Uku Taht was a developer who hated Google Analytics. Not just the interface.the ethics. Every website loading GA was sending visitor data to the world's largest ad company. In 2018, he started building an alternative in Elixir.
The first version was embarrassingly simple. Page views, referrers, top pages. That was it. No funnels, no cohorts, no event tracking. He launched it on Hacker News with a live demo anyone could see.plausible.io/plausible.io.showing Plausible tracking itself.
That demo was the entire growth strategy. While competitors hid behind signup forms and 14-day trials, Plausible said "look at this right now, no account needed." The HN post hit #1. Traffic spiked. But more importantly, a pattern emerged: developers would see the demo, think "I could switch to this today," and do it.
Marija Šarac joined as co-founder to handle marketing. She wrote blog posts that ranked for every "Google Analytics alternative" keyword. Not fluffy content.genuinely useful comparisons. "Plausible vs Matomo." "Plausible vs Fathom." Each post was honest about what Plausible couldn't do, which made readers trust what it could.
The GDPR wave hit at exactly the right time. European companies were scrambling to become compliant. Plausible's script was 1KB (vs Google's 45KB), didn't use cookies, and didn't need a consent banner. For many companies, switching to Plausible meant deleting their cookie popup entirely. That alone was worth the $9/month.
By month 12, they had 2,000 paying subscribers. By month 18, $1M ARR. No VC money. No sales team. Two people, a blog, and a really good demo.