to any benefit but just to maintain the status quo.

[RunSet]

Diligent readers will observe which aspect(s) of your attempted equivalence do not pertain.

[MadnessASAP]

Unfortunately we don't live in the land of omniscient rational actors.

Being able to find customers and explain your products value to them, that being marketing, is an essential part of producing a product.

[paulryanrogers]

If only marketing stopped at explaining the (actual) value...

[Veuxdo]

> Marketing is like juicing in athletics.

This is far, far too cynical. Marketing is not cheating. To keep the sports metaphor, marketing is training. It's unglamorous, time-consuming, and (for most) not fun. But, if you want to succeed as a professional, you have to do it.

[yojo]

As a single business, marketing is a totally rational way to boost sales. Collectively, it’s just a tax.

If no one was paying, but people were still writing, the best solutions would likely bubble to the top. But as soon as someone pays for placement, everyone needs to. You end up with a new normal that’s the same as before (modulo those products that are better at marketing) but everyone had to pay a bunch of money.

Short of literally banning advertising, there’s no way around it/any serious business needs to do it. But I get the take that it’s a cost that is only necessary because everyone else is doing it.

[Veuxdo]

> If no one was paying, but people were still writing, the best solutions would likely bubble to the top.

I think that's far from guaranteed. It could very well be the case that the oldest, most established, solutions would dominate the top, for instance.

[pakitan]

You're confusing paid advertising with marketing. Marketing is interweaved in almost any business activity. No marketing means you literally register a company and then wait in your house for someone to randomly walk in and pay you for you services. And if that miraculously happens, you treat them as badly as you can and do the worst possible job, just to make sure you don't inadvertently get some word of mouth referrals.

[Veuxdo]

This is a good point that I'm glad you called out. Having a logo is marketing. Having a website is marketing. Every blog post, tweet, like, reshare, etc. is marketing. This comment could be considered marketing if you look hard enough.

[yojo]

You’re right that I was implicitly referring to top of funnel marketing - things you do to make people aware of your business and get them to your business. And yes, I was most focused on advertising.

I would argue that customer service and the actual job done are part of the product, since they’re part of the value you’re delivering to the customer. By that logic one could include the warm fuzzy feeling they get from some really slick copy, but to my mind it feels different. I’m having trouble formalizing the line here.

I’ll also concede that there are things that fall under the aegis of “marketing” that are not direct transfers of money for placement - e.g. cold calling, content marketing, SEO, etc. many of them are zero-sum games, a few are not.

[thfuran]

>You end up with a new normal that’s the same as before (modulo those products that are better at marketing) but everyone had to pay a bunch of money.

I think the situation is almost guaranteed to be worse because there are now stronger incentives to manipulate and deceive.

[thfuran]

Training actually improves the product (athletic performance). Does an athlete going on a commercial to hawk shoes make them a better athlete or make the shoes better? Would the answer be different once we change domains back to software? Marketing may be a necessary business activity in the current environment, but it is not at all like training in its fundamental effect on the quality of the product. (Though in that regard, I think juicing was a bit awkward as an analogy)

[_1kfq]

There are really two types of "marketing":

- "Hey, here's something interesting you might be interested in!"

- "Drink Coca Cola"

The second type of marketing is the sort of zero-sum game you're talking about. Everyone already knows about this, Coca Cola and Pepsi spend phenomenal amounts of money, and it kind of just cancels out.

But the first type of marketing is rather different. The simplest kind is making something and then telling people that you made it.

[mrmanner]

This assumes all potential customers know all products and services somehow, without the enterprises communicating their existence? Without marketing, how would we know that website analytics as a service even exists?

Sure we could guess and randomly reach out to companies to ask if they provide it. Answering those inquiries could easily be considered marketing, though.

[imtringued]

I wouldn't call that marketing if you truly dial random numbers. Meanwhile if you put your number in a phone book, I would count that.

[AYBABTME]

Bringing attention to the existence of a thing isn't juicing, it's a necessary part of making something useful. If you build something that's potentially useful but no one ever hears of it, it isn't actually useful until someone hears of it.

[RunSet]

Honest, unpaid word of mouth might serve that function if not for the hired shouters and resultant ambient dishonesty.

Flipping the microscope, paid promotions distract from honest testimonials with no profit motive.

"We are improving your search results by prepending sales brochures."

[AYBABTME]

Ignoring financial incentives, you're claiming that a specific method of dissemination (word of mouth) is all that anyone could ever need, or some such. This doesn't make much sense. How can only one very specific communication method be the end of all that be, when it comes to a multimedia world. It's like saying one ever only needs masks to mitigate every communicable respiratory diseases. Masks are effective but far from reasonably being the end of the tech tree, the pinacle of all methods that ever will be.

Also it seems like your gripe is actually with advertising, which would be more sensible. Simply being against marketing is merely proof that you can't possibly understand what marketing is.

[imtringued]

That only applies to heavily saturated markets and it's only "zero sum", because the market isn't growing anymore, not because marketing is bad.

When you are tapping a new market, absolutely nobody knows about your company, your product and the problems it solves. In fact, often you even have to educate your customer that they have an opportunity to improve their business/life with your product.

[_1kfq]

> Plausible also has a co-founder who does marketing, and is evidently very good at it. That's perhaps a more important factor in success than simply offering a paid plan.

Yes, I agree. This is also what I told the NLnet people a few years back, but while there's a lot of budget for specific technical things, there isn't really any money set aside for more "soft" aspects like this.

[_1kfq]

[name redacted] started a few months before Plausible.

Giving it away for free didn't help, but "making money" was never really a goal as such. I think "being free" is important if you want to be a viable alternative for Google Analytics. €9/month is nothing for a business, but who is paying that for a blog or hobby site (or even some small businesses)?

I already decided a few years ago that "covers hosting" is good enough. It's just that circumstances conspired to put in this rather uncomfortable position.

[Gentil]

> but who is paying that for a blog or hobby site (or even some small businesses)?

I was trying to. I highly recommend you to bring back the paid plans. Just leave it as it was. Opt-in for personal and for small commercial websites, paid plan. Like someone else mentioned, for a business, invoices helps a lot to bill as expense if they want to pay you.

[bombcar]

Always ALWAYS have a way to give money that results in a professional-looking invoice for a professional-sounding product. That’s a great way for people in business to get the cost expensed.

[endofreach]

As much as i admire that: The language you wrote that in, only exists, because google found a way to grow by making money.

To be fair, not sure if this is a pro or contra: [name redacted] wouldn't need to exist, if google didn't find the way they did, to make money.

Anyway, cool product. Love OSS but don't mind paying for simple solutions as a business. It's not only about saving time but also about keeping focus.

[vgel]

Thank you for making it free! I've used it on my blog (https://vgel.me) forever, since back before I ever would've paid for analytics, and it's been rock-solid the whole time. Some of the most "set it and forget it" software I use. I definitely owe you a donation so I'm glad I saw this!

[soneca]

It’s very very risky to optimize for just “good enough”. You have to build some reserve, or you risk being in the situation you are in.

You don’t need to optimize to earn tons of money, but minimum threshold should more than just good enough. So, if things go wrong, you can spend that reserve and actually be on a “good enough” position until you figure things out

[figassis]

One difference I see is I heard very little about [name redacted] (first time was mid 2023), but Plausible pops up every few months to the top of HN. So they for sure have marketed harder.

This also validates that maybe something like Setapp for SaaS or Spotify for SaaS might be a good business model.

[diggan]

> Not sure when [name redacted] started

"Hello, world" - [name redacted] committed on May 28, 2019 - [link redacted]

Plausible:

"Initial commit" - ukutaht committed - on Sep 2, 2019 - 779d64e19a26a4e4944d4f0d7d9e280a27fbc6e5 - https://github.com/plausible/analytics/commit/779d64e19a26a4...

[c12]

[name redacted] did in the beginning have a paid tier that I was subscribed to but the author found it too much hassle to deal with and so removed it.

[mekster]

Color, layout and name alone took me away from this to look for alternatives instantly.

I don't see to choose this over various alternatives.

[spiffytech]

[name redacted] previously offered paid plans. Not sure why that changed.

[link redacted]