Latest / The Indie Hacker Podcast with Fexingo: Solo Developers, SaaS Side Projects, and Independent Tech / How a Solo Dev Built a SaaS That Replaced Google Analytics
Transcript
- Lucas: So, have you ever looked at your Google Analytics dashboard and thought, 'There has to be a simpler, more private way to do this?' Luna: Honestly, every time I log in. It's like a firehose of data I don't need, and it's tracking every click across the web. Lucas: Right. That frustration is exactly what one solo developer turned into a business. Today we're talking about the founder of a web analytics tool that literally positions itself as 'the Google Analytics alternative that doesn't sell your data.' Luna: And it's not just a hobby project. He's got over 15,000 paying customers and a run rate north of two million dollars in ARR. Lucas: All bootstrapped, no VC money. The founder, let's call him Alex, started this in early 2020 when privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA were really starting to bite. Companies couldn't just drop the Google Analytics script without consent banners, and even then, data transfers to US servers were getting challenged. Luna: So he saw a gap. But how do you compete with free? Google Analytics has a free tier that's incredibly powerful. Lucas: That's the million-dollar question. Alex's insight was that 'free' has a hidden cost: your data. Google uses that data for its own advertising and machine learning. For a lot of businesses, especially in Europe, that's a legal liability now. So Alex's value prop was simple: your data stays on your server, or at least in a jurisdiction you control. Luna: But is that enough to get people to pay fifty, a hundred dollars a month? Lucas: Apparently, yes. But he didn't just lead with privacy. He also made the product incredibly lightweight. The tracking script is about two kilobytes — Google's is around forty. That matters for page load speed, which affects SEO. He built the entire first version in three months using Node.js and a Postgres database. No analytics library — he wrote his own aggregation logic. Luna: Three months for a fully functional analytics platform? That's intense. Was it feature-poor at launch? Lucas: It was intentionally minimal. You got page views, referrers, and browser/device breakdown — that's it. No real-time, no funnels, no heatmaps. The philosophy was: what does a bootstrapped founder actually need to see each morning? Alex once told me he shipped with ten dashboard widgets and just iterated from there. Luna: That's a great lesson. Start with the core job to be done. So how did he find those first customers? Lucas: Here's where it gets really interesting. He open-sourced the core tracking script on GitHub. Not the whole platform, just the snippet that collects data. He wrote clear documentation explaining how to self-host it. That became his primary marketing channel. Developers found it, liked the simplicity, and then discovered the hosted version with a nicer UI. Luna: So the open-source piece acted as a lead magnet. Smart. How long until he saw first revenue? Lucas: He launched a basic paid plan — ten dollars a month for up to ten thousand page views — on day one of the public launch. First paying customer came within a week, from a Hacker News comment. Within three months, he hit a thousand paying customers. Luna: That's a ten percent month-over-month growth rate for the first quarter. Did he do any paid advertising? Lucas: Zero. No ads, no PR agency. His entire growth engine was two things: SEO for the open-source documentation, and community engagement on forums like Hacker News, Reddit, and Stack Overflow. He would answer questions about 'lightweight analytics' or 'gdpr compliant tracking' and subtly mention his tool. Luna: So content marketing and developer relations, all as a solo founder. That's a lot of hats. Lucas: It is. But Alex streamlined it by focusing on one metric: first-page rankings for long-tail keywords like 'self-hosted analytics GDPR.' He built a small site around the documentation, and within six months, he was on page one for a dozen high-intent terms. Luna: And all while maintaining the product. That's the part that scares me. How do you not drop the ball on customer support? Lucas: He automated a lot. He set up a knowledge base with searchable articles, and he used a simple ticket system. He also limited the onboarding to a single guided tour, so fewer questions came in. Alex told me that by month six, support took him about two hours a day. Luna: Two hours for fifteen thousand customers? That's impressive. But I guess if the product is simple, the questions are simple. Lucas: Exactly. He deliberately avoided building a complex platform. No funnels, no A/B testing, no session recordings. That kept the bug surface small. And he had a strict 'one new feature per month' policy to avoid scope creep. Luna: I love that discipline. Most founders would be tempted to add everything customers ask for. Lucas: Right, and that's where they burn out. Alex was also careful about pricing. He didn't use a freemium model. He had a 14-day free trial, no credit card required. That way, every user was a potential paying user from the start. And his conversion rate was around eight percent, which is high for SaaS. Luna: But here's the thing: he's competing against free. How does he justify the price when Google Analytics is free? Lucas: He leaned hard into the privacy angle, but also into performance. He published a speed test showing his script added zero milliseconds to load time on average, while Google's script added about 150 milliseconds on a 3G connection. For seo conscious site owners, that's a big deal. Luna: So the pitch is: pay a little, get more speed, and don't get tracked. That's actually a solid value prop. Lucas: It worked. By year two, he was at $1.2 million ARR. And he hasn't hired a single employee. He uses a virtual assistant for a few hours a week on billing and email, but the rest is all him. Luna: That's the indie hacker dream, right? A profitable, low-maintenance business that runs on autopilot... mostly. Lucas: To be fair, he's still building features. He recently added a 'funnel exploration' view, which he resisted for a long time. But he built it in a way that didn't require storing session-level data — it's all pre-aggregated. Luna: So he maintained the privacy-first architecture even while adding more advanced features. That's thoughtful design. Lucas: And it's why he's still solo. He didn't scale complexity. He scaled the number of customers, but the product stayed simple. That's a hard lesson for a lot of founders. Luna: Speaking of scaling, I'm curious about the financials. He's at $2 million ARR now. What are his costs? Lucas: He's on a $500-per-month server setup — a couple of dedicated boxes for the backend and a CDN for the tracking script. So his margin is enormous. He's basically printing money at this point. Luna: And no employees to pay. That's a 95% margin or something crazy. Lucas: Ballpark, yes. After taxes and the virtual assistant, he's taking home well over a million a year. And he works maybe twenty hours a week now. Luna: That's the kind of story that makes you want to quit your job and build something. But realistically, not every idea can compete with a free giant like Google. Lucas: True. But the common thread in successful indie businesses is that they solve a problem the giant doesn't care about. Google Analytics is designed for enterprise marketing teams. Alex's tool is for the solo founder who just wants to know 'how many people visited my blog post today' without selling their soul. Luna: And he found a way to make that profitable. That's the takeaway: niche down, stay simple, and let your constraints be your advantage. Lucas: Exactly. And if this episode gave you a useful insight or just made you think about your own side project differently, honestly, that's what we're here for. If it was worth a coffee to you, you can find the link — buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Luna: Yeah, listener support is what keeps this podcast ad-free and lets us dig into these stories. No pressure, just if you feel like it. Lucas: Alright, back to the analytics world. One thing I didn't mention: Alex also built a simple referral program. Users could invite others and get a month free. That added a nice organic growth loop. Luna: And I'm guessing that worked well because his users are developers, and developers tend to trust recommendations from other developers. Lucas: Exactly. Trust is the currency in dev tools. So if you're thinking about a SaaS, maybe start by asking: what do developers trust? Open source? Privacy? Speed? Pick one and build around it. Luna: Great advice. So what's next for Alex? Is he going to stay solo forever? Lucas: He says he might hire one person for customer support this year, but he's in no rush. He likes the autonomy. And honestly, at $2 million ARR with zero employees, why would you change much? Luna: Fair point. Sometimes the best business is the one that doesn't grow beyond what you can handle alone. Lucas: That's the indie hacker ethos right there. Next episode, we'll look at a solo dev who built a SaaS inside an existing platform like Shopify or Salesforce — basically, a plugin business. That's a whole different set of constraints. Luna: Looking forward to it. Until then, keep building.