The Plausible Blog

As promised, here’s another monthly update on building Plausible. February was a really good month:

I haven’t been regular with updates on how Plausible is doing, but I intend to put more effort into this blog this year. Let’s kick things off with the highlights for January 2020:

If you’re running a website with Google Analytics installed, you may be wondering how it affects the privacy of your website’s visitors. There’s a growing distrust towards the digital advertising sector but what are the actual issues besides calling out ‘creepy’ ads? Let’s discuss the wider ethical questions around personal data collection and digital targeting.

One of the main reasons I started Plausible was to provide a more transparent alternative to Google Analytics. I believe that people should be able to control and know about their data, instead of having it sold to the advertisers behind their back.

If you’ve ever had to develop transactional HTML emails with slick designs, you’ll know that it’s a complete mess. The incompatibilities between email clients are way worse than what you see with different browsers. Testing emails is extremely difficult, and there’s a seemingly endless number of problems with various clients.

I spent the second half of June back home in Estonia to recharge my batteries and reconnect with family+friends. Summer solstice is a huge celebration in Estonian culture so everyone seems to be on holiday at the moment, enjoying nature, good food and drinks. I haven’t had as much time for Plausible as I normally do, but I’m totally OK with that.

For more than a decade I used a variety of products made by Google. Their products and services are reliable, intuitive, and often free to use. Like many other programmers, I really looked up to the company and followed their rapid rise to one of the biggest companies in the world.

It’s been 4 months since I wrote about the analytics tool I want. My idea was to create an alternative for Google Analytics that simplifies the UI and enhances the privacy of online tracking.

Solo founders and makers often have a dilemma: when communicating with customers, should I describe myself as I or we? It’s tempting to use a royal we, even if you’re working on a product alone:

The meteoric rise of front-end frameworks like React, Angular, Vue.js, Elm, etc. has made single-page applications ubiquitous on the web. For many developers, these have become part of their ‘default’ toolset. When they start a new project, they grab the tools they know already: a REST API on the backend, and a React/Angular/Vue/Elm frontend.

This week, I worked on some under-the-hood improvements to Plausible to give me better insights into my userbase. One of these was to store a last_seen timestamp for all users. This is a private piece of data that I use to determine:

• How many users are actively logging on and checking their analytics
• What is the average usage frequency of Plausible?
• When should I consider an account as ‘rotting’? Meaning I’m about to lose them as a user/customer

In general I don’t think that the tech stack matters too much for software projects. Especially if you’re a solo maker, almost all of the risk is on the sales and marketing side as opposed to the tech side. The best approach is normally to just pick some boring tools and start solving your customers’ problems.

Working on plausible.io I often find myself doing things I have no clue how to do. I struggle massively with marketing, copywriting, and most of all, UX/UI design. Here are some tips I’ve found helpful when trying to design for the web as an unimaginative developer who hasn’t designed a single thing in his life.

While working on Gigride, our marketing head asked me to integrate Google Analytics for our landing page. My first thought was: