Marko Saric (@markosaric) talks living in Brussels, things he learned working in marketing, joining an existing project as a late co-founder, succeeding on Hacker News, surviving against a behemoth competitor, and learnings from bootstrapping an open-source project to over $1.2M in annual revenue with Courtland (@csallen) and Channing (@ChanningAllen).
Plausible creators Uku Täht and Marko Saric join the show to talk about their open source, privacy-friendly alternative to Google Analytics. We talk through the backstory of the project, why it’s open source, the details behind a few viral blog posts Marko shared to bring in a ton of new interest to the project, why privacy matters in web analytics, how they prioritize building new features, the technical details behind their no cookie light-weight JavaScript approach, and their thoughts on a server-side option. Join the discussion Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today! Sponsors: DigitalOcean – DigitalOcean’s developer cloud makes it simple to launch in the cloud and scale up as you grow. They have an intuitive control panel, predictable pricing, team accounts, worldwide availability with a 99.99% uptime SLA, and 24/7/365 world-class support to back that up. Get your $100 credit at do.co/changelog. Retool – Retool makes it super simple to build back-office apps in hours, not days. The tool is is built by engineers, explicitly for engineers. Learn more and try it for free at retool.com/changelog Square – Develop on the platform that sellers trust! Head to squareup.com/go/changelog to learn more and create your Square Developer account. When you build with Square, you get to outsource all the payments complexity to them. They take care of maintaining PCI compliance, detecting fraud, and managing disputes on your behalf. Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com. Featuring: Marko Saric – Website, X Uku Täht – GitHub, X Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X Jerod Santo – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X Show Notes: Plausible - a lightweight, open source, privacy-friendly alternative to Google Analytics Why you should stop using Google Analytics on your website How one blog post changed the traction for my startup Will removing Google Analytics from a site hurt search engine rankings? Blogging statistics and trends you should know in 2020 How to de-Google-ify your site to make it faster and visitor friendly Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!