By Bernhard Hauser in Interview — Jul 31, 2024

Micro Interview with Iron Brands from Simple Analytics

Describe what you do in less than 10 words.

Privacy-friendly and simple Google Analytics alternative

Do you prefer building businesses from 0 → 1, from 1 → 10, or from 10 → 100?

0→1 and 1→10. Those phases are most interesting to me. In 0→1 everything is about being scrappy, reach out, do things that don’t scale. Love that!

Going to 1→10 it a bit more long-term, but still very small scale. Mainly thinking about SEO, Product-Led Growth etc. Do we want a free plan or are we going free trial? Like still super important.

Once there is a need to hire (10→100) I like it less haha

What was your biggest professional failure and what did it teach you?

There were tons of failures, but one failure was really captured in the moment:

At Simple Analytics, we get quite some inbound from larger organizations that want to do a demo before they use it. That's fair. However, neither Adriaan nor I knew how to do proper demos. We don’t have any experience in Sales. So we just sit there and show the tool and leave it up to them to decide if they want it.

One time, I had a meeting with a big big client, a multi-billion dollar client. 25 people in the meeting room, and I just showed the tool. Then, in the end, the manager wanted to discuss pricing. Fine.

I told him that our pricing was based on page views. They were a company manufacturing hospital equipment. (Since that’s really B2B, they didn’t have a lot of pageviews for that size)

So, I asked him how many pageviews they had. He told me 80K on average. I checked our pricing and told him this amounted to $9 per month.

At that point, the developer unmuted and told the manager, “to fucking get the tool if he wanted it and not invite everyone to such a meeting”.

What did it teach me? I could have charged a minimum of $500 a month, and I’m an idiot.

Why did you decide to bootstrap instead of raising VC funding?

In my previous business, I badly wanted VC money. I thought it would be the ultimate validation—not just of my business but also of me as an entrepreneur. I would prove to my parents that I was pursuing something big.

At Simple Analytics, we value other things. We want to work on our own terms, create our own rules, and make our own decisions.

Being bootstrapped means you are constrained. You can't spend money on advertising or hiring a growth team. You can’t buy your way to product/market fit. However, this can be a good thing. It pressures you to make it work with limited resources. You can’t hide behind your big pile of cash.

I’d choose that option every day of the week and twice on a Sunday.

What’s one piece of advice you would give to a new founder starting their journey?

Just start. There's a bit more to it, but this has helped me so much.

Everyone wants to be an entrepreneur or thinks about the entrepreneurial life. They make plans and strategies, and everyone has business ideas. But only a few actually try something.

People start reading business books, but that's just procrastination. You're reading, not doing anything. You think you're getting smarter or ahead, but there's still no action. You just need to get out there.

It's easier now because you can spin up a website quickly. The simplest thing you can do is start a newsletter, start writing, and people will start reading. You'll want more readers, iterate on that, meet people, have conversations, and eventually, you get somewhere. You need to take small steps to get the ball rolling.

I never thought I would be at Simple Analytics because I didn't think of the idea. I would be 100 miles away from UniHosted, which I still don't completely understand sometimes. But it happened because I just went out there and did some stupid stuff with my previous company.

Some things didn't work, but I met a lot of people. You just need to get out there and do something. Don't think reading books and pitch decks will get you anywhere.