Meet Marko Saric, Co-founder of Privacy-friendly Plausible Analytics

Feb 27, 2025

In this interview, Marko Saric shared his thoughts on privacy and running a bootstrapped SaaS business. Plausible integration is already available in Open SaaS as a privacy-friendly alternative to Google Analytics. We hope this interview helps you understand the value of such a product, and the nature of running an open source business.

Here’s a few other things we’ve covered in this interview:

Tackling big tech privacy issues.
How bootstrapping your business fuels independence and transparency.
Real, practical advice for growing your SaaS the smart way.

Let’s dive in!

I’m Marko Saric, co-founder of Plausible Analytics.

My journey with Plausible began with a growing awareness of the privacy issues surrounding Google and its products. For many years, I was a user of Google’s services but over time (and thanks to Snowden, Cambridge Analytica and other privacy scandals), I became more aware of the negative aspects of surveillance capitalism. This led me to explore better, more ethical alternatives to the big tech products.

I started sharing these alternatives on my blog which is how I connected with my co-founder Uku. We both had experience in tech and a shared vision of working on a privacy-friendly analytics tool so we decided to work together on Plausible. I’m focused on marketing and communication side of things while Uku is focused on design and development.

For those unfamiliar with Plausible, how would you describe its core mission in just a few sentences?

Plausible Analytics is an easy to use, lightweight, open source and privacy-friendly analytics tool. Our mission is to provide website owners with useful insights while respecting visitor privacy.

We have been working on Plausible for more than 6 years now, have more than 14,000 active subscribers at this point and have counted more than 136 billion pageviews so far.

Plausible is bootstrapped and open-source—what made you choose this path instead of taking the more common VC route?

We chose to bootstrap and open source Plausible because we wanted to maintain control and independence while also being more privacy-friendly and transparent.

Both of us have worked at venture funded startups in the past and neither of us had good experiences with investors so going bootstrapped was pretty much the way to do this if we wanted to do things our way.

We’re in the privacy niche so open sourcing our product allows us to build trust as people can inspect our code to verify that our actions match our words. People cannot do that with Google Analytics and other competing products.

Just like Plausible, Wasp is an open-source project too! We’d appreciate it if you could star Wasp on GitHub as a sign of support! ⭐️

I think it’s a good idea to start bootstrapped even if you do wish to get funded. You should focus on creating a great product that solves a real problem and on spreading the word about it. If you do that well, you’ll have investors reaching out to you even if you don’t want or need them.

I recommend reading “Rework” by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. It offers unconventional but valuable insights into running a startup.

Another good book is “This Is Marketing” by Seth Godin. It’s about how many startups confuse marketing with spending money on advertising, spamming, interrupting, being annoying and other hacks and tricks. That’s not marketing. Marketing is communication.

How did you get your first customers?

Our first customers came through community engagement and the “build in public” movement. We shared our journey, steps taken and product development openly on our blog, social media and niche communities such as Indie Hackers. That’s how we got the early beta users and some of those became our first subscribers too.

What were the biggest challenges you faced while building and growing Plausible?

The first year was pretty challenging in terms of growth. Uku was working alone on Plausible trying to do both development and marketing. This is pretty much an impossible task. The growth was very slow and we made it to about 100 subscribers and $400 MRR some 14 months into the existence of Plausible.

That’s when Uku decided to look for a marketing co-founder and that’s how we found me. Being two co-founders helped us put more time and effort into marketing and communication. One of the first things we did when I joined was to change our positioning to make it crystal clear and easy to understand what we do, what we stand for and how we compare to Google Analytics (the biggest name in our market). And then we started publishing educational and informative content covering topics such as privacy, open source, bootstrapping and startup marketing .

I have written more about the changes we made in these early days in this post.

Which growth strategies have been the most effective?

We have a boring marketing strategy and we say no to all the growth hacks and other best marketing practices. Content marketing has been our most effective growth strategy. As an example, the first blog post that I published (Why You Should Remove Google Analytics from Your Site) went viral on Hacker News. It drove some good traffic to our site leading to an increase in brand awareness.

What matters is doing quality work and staying consistent with it over a longer period of time so we continued to publish multiple blog posts per week for over a year. Thanks to that work, we’ve been fortunate enough to achieve the viral moments on Hacker News multiple times over those first 2-3 years.

I have shared more about our early years, marketing steps we’ve taken, lessons we’ve learned and things we have achieved in blog posts such as this one. Our analytics dashboard is open to the public so it’s possible to see the progress we’ve made since day one in our stats.

What role has the community played in Plausible’s growth? Have there been any surprising or particularly impactful contributions from the community?

The community has helped shape our product and spread the word about our mission.

We have an open roadmap and listen to the product feedback which determines our development prioritization. This is where feature requests and other feedback is very valuable to us. We pretty much pick the most upvoted feature and work on that.

As mentioned earlier, we don’t do any traditional marketing as in we don’t do any paid advertising nor pay anyone to recommend Plausible. This means that most of our growth comes from people who love using Plausible and who share their experiences with the world. Without people spreading the word about Plausible it would be difficult for us to do what we do. So that’s why community contributions is vital for us.

What’s next for Plausible? Are there any upcoming features or improvements you’re particularly excited about?

We’re focused on continuing to improve Plausible and making it even more useful and competitive while staying true to our mission and meeting rigorous standards for stability, security and privacy.

Our developers are currently working on the top two most upvoted feature requests from our public feedback board (scroll depth and saved segments) so that’s very exciting. It would be great to release these two big features soon!