At Signalbase, our main developer is moving on. We hired a new developer the next day.
How? We put in a lot of work finding a developer for Simple Analytics, and now we have a shortlist of amazing people.
He starts next week.
Putting a lot of time into the process can bear fruit in the future.
Commands:
brew install duti
osascript -e 'id of app "Cursor"'
duti -s com.todesktop.230313mzl4w4u92 public.plain-text all
duti -s com.todesktop.230313mzl4w4u92 .js all
duti -x md
Wished I knew this 2 years earlier. Switching code editors a lot, but when clicking files in Finder it opens in your old editor. F*ck.
Luckily, a tool called duti exists. Install it with brew, get the ID of your editor, and update groups of extensions at once.
Take one last look at it while it’s still there (although broken):
dashboard.simpleanalytics.com/open
We’re removing our public page with MRR and other stats.
We’d need to rework it to add value, and we don’t really use it anymore.
It has become legacy, and we don’t need it to build trust anymore.
2 coffee no breakfast
Let’s go
I'm super grateful for everything that's been given to me here. And now they ask something in return: pay tax. Yes, it's not nothing, but it's tied to how much you earn.
If I can give up a bit more because I'm doing well, that seems fair to me.
I grew up in the Netherlands. I used its schooling system and health care. I got subsidies for studying, for starting my businesses, for being a developer, and for when I couldn't afford health care.
Because of that, I could take risks, travel everywhere, and build a life.
I see too many founders treating tax evasion like some badge of honor.
It's not. If you live in a country and use its resources, just pay the damn tax.
We want to make our pricing page even simpler and more targeted for enterprise customers.
Any feedback?
While everybody is talking about safety in Europe, I found a way to never get those random white spaces on mobile, usually caused by some element being wider than you thought.
Just add the Tailwind class `overflow-x-clip` to your `<body>`, and you’re set.
Looking for some freelancers that might help us with requests like these:
Would you have the capacity to help us implement some additional ads / conversion tracking with Simple Analytics in Shopify? We would be happy to pay extra for your assistance with this.
With the Simple Analytics team we are in Malaga.
What shouldn't we miss?
Open to other suggestions on what we can do to keep the Free plan attractive, while also making sense from a business perspective.
Then free users would need to add a badge linking to Simple Analytics, which would give us something back: more eyeballs (even on smaller websites) and some backlinks (which might help, especially from bigger websites).
That said, we don’t get much back from our free users. They obviously don’t pay us anything, but we expected a bit more talk about Simple Analytics online because of it. So we’re debating internally whether we should add a badge requirement to the Free plan.
I was super scared about what support would cost us, so I built a community to forward people to and blocked the support email for free users. But you know what? Our tool is super self-serve. Users can figure it all out themselves, while our customer support is wide open.
We passed 35,000 users at Simple Analytics. Every month, around 1,000 new users sign up and use our product. Transparency notice: most of them are free users. We have 1,337 paying customers.
Meanwhile, the sites that just publish genuinely helpful stuff keep ranking through every update.
The tactics change. The principle doesn't.
The SEO landscape has never changed when you just write for humans.
People panic about every algorithm update. They chase tactics, restructure entire sites, hire consultants to decode the latest shift.
I look at companies like Typefully and Tally and see clear vision in what they ship. They're younger, sure. But that's not the real difference.
Looking for some business advice here: something else then rename your business to something that also starts with a T. Timpel Tanalyics?
Last week I told the team we need to be more proactive. Yesterday Alex asked what my plans are for the next six months. I didn't have a clear answer.
That's how fast I slipped back.
The problem isn't listening to customers. The problem is we stopped filtering requests through our original mission.
We built Simple Analytics to be privacy-friendly, simple, and actually fun to use. We nailed the first two. The fun part? We stopped pushing on that.
Simple Analytics became too reactive.
We wait for customers to request features before building them. We delay infrastructure moves until a big deal demands it. The rebrand stays in the someday pile.
For Simple Analytics right now, it doesn't.
That might change when we're at scale and have a dedicated content team. But with a small team moving fast, focus beats coverage.
But for us? The opportunity cost was too high. Every hour spent wrangling translations was an hour not spent shipping features or writing content.
The question isn't whether multilingual content can work. It's whether the return justifies the complexity.
If you're Stripe processing payments in 40 countries, multilingual might be needed. If you're targeting SMBs in specific regions, local language is important.
So we made a call. English only. Hardcoded. No more translation overhead.
Here's the thing though: this might be completely wrong for your business.
Every blog post meant 5 translations. The translation libraries made development slower. SEO kept breaking.
And the data told the story: in Google Search Console, the first meaningful international search result appeared at query 228. That's 227 English queries before that.
We just killed multilingual support at Simple Analytics. All of it.
For the past few years, we've maintained content in 5 European languages. The theory made sense: we're a European privacy tool, GDPR is strongest here, why not speak to founders in their language?
But the reality was brutal.