Episode 5

Episode transcript:

[00:01] Pawel: Hello there. Welcome to another interview I've conducted for the Stacking Pancakes show. In this one, I'm chatting with Marco Saridge from Plaza Analytics, a fantastic web analytics startup. And I'd say probably the easiest way to describe Plausible is as a privacy focused Google Analytics alternative. And it's basically the tool you use to monitor your web traffic and it just does it so incredibly well. And full disclosure, I'm a customer and some of my clients also use Plausible to monitor web traffic. But there's another thing about Plausible that makes it such an interesting startup. And you see, Plausible achieved phenomenal growth, but they did it well, quite differently from most startups for those of you who don't know their story. And basically this is something we've discussed in depth with Marco during the interview. Plausible basically said no to pretty much every typical startup growth strategy. Like if you've read Traction right then Plausible didn't do most of the stuff there and actually openly said no and for a reason. So that pretty much left content and SEO as ways to grow and that's what they've used. And not only they are thriving, they're a thriving startup with incredible growth. They continue to grow at an astonishing rate. And Marco was very open about their growth rates and shared some data and insight. He was actually very transparent. So it's all really mind blowing and I'm super excited for you guys to hear about it all. So without any further ado, here's the interview and yes, we're recording. Hey Marco. Hey, how's things?

[02:11] Marko: Hey Pawel, thanks for the invite. Things are good. How about you? Great.

[02:15] Pawel: Listen, thanks so much for coming onto the show and people who are listening, they might or might know you. So I think the best way to start is for you to give us kind of the story of Marco and Plausible. Your sure.

[02:32] Marko: I'm Marco, I'm the kind of the marketing communication co founder of Plausible Analytics. So I focus on growth. I have a co founder on the technical side, so it focuses on the development. And basically Plausible Analytics is Google Analytics alternative. So everyone knows Google Analytics, all marketers site owners, everyone has used it. Many people have very strong opinions about it. Some love it, some hate it. So we are an alternative that focuses on being easy to use, being lightweight, fast loading, privacy friendly, and we're also open source at the same time. So that's kind of a quick introduction.

[03:15] Pawel: Yeah, and it's a brilliant product, I have to say. And this is not a plug. Marco didn't ask me to say this, but a lot of my clients use Plausible because it's just I have to say it. It may not sound great, but marco. But it's ridiculously simple to use to get the data compared to Ga Four. And by all means, I'm not bashing GA4 here, but sometimes to get some insight, it takes a skill, right, to get some insights. But you guys have this amazing, simple dashboard where just everything is right in front of you. But you also thank you. Honestly, it's incredible. But you also have a phenomenal growth story. I mean, first of all, you went against a huge goliath, right? Ga. It's without a doubt one of the largest or probably the largest, right, web analytics product.

[04:14] Marko: And it's free.

[04:17] Pawel: Largest by far, and it's free to make things worse, right? Your product is obviously premium. And yet not only you've built a phenomenal product and achieved phenomenal kind of growth rate and built a fantastic business. You did it. And this is what I'm kind of leading to. You did it in not a very conventional way. And I'm kind of alluding to a wonderful piece of content you have on your site, and I have it in front of me here on the other screen. It's 15 Best Startup Marketing practices we said no to. Do you remember writing it, I'm sure, right?

[05:02] Marko: Yes, of course.

[05:04] Pawel: Can you tell us about it? It's phenomenal because when you start in startup, when you start in SaaS, you hear all this information like, okay, read traction, and there's these probably more even than 15 different practices and channels. So apply those and that should lead to success, et cetera. But you basically turned around and you said no to most of it. Spoiler alert, basically leaves content, SEO and few other things that you did. Can you talk to me about that? About the whole how it came about and what those 15 kind of practices said no to? Where are the sum of those?

[05:47] Marko: So basically, I'm a marketer. My whole career was in digital marketing, online marketing. I've worked for a small venture funded startup at once, and I've also worked for a large kind of public listed company as well. So I have experience from different areas and a different way of doing marketing. And so now when I joined Plausible back in 2020, early 2020, I was like, this product is different in kind of positioning, in everything. And now that I'm in charge of how we do marketing, rather than being part of a team where I kind of have to follow what somebody else has decided, I'm like, so how can we also try to do marketing in a different way that fits better with the positioning of the product itself? Say we have a product that's previously focused. It really doesn't fit, at least in my mind, it doesn't really fit that we do marketing in not so privacy focused way. So I was like, okay, so our marketing has to stay privacy focused, so we should not do anything. Obviously, stuff like we need to ask for user consent, the standard stuff, which meant basically that we had to exclude a lot of the kind of the very common marketing practices that I'm used to from other companies I worked at, which is paid ads, affiliate schemes, basically. Now, I don't have the blog post in front of me, it's been a few years ago, but basically I've basically listed stuff that I don't appreciate about marketing both as a kind of marketer, but mostly as a user of other products. So things such as very kind of aggressive call swaptions and different ways of taking my data and so on. So basically, if you look at it, what we've done, it's as simple as you can get. We try to focus on having a great product that kind of solves some issues that people have and then we try to communicate that as clear as we can as well in our positioning. And then I started writing blog posts and in the first year or so, I think I've wrote about one or twice, maybe twice every week. Now I've write very less frequently because it's busier with other tasks. But I basically started writing content and then going out to different niche communities, spreading that content to people that I thought would enjoy it. And that's how it went. And even to this day, those practices that I said we say no to back in it was 2020. I believe that I wrote it. We still say no to them. We haven't started using any of them. So even to this day, we've spent basically $0 in advertising, in paid advertising. So we haven't done any paid ads, we haven't paid any influencers, we don't have an affiliate program. So basically everything we've done to date is basically on time, my time and like word of mouth and organic, that's kind of the story today. So even if you visit our website today, you will see we don't have any kind of pop up things and we don't urge you to do this and that or to collect your email address or whatever. It's pretty standard and straightforward and we kind of communicate what we do. And if you find that interesting, if it might help you, we'll be allowed to sign up for a trial. And that's how it goes. There's no like third party connections on our site to try to collect your data and then to target you on other websites and all that stuff retargeting and all that. We don't do any of those things.

[09:42] Pawel: Can I make a one comment and share a personal experience of using your product? Because we're actually talking for the first time. We haven't met before, right? And there's one thing I absolutely appreciated about what you do. This may not have been intentional, but when you sign up for plausible, you get the trial, right? And then I think you get like 30 days. I'm not sure because it's been a while since I was on a trial. And after those 30 days, you only get one email. I mean, there is just one. Hey, your trial, I think it's a week before or a few days before, I don't remember. Again, it was a while ago since I did a trial with you guys. But you only get one email saying your trial is finishing on this and this day.

[10:34] Marko: I wrote those emails about four years ago when I joined. And I think you get one when you sign up.

[10:40] Pawel: You get one when you sign up.

[10:41] Marko: And then you get one when you start. When we record your first visitor.

[10:46] Pawel: That's right, just a confirmation.

[10:49] Marko: Then towards the end of this month, you get like, I think your trial ends next week and your trial ends tomorrow. So basically maybe four or five in total.

[10:57] Pawel: I think there wasn't even a four. Maybe it's changed. But honestly, I so appreciate that because there was no push, absolutely no push. So it was just like, hey, you joined, great, great to have you, here's what you need to do to install the code, blah, blah, blah. Then there is like, okay, the code is working, which makes sense, right? And then there is silence for a month. Like nothing happens.

[11:18] Marko: That was the idea of mine. I was like, I really hate when I sign up for a product and then I start getting, I don't know, ten emails in three days. And yeah, even when I stop using their trial and never sign up, they keep emailing me to come back intentionally for sure. Because of the experience that we have by using of other products that we don't like the way they've done some things. And we're like, now that we are in control of our own little startup, let's try and do things the way we would appreciate them as users of other products. Like a handful of emails, no crazy calls to actions or anything, just more like, okay, you've signed up, it's confirmed. Okay, you've started getting your visitors tracked, confirmed, okay. Oh, by the way, next week it ends, the free trial. If you want to sign up now, you have to think about do we want to do it or not? And then when the trial stops, actually, if you don't sign up, you will never hear from us again.

[12:16] Pawel: No, you don't get that.

[12:19] Marko: So as a marketer now, thinking like, over the last four years, there must be tens of thousands of people that sign up for a free trial but never converted. I'm like, oh, this is a beautiful opportunity, let's send them offers. But we've never done that. So you don't get like this weekend we're talking, this is the 29 November. So like last weekend, there were so many emails I got from companies I used over the last ten years for like few days I tried them. I got so many emails like, oh, we have an offer for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, come sign up. And I don't even remember what those companies do because I used them, like, ten years ago and I got so many of these emails that it was a good opportunity to unsubscribe from any but basically stuff that we don't like and we don't appreciate as users, we try not to do to people that sign up for our products. So yeah, like a very minimal number of emails, very light emails, and more educational informative and then silence after you finish your trial. If you don't sign up, even if you sign up, actually, if you subscribe after your trial, you don't get any emails.

[13:24] Pawel: No you don't.

[13:26] Marko: You get your invoice, obviously, payment processor. But no, we don't actually communicate with our customers. Another thing, because I really don't appreciate when I sign up for a company, I become a customer and then there's an onflow of emails, new emails, new round of emails and regular emails telling me about random things and I'm like, let's not do those things. I mean, maybe some people like it, maybe some people miss that in Plausible that we don't email them all the time, but we don't really appreciate other companies emailing us all the time, so we don't really do it. If you're interested about what we did recently, there's a bot new section and we kind of give you a notification about that in the app and you can follow us in social media and so on. But yeah, very light on emails for sure. And after the trial ends, if you don't subscribe, we will never use that email of you for any other purposes. You will never hear from us again.

[14:25] Pawel: It's brilliant. And it's also like, am I right in saying you use the same approach or take the same approach with your marketing? Because you said it yourself, you just do content and then do very organic promotions. Some of it ranks in Google, obviously. Some of it you post into communities or you join conversations wherever applicable. But that's about it, right? So again, no pushing it's, just sharing information, sharing opinions and we talk about your topics in just a moment. But it really is just very, I don't want to say slow burn approach, but that's just the term that comes to mind and it works, right? Because you guys have been super successful and the business is super successful. You have no investment, so it's not like you have money in the bank and you can do whatever you want because there's money in the bank and I never heard about you winning the lotto. So there's nothing there either.

[15:34] Marko: Plausible is completely self funded. At the start, obviously we used our savings first year or two years. Obviously at this stage we have customers, we have 12,000 something paying customers, subscribers, which means that now we're sustainable, profitable. We started, two of us as co founders, but now we have a team of eight full time team members and we have a few freelance regular contributors on the side focusing on say, WordPress plugin or some other things. So yeah, we have a team and it feels so good that we're able to provide salaries to whatever, 1012 people in total that they can use whatever they're doing themselves. It feels good. That was definitely intention. Like, let's start slow and let's be self funded and sustainable, let's grow towards that. And then we started paying our own salaries, we didn't have to use our own savings anymore. And now, yeah, we have a team and we've been paying competitive salaries and bonuses and things like that.

[16:45] Pawel: It works.

[16:46] Marko: Slow burn, you say. And yeah, it's not pushy, but it works. I don't know now if it can work for every startup out there, but it worked for us. And we're like more than 200,000 MRR at this stage. And yeah, again, not spend any money on ads and not really trying to do anything that we don't like ourselves in terms of marketing approaches. And yeah, a lot of it is the word mop, really. It's like somebody signs up, likes what we do.

[17:18] Pawel: Okay.

[17:18] Marko: My friend or my colleague tells me that they hate what Google did with UA to GA4 transition. Oh, by the way, if you don't like the Ga Four, if it's, whatever too complex and you don't want to go through the whole process or you miss your old data, historical data, there's this other startup and other analytics tool that does things in a different vein, maybe you like them more and then people sign up. And if you look at the search keywords that people find us with, majority of those are basically plausible, plausible analytics, basically branded keywords. And that, again, we don't advertise and we don't do any of that even on Google. And basically it's word of mouth. People hear about us, people have an issue with their current analytics provider and they hear that we kind of solve some of those issues and they're willing to give us a shot and see if that's true and if that works for them. And that's how it goes. We don't have huge spikes. It's like slow and steady, I don't know, ten K growth a month or whatever. Basically organic. Slow approach, slow burn approach.

[18:28] Pawel: Yeah, it's fabulous. But tell me about the marketing you do because you do some and I'm actually looking at some of the data for your site, I can see in my platform, and so I can see you're doing and it's mostly content, right? Talk to me, talk to me about the stuff that you do or you've done from the start.

[18:50] Marko: Kind of I'm the marketing guy, so I'm the only one, only marketing person in this team of people I was talking about before. So I'm the only one that does marketing. There's nobody else that does marketing. We have a customer support person, and then we have developers both on infrastructure and security and on the kind of the coding and product side. So I'm the only one in the team currently and have been the only one from the start. Back in the day when I started, when I joined early 2020, I was focused on content. I had more time then, so just content. I published, let's say 50 blog posts. The blog posts were very informative, educational. None of them were salesy. There was no blog post like, oh, plausible is the best analytics in the world, go sign up. There was nothing like that. It was more about different topics. Topics ranging from privacy and GDPR, to topics ranging web analytics, marketing, and topics like about what's up with the state of Google? Google is a big name, and people love to follow what they're doing, and many love it. Many hate it. So those were the kind of the three big topics I discussed. And if you look maybe 2021 or so, I stopped publishing regularly because we started getting so much traction and customers, and I was the one doing also the customer support at that stage. So at some point there were so many inbound requests that I just stopped doing the outbound stuff, the writing and reaching out marketing. So I didn't have much time at that stage. So I was like, okay, naturally it went from, I don't know, 80% of my time being focused on marketing, writing, and reaching out to 80% of my time being focused on actually responding to people that reach out to us. Back early on, nobody reached out to us, so there was not much of that. But then 2021 or so started being majority of my time doing that. And then when we hired the only support person, it kind of opened up more of my time. But then we hired all the other developers and so on. So my time is now mostly internally talking to developers and dealing with what's on the roadmap. What are we building, how is this supposed to work, how it's supposed to look like? I'm still the one doing all the announcements, so when we have something ready, I'm the one writing the documentation. I'm the one that gets the announcement for our WhatsApp page and our social media. So I do that. But if you actually look how much marketing marketing time I do, if you don't consider these other tasks marketing, it's very little. I don't think I've written any blog posts from scratch other than documentation pages this year at all.

[21:46] Pawel: There are two published on the site, but as you said, you may not have written them from scratch this year.

[21:51] Marko: I think they've probably been updated. Let me check.

[21:54] Pawel: Okay, fair enough.

[21:55] Marko: Is Google Analytics illegal? That was wrote last year, and I had to update it because there was like many different data protection authorities in Europe said, Google Analytics is illegal since then. So every time somebody new says Google Analytics is illegal, I update that post and then change the date. And the other one is actually, if you open it up, it's the first ever kind of expert or guest post we've had. We paid an expert in Ga Four because I was like, I want to write a post about Ga Four because my whole experience with Google Analytics is Universal Analytics. I know that one very well. And then I was like, I want to write a post about Ga Four because now people will be switching over. It was earlier this year, and I was like, okay, let me go and sign up for Ga Four and try and figure out how to use it. And I just couldn't. Yeah, complicated to me as a marketer, as a blogger, as a site owner, that I just couldn't figure out how to use Ga Four. I was like, I don't know what to write about differences between Ga Four and UA. So I was like, how do I write a post if I cannot figure it out? And I was like, I cannot spend so much time trying to learn Ga Four. And I just went and got one author, one expert, basically on Google Analytics to help us contribute with a post on the differences. So that's the other post of this year. So, yeah, basically, last actual post I wrote is June 2022, when we reached 1 million annual recurring revenue. I wanted to write a recap of the whole process up to it to kind of informative educational, so other people can learn from it and get inspired by it. So, yeah, I haven't written a blog post from scratch in a year and a half or so, which is weird because that's kind of like, theoretically my main job should be writing and kind of getting the word out. But yeah, I haven't done it in.

[23:49] Pawel: A while, maybe let's not advertise that you're not doing your job right. I need to ask you something because from the start you did something a bit unusual. Well, another unusual thing in a positive way. From the start, you had a very strong voice and strong opinion, right? And you guys basically stood for something. It wasn't just like, oh, hey, we have analytics product grant and it's great and whatever. It was more like, look, there is a problem with the way we address certain issues. In your case, obviously, security, privacy, et cetera. And you had a very strong opinion on that. And I wanted to ask you, do you think that having that strong opinion or strong voice, which obviously transpired through content and it probably helped you, like you said, focus on three specific topics rather than 2030 different topics and maybe even post less but more focused content? Do you think that contributed to such a phenomenal brand popularity? Because I'm looking at your data, right? And the majority of searches around your site is, like you said, it's branded content. Sorry, branded keywords, right?

[25:14] Marko: Yeah.

[25:14] Pawel: Now you do have landing pages that are ranking well, there's this self hosted web analytics landing page and several others and lightweight script, privacy focused, et cetera. But the majority, if you look at your, like you said yourself, your keywords kind of breakdown, it's branded. So there is a huge brand popularity. And I'm wondering, is it just the brand being so maybe catchy or is it the fact that you guys from the start or from the moment you joined, I don't know when that happened, when this started taking place, but you started kind of being very strongly opinionated.

[25:57] Marko: I think that's for sure, consciously. So I joined in March 2020. Plausible was launched in January 2019. So I launched like a year or three months or so into it. A year and three months. My co founder, like I mentioned, is the developer, so he was mostly focused on let me build this product, let me design it nicely, and all that. He's not a marketer, so he doesn't have as much experience as me in marketing. So he was more like doing the building public approach. He will post up on indie hackers or Twitter like, oh, I just launched this, or I'm building this next. I joined a year and three months into it. And we were about, I think 50 subscribers and something like 400, 300 something MRR. So very small. It was not growing very well. So I joined and first thing I did is obviously we had to change our positioning to make that more clear on the home page. And like those landing pages that you mentioned about previously focused analytics, lightweight analytics, open source analytics, simple analytics, easy to use, there's about a handful of them. I wrote those posts as the first thing, like first two weeks of me joining, I wrote I think six, seven posts each on one kind of big aspect of Plausible and how it differs from Google analytics. So those posts are pretty much unedited since 2020. Like you said, they still rank. It's just what I found is that there's not a big demand for these keywords. It's not like, oh yeah, you have thousands of people searching for simple analytics, or thousands of people searching for easy to use analytics, or thousands of people searching for open source. It's hundreds maybe or even less per month. So even though we rank for top five or whatever for all of them or first page or whatever, there's not enough for demand for them. So you can say that we've kind of been in a situation where we had to manufacture or create some demand for what we do. And that comes down to then this other type of content that I started publishing. And the first blog post, the actual blog post that I published was in April 2020. And the headline, I'm just checking it right now is why you should stop using Google Analytics on your website.

[28:26] Pawel: Yeah, very strong opinionated.

[28:28] Marko: Come back to what you mentioned is like opinionated posts. So they were not salesy and whatever is like the standard what you would on a kind of a badly written corporate blog. It will be very salesy and stuff. No, I came from it more like blogger perspective, like personal blog perspective. Like okay, we are a small company of two. Our product is very strong in terms of positioning, in terms of what we focus on and what we don't do and what we do. So let's have our blog post do the same. Why you should Stop Using Google in Your Website first blog post that I published, I submitted to Hacker News, the big technical forum. I think within two or 3 hours we had 20,000 visitors. First spike, first blog post, first huge spike. I think on Hackers, they changed the title eventually after a couple of hours. They are editors and they didn't like this very strong title and they changed something very generic. So it kind of lost traction after two, 3 hours. But anyhow, we kind of got our first spike and that's the process I continued. If you go closer to today, what was it? We have other posts, similar posts. Like what? Just I'm going back. So we have the startup marketing practices we say no to that's what we already discussed. We have other like there was some other things that yeah, how to fight back against Google's flock. That's another very opinionated. Then there was one Google Amp is dead. Yes, was another opinion. So basically yes, we had a lot of opinionated posts, like let's say a handful. I mean, you cannot have so many opinionated posts either. You have to have a stronger opinion about certain strong topics and let's say there was five over the last four years that I've published and they all kind of worked very well. And then the second type of post I've done is the second post I published basically is on this second topic, it's transparency. Second blog post is called how one blog post changed attraction for my startup. And that's basically talking about why you should stop using Google Analytics blog post and what results we got from it. We open up our stats, then they're still open to this day. You can actually go and click and check our web traffic stats. Like our analytics dashboard is open to the public. You can see the same stats that I see to decide how we're doing. You can see the same stats.

[31:16] Pawel: Wow.

[31:17] Marko: That was the Transparency blog post. So we basically did that and even to this day you can see our traffic. We share our numbers and we shared it more often in the past, the MRR and so on, because it was more exciting back in the day when. We were reaching, okay, 1st, 1000, MRR, 1st 5010K, MRR and so on. We shared that on the blog, we shared that in social media. So transparency has been kind of a big topic too from day one. And we shared our lessons learned. If there's a blog post about lessons learned, getting to this stage of MRR or how to do this or how to do that. So basically opinion posts, one big topic, kind of transparency like lessons learned, like sharing our journey was the second one. And then you have similar as well. It's like educational. In 2020 there was a big topic in the marketing world, like referral policy changed in browsers so you could no longer see the full referral URL in your analytics. You could only see the domain name. So I wrote a blog post about that I can see in August 2020. So that was more like educational informative about divider web analytics world. So yeah, those are the canvas. If you look at the big topics, what we discuss, those are it basically while I was writing that's, what I was writing about there's one about a big topic again is the ad blockers and how they affect web analytics. Many marketers don't care, they're like, okay, people will block more. Many do care. So I went and I did like a little study where I put Plausible and Google Linux side by side on one website. And then I had a blog post published that went on Hacker News and Reddit and so on. And so I was able to follow that kind of more tech focused audience. How much ad blocker usage do they have? And I figured that 58% of that kind of more technical audience was blocking Google Analytics compared to blocking Plausible. And I had a little study there with numbers and that was published. So basically, yeah, if you look at the blog, it kind of gives you many insights into what worked for us because you can see the blog post and you can see the results on our stats dashboard as well. So you can kind of analyze the results and see what worked. That's basically what I've done.

[34:06] Pawel: Brilliant. It really is incredible, I tell you. But I need to ask you, and feel free to say like, I don't want to answer this question, but I hope you will at least share some light on. So what's next? Because you've done this right now, like you say yourself, it's like, okay, my actual job is taking kind of the backseat because I have other priorities in the company now. But if there was something you still like to do or try, or is there something.

[34:44] Marko: Just before when I was talking that I didn't publish a blog post in a year or whatever, I was thinking to myself, maybe we should hire somebody to publish blog posts for us. Fair enough. Because, yeah, I don't think my time will change or the tasks that I do will change much because we're growing so much and there's so much internal demand for my time, like questions and points of view that I have to share and kind of working with the team takes most of my time. So maybe I think it makes sense. We do have the budget. It's not like we don't have the we have the budget. We could hire somebody internally, somebody similar to me, like a content marketer, maybe some blogging experience in the past, somebody that can actually come and kind of get my knowledge up to date as well. Because I haven't really followed what has been happening in the content marketing world and SEO world for like two years or so. So my knowledge is probably outdated at this stage. Like, somebody who's up to date doing these things day to day. Somebody who can come in and have some opinions themselves and have some new ways of doing content thing. Because right now I can easily come with many topics that we haven't covered, like new features we've built that we only have documentation for, we don't have blog posts about. I used to do like the other thing that I published several posts about is like, every time we would have a new feature, say, we started back in 2020, we introduced external link click tracking. That's a big thing for bloggers and affiliates and so on. Normally it's quite difficult to do. It a lot of manual work. And Google didn't have it very google links didn't have it an easy way either. So we're like, let's build a very easy way. Just do one small thing and automatically we will track all external outbound clicks that happen on your site and give you like you can see who clicks on them from what page they click and what links are clicked the most, and so on. So we had that feature introduced and then I published a long blog post like, I don't know, 2000 words or whatever about the topic of tracking external link clicks, why you should do it, how you can do it, blah, blah, blah. So I used to do this, but again, because of time, I haven't done it recently. We publish so many new features that don't have blog posts for them. So I think coming up with topics like that, it's easy for me. It's just writing them, it's more difficult. So, yeah, I think what we could do next is get some expert in content and kind of help us be more proficient again on the blog release. More.

[37:26] Pawel: Awesome. Awesome. Listen, Marco, thank you so much. Thank you so much for sharing this again. Yes, you've been fully transparent and I love this. I love this about your product in general and I appreciate all the information you've shared and yeah, listen, thanks so much for coming on the show, sharing the story. I've used the word phenomenal probably a couple of times in our conversation, but it is phenomenal, I tell you. And it's really well done, and thank you.

[38:00] Marko: Thank you, Pamela. I appreciate the kind words, and I'm really happy to hear that you and your clients and so on enjoy what we do. That's basically the main work that we do, is trying to build a nice dashboard that helps bloggers, business owners, marketers and so on. Something that Ga Four doesn't seem to be doing very well, at least for many people.

[38:21] Pawel: No, the purpose of our conversation is not to bash Ga Four, but if we can just spend two minutes on it. Yeah, it's just too complex, I think there's just too many issues out of those clients who use G, I regularly get questions like, how do I do this? And even I myself go, like, I don't know, we need to figure it out, because I don't know. Plus, the data isn't always right, but that's another story. I'm finding that this seems to be some gaps sometimes, but it might be something technical that I don't understand. So

[39:00] Marko: I'm not saying it as a critique, but like I told you, I couldn't figure it out myself, so I really don't have much direct experience. But people are very happily sharing with us all the time. When somebody new comes and signs up, they're really happily sharing what they appreciate. Implausible, compared to Ga Four and stuff, like, it doesn't seem to be in real time. People tell us like, two, three days delays are very common. Some simple things, such as entry pages, exit pages, are really difficult to get.

[39:25] Pawel: Yes, they are difficult to get.

[39:26] Marko: Well, implausible, it's like one click, it's.

[39:30] Pawel: All in front of you.

[39:31] Marko: Many of the things that used to be easy or normal in universal analytics that I used to use it for don't seem to be very easy in Ga Four, so I really don't know what they were thinking. But yeah, that's to the benefit of us.

[39:44] Pawel: Yeah, exactly. I don't know either, especially, like, looking from my perspective as an SEO consultant. There's so much data I don't need, really. And I appreciate some other people, other professions might need it, but for me, I need to know if the traffic is growing, especially organic traffic, if there are any patterns between different channels. If there's a dip in organic, is there a dip in other channels, too, et cetera. What are the top landing pages? And then being able to look at data for specific pages? Et, but so that's relatively simple, right, if you think about it, because the other data is in Google search console, the big data, where we can go deeper into the SEO, but from the web analytics, you just need to see kind of the bigger picture and maybe look at some details, and that's it. And Geford doesn't do like it does do it, but it's just so hard and problematic. So yeah, with tools like plausible. And again, this is just my opinion, but it's all out there. It's all in front of you. And for anybody listening, you can go there's a live demo on the side. You can even go to your actual dashboard.

[41:03] Marko: What we use for live demo is what I mentioned before. It's like the dashboard that I look to judge and see how we've done over the last days or whatever is the live demo that as a visitor, you can just click and see as well.

[41:17] Pawel: That's transparency. That's transparency. Oh, yeah, I can see it. It's plausible. IO on the live demo, yes.

[41:25] Marko: You can go press on A to go to all time View or choose in the date range up in top right, and you can basically see the first spike that I mentioned or the first year or so where there was not much traffic. Obviously, we're tracking sign ups ourselves to follow how many people sign up, and you can actually see sign ups and how that correlates with traffic spikes. For example, one thing I've learned is, like, traffic spike on something like hacker News doesn't really result in a huge traffic spike immediately in sign ups.

[41:58] Pawel: Okay?

[41:59] Marko: But you can see the weeks after. You can see an increase in sign ups because the word of mouth, somebody who's read our blog post two weeks ago might now be in a situation where they might need an alternative to Ga Four. For some reason, they're like, oh, I remember those guys. They had that blog post that I liked a few weeks ago. And, okay, now I'm going to go check plausible, because now it makes sense because I need it now. That's what I do. These kind of things can be analyzed by looking at our blog post and the traffic and the sign ups. Everything is there in public.

[42:32] Pawel: Yeah, I can see that. I'm actually looking at your funnel blog to register funnel, three step funnel. I'm actually seeing our exact conversion rate. This is fantastic. Now, that's transparency. I tell you, honestly, it's fabulous from an SEO perspective, even, just to see your conversion rates, et cetera. It's brilliant. Well done. Honestly, well done on this. Thank you so much for coming and sharing. Thank you. Thank you, Marco.

[42:58] Marko: Thanks, Pavel. Thanks for the invite.

[43:00] Pawel: Thank you. Bye.

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