The founder's co-founder (the marketing operator, not Adriaan the technical founder) describes Simple Analytics' growth as a combination of aggressive Hacker News and Reddit distribution — consistently hitting the front page with relevant posts — paired with a co-founder model where the engineer owns product vision while the marketing co-founder owns all growth levers (SEO, social, launch strategy). Adriaan himself grew to 10K MRR organically before his co-founder joined, by launching on Hacker News after building a privacy-first tool to solve his own problem with Google Analytics.

“I actually wrote A Blog about this how we exactly did it and posted on Indie hackers... the post was called how to hack Hacker News... someone took the post from Indie hackers and put that one on Hacker News it went top spot”

“he was like yeah Google analytics they're sending all the data no privacy um man I can fix this I can build like an Analytics tool that's just simple privacy friendly and then I'm solving my own problem he launched it on Hacker News and it happened to be like also other people's problem”

“I can help you grow this project from a project to actually a business where you can live from and we can live from like together — you can focus on making this the best possible product with the best possible vision for our customers that you can imagine and I'll take care of the rest”

“the normal engineer would say the normal indie hacker it's just really a really good Problem Solver uh builds a project but doesn't launch it or doesn't launch it properly or neglects like the marketing bit — so I want to be the guy that actually helps them set up like I can help you grow this project”

Adriaan built a two-month MVP, launched on Hacker News (stayed #1 for ~9 hours) to land his first customers, then grew through radical transparency: public financials, active Twitter sharing, and privacy-focused content that made his core promise credible. He funded the company by continuing part-time freelance development work rather than taking investment.

“making it very full product and getting it ready for hecka news and make sure like that everything is correct for for SEO and stuff like that so making it yeah ready for launch basically”

“on Twitter I'm quite active on sharing insights also on our open page like we share or financials public statistics so that's also yeah contributing to like the whole transparency”

“if we write about it then there's a huge chance that we will actually did it right so that we actually also implemented these... you're building more trust that way by sharing like what you're doing how you're doing it why you're doing it”

“recently I also published a blog post about like what you can do as as a business to make your business more privacy friendly... this makes your brand also more yeah trustworthy because if we write about it then there's a huge chance that we will actually did it right”

Adriaan launched Simple Analytics by building with familiar tools to ship fast, then got initial traction from a Hacker News front-page run and benefited from GDPR timing. Growth came from radical transparency (public roadmap with community voting, open metrics), a content-focused marketing hire, and a co-founder with a marketing background — with Adriaan's main regret being that he hired marketers too late and skipped a freemium model that would have driven word-of-mouth.

“I was just lucky to yeah launch it at that time — the GDPR came into effect and more privacy regulations and more strict rules so yeah I was just lucky to launch it at that time.”

“What we always did was being very transparent so we are transparent about our own metrics but also with the road map so I created a repository for GitHub issues and then people could actually file new features and I built a page on /roadmap and people could actually vote on features on the road map so at certain point the features that people really wanted were floating on top.”

“When we just started we were launching on Hacker News and we got so much traffic and we really asked for a credit card before people could use our product — in hindsight this was a mistake. It would be way better to have like a list of email addresses from all the people that were interested so we could actually convert them into paying later.”

“I think I would take a different approach in hiring marketing people earlier on because as a tech founder it's really easy to see what needs to be done feature-wise… the most important thing is selling your product. Finding someone that does the marketing and really knows what they are doing — I think that would have been way better early on.”