📥 How This Website Analytics Tool Got Its First Sales

Hi everyone,

Every week, I highlight up-and-coming projects and successful startups' early growth strategies that worked as well as the challenges they faced when making their first sales.

Up-And-Coming Project 📈

Here’s this weeks up-and-coming project’s early growth strategies that got their first sales 👇

Tinylytics:

Tinylytics is an analytics tool designed for small websites, like personal blogs or side projects. It's ephemeral in nature, easy to use, and gives you just the right amount of data, without fuss whilst keeping things fun (like an old school hit counter on your site).

Project Launched: 2023
Founder: Vincent Ritter
MRR: €160 MRR (Updated 19th Of July 2023)
Revenue: €400 in revenue, just in 17 days

How Tinylytics Got Its First Sales‍:

Discussing:

• Personal blog as an early growth channel.

• Creating a voice in the right communities.

“This certainly hasn’t been an easy road and took years of work to get to this stage. I started regularly blogging and micro blogging (like some people use Twitter for) just over 5 years ago – with building projects out in public.

That, in conjunction with feeding my blog both into Micro.blog and Twitter (at the time), got my readership up.

My blog is both quite personal, but also has project specific posts (where it all started), for example here on this page I collect current projects: That gathers interest from a varying degree and backgrounds :)

There’s both subscribers to my RSS feed and other various social "Fediverse" sites where my posts ultimately end up. I am just coming back on Twitter to also promote more of my project work, as you have seen.

That’s a lot of moving parts of course and very specific to my user group that follows me. This combined with a thirst for privacy conscious analytics, that doesn’t cost the world, ultimately made Tinylytics so popular in such a short time.

The communities I mentioned above are quite special and I did create apps for these, so I am known on Micro.blog, and I am also involved at an official capacity there as I create their app, thanks to my initial interest with my own app Gluon.

Tinylytics started one weekend and was ready to go as a MVP the following Monday. I teased about it, without saying much… within the day I had over 20 accounts registered. 100 accounts & 2 weeks later, I spent the weekend to add optional subscription, to support development and see if it had any legs.

To be honest, I really didn’t expect much here. Within the next 48 hours I had 10 active subscriptions. My first subscription came shortly after my blog post.

Today, I run at a MRR of €160 and made ~€400 in revenue, just in 17 days. There is higher revenue right now because I added the option for a yearly (which is more popular than I thought).“

What Vincent Struggled With:

Discussing:

• Failures along the way.

• Optimizing blogs features over time.

“Over the years I realised that failure is good. It makes you appreciate these moments of success, no matter how small. I created something called Sublime Ads – but is was a little too niche and didn’t seem to take off much – mind you… zero marketing. There were many other projects that never have seen daylight :)

I would love to have bigger readership and bigger reach in other areas, like on Twitter, but that was a decision I took years ago to not pursue. Something I am aiming to look at again slowly, but it’s not that important for me.

My blog is mainly all about my projects, or it was supposed to be at the start, but then it got mixed with other shorter life update posts. Over time I added filters and some other improvements. As it’s a personal blog, that I built myself, it is mainly focused just for me as a digital archive to look back on.

The one thing I did change was that the feed of posts is now on a separate blog page, instead of the homepage. It’s much easier to showcase my projects that way too – which I actively want to work on.”

What's your plans to grow TinyLytics?

‍Discussing:

• Aligning Tinylytics with the interests of Vincents blogs readers.

• Future growth channels.‍

“There are features I am still implementing and also working with members to make it better for them – because I think that super important with building anything. Sure, I have ideas, but I never shy away from helping a customer with a feature request.

In terms of expanding though, once finished, I am planning to write a few blog posts about why it’s a good alternative to other analytics services, and keep them on the site, which may also bring in some traffic that way.

It’s also important for me to keep the "JOMO" (joy of missing out) in the service, and something I want to add to the marketing as time goes. There are a lot of services out there that really just stress you out, because you get fixated by the numbers – that’s really not for me, and that’s why I built it in the first place – just a place to track my own sites, without all the things I don’t need. In point 1 you asked me about how it aligns with my readers… and this is one of those exact points.

Of course I keep a few things fun, like adding a classic 90s style hit counter and some other cool stuff like "kudos"/"like" button integration – just to make it a bit different :) Most SaaS is boring, especially around analytics – numbers and graphs are just boring I guess, so I wanted something extra.

Long term, given enough MRR, I may do some podcast advertising especially around the "indie" dev circle or some RelayFM shows.

OK, I think that’s all I can say for now.

Slow and steady is my game. If I can buy groceries, and servers are paid for, happy days :)”

👉Check Out Tinylytics 👈

MRR Charts🚀

- This Weeks MRR Updates -

1. Nemomakes: Launched in 2019

2. Calendesk: Launched in 2020

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- Cameron Scully (@cameronscully_)