We Launched Our Project With A Simple Tweet Thread And Grew It To 100 Users
Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?
Hi everyone! My name is JR and I’m the co-founder (with Leng Lee) of Beam Analytics. Beam is the best GDPR-compliant Google Analytics (GA) alternative on the market. We started working on Beam in October 2022 and launched it in January 2023.
Our product gives you the standard web analytics you expect - unique visitors, page views, sources of referrals, bounce rate, time on site, etc. Where we differ is that we also give you funnel analysis, cohort retention, and the ability to track custom events. And you can do all of this just by embedding one line of code on your website.
We think we offer incredible value for you to stay GDPR compliant with your web analytics. Our free tier is very generous, and even once you exceed your free tier, the price is just $11/month with an extra $2/month for each extra 100k page views. For this, you can add an unlimited number of domains. You can also add an unlimited number of team members to the same account. Unlike Netflix, we think shared accounts are great!
What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?
Beam is the third indie hacker project I’ve worked on, but the first I’ve teamed up with someone on. My first two efforts were Flurly (an online payment processor for digital products) and GraphJSON (an easy way to log and analyze events using ClickHouse). Together, they make about $2k a month, so yes, I’m still using my parent’s Netflix account.
I knew Leng from a previous company and enjoyed working with him. He used to be a stand-up comedian and is just very funny. And as a Rhodes Scholar, he’s just very smart. What was also appealing about working with Leng is that we had a shared appreciation of start-up history and the received wisdom.
It didn’t mean we always agreed with that received wisdom or that we had the same interpretation of that received wisdom. But having that shared baseline made discussions much easier as we spoke the same language. We both try to be students of the game because we’re not masters of it!
We drafted a tweet thread, and I tweeted it to my followers. I only have 4k followers, but they’ve been incredibly supportive.
To kick things off, we started by talking about our goals and constraints for the side project. Both of us are married and have full-time jobs. Neither of us wanted to start off aiming for a VC-backed business. We wanted to build a SaaS business given his product background and my engineering background. SaaS was just a business model we understood and thought could lead to a nice lifestyle business.
We would just get on calls and catch up. We’d talk about problems in our lives and if there was a tech problem that could solve it. Unfortunately, tech can’t solve us being assholes!
One day, we talked about how several companies had taken advantage of legislative change to grow their business. Some act even before the law has even changed (eg. ridesharing) whilst others kicked off once the law was changed (eg. Oscar Health with Obamacare).
Researching this, we saw the news about Google Analytics (GA) being deemed not GDPR compliant. We’d both previously used GA as well as GA alternatives so understood a little about the space. We then dug into the different business models, the pricing, and our value proposition.
We saw all the other players touted their GDPR compliance as a key feature, but we thought that this should be table stakes. We didn’t want just the customers who are willing to pay a premium to be compliant with the law. We thought the best way to be GDPR compliant and care about user privacy was to make the product affordable for all website owners.
Take us through the process of building the first version of your product.
I knew from launching Flurly and GraphJSON in the past that I wanted to invest a bit more in making the design just have a bit more polish. I think it makes a huge difference.
So we worked with one of Leng’s designer friends who helped us with the logo and some key design principles to help our landing page and product design. First, we needed a name. We were talking about how the goal of data is to illuminate, tell a story, to give insight.
Through that word association, we came up with Beam. For the logo, we thought of torch and light-related imagery. I don’t even remember how we got a bear. I guess bear and beam are 75% the same?
Some logo designs are in this pdf.
For the actual product, we knew the basic requirement. But we didn’t just want to be another cheap clone of all the other alternatives, so we started talking about useful features we could add.
As a PM, Leng had always wanted easy-to-implement and interpret product analytics. So that’s how we came up with the funnels and cohort retention.
Leng wrote up a solid product requirement development. With his legal training, he also figured out the GDPR requirements. The legal side was particularly important as it was core to what we were about. After a lot of research, speaking to lawyers and university academics, and benchmarking our approach with other companies, we found a solution that we’re confident in.
On my end, I got down to work figuring out what our stack would be, and how to meet the GDPR requirements we had figured out. In the back of my mind, I also wanted to make sure we kept our costs low.
Having worked with ClickHouse before for GraphJSON, I knew I wanted to use that technology again. But I didn’t want to have to manage all the underlying infrastructure because I like to sleep.
Finding TinyBird was great as they provided a ClickHouse-managed service. Vercel and Supabase have served me well previously so we’ve also used them for Beam. Lastly, I chose to use Hertzner servers so all our data processing could stay on EU-owned and located servers.
For the design of the homepage and the product, we tried as much to use templates. We followed our design friend’s guidelines and think it does the job. We figured it was unlikely we’d win or lose alone on the design, but we wanted the product to look and feel like a polished SaaS.
Describe the process of launching the business.
The first thing we did to launch the business was the best. We drafted a tweet thread, and I tweeted it to my followers. I only have 4k followers, but they’ve been incredibly supportive.
The tweet reached just under 30k views and has been the best thing we’ve done. That helped to generate some early user traction. And as everyone knows, once the product starts getting users, things get busier. There are bugs to fix and features to add.
Link to the tweet thread for screenshots.
We had made sure to write several blog posts before we launched. Just to help with SEO but also so we could have ready-made answers to any questions people might have.
That’s proven very helpful as people often have a lot of questions about GDPR compliance, and about our funnel and cohort retention features. We also ensured we got set up with Crisp so users could message us from our website. That was an important way to talk with our users.
In terms of financing the whole thing, it hasn’t been too bad. I think our monthly burn is about $40. With an MRR of $20, we nearly default not dead! Our main cost will likely be TinyBird in the future.
For now, they’ve been kind enough to give us some credit. Hertzner servers ($20/month) and Google Suite for our email ($6/month) are the main costs right now. Other costs include buying the domain ($60/year) and our Content Distribution Network (CDN - $25/year).
Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?
We’ve tried to reach into European-related networks thinking they would care most about GDPR. So far, this hasn’t had much success. But what is interesting is that many of our users are based in Europe - Spain, the UK, Austria, France, and Germany - and we’ve heard about them recommending them to other friends in Europe. No strong virality as yet, but we’re hopeful.
I tweet a lot from my private account and Beam’s account. I search for users who tweet for “alternatives to Google Analytics” and say things like “We might be the one you’ve been looking for.”
Hopefully, it’s not too annoying for them! Most have responded positively. It’s a bit of a grind right now but we’re a big believer in this hand-to-hand combat stage. Of course, we’d love to get a lot of attention on Product Hunt or Hacker News, but having gone through that a few times, I’m not sure how good the quality of the traffic is.
We got a bunch of visits from Hacker News when we asked people to roast our homepage, but the conversion rate to signed-up users was pretty low.
, Unlike a VC backed business, we know we can keep just grinding away for a little while to give Beam the best hope of finding its market.
We write a lot of blog posts. Our blog is pretty full, and we’ve also worked in partnership with various outlets such as this one! The main goal is to get backlinks to our site and improve our SEO. This is a long-term play.
Our competitors have been building up their SEO cred for many years and have done a great job with their content marketing. So we’re slowly trying to build this up and catch up. But right now, we’re not doing any ads of any type. Our SEO ranking is just so low and the CPC for the key search terms is just a little too high right now.
We’ve started experimenting with Affiliate marketing. We started off using Rewardful but that gets pricey quickly so we’ve switched to Reflio. It’s contingency pricing at the start, and you can then switch to a monthly fee when it makes sense.
Some of our early users have been vocal in their support and sharing with their network. I don’t think any have converted to paid users yet, but we’re hopeful this channel will eventually grow.
What’s nice is we use Beam to track the performance of Beam! Every day, we’ll log in to see our web traffic and see if unique visitors are growing. We see which countries are sending traffic, and what our bounce rate is.
We also analyze our sign up conversion rate after each marketing tactic. It’s still a little early to analyze the cohort retention data, but we’re hopeful we can generate insights from that chart soon. We’re huge believers in cohort retention data to see if product enhancements are making a difference, so having it as part of our product is great.
How are you doing today and what does the future look like?
We’re doing ok today. We’re at a steady state of adding 3-4 new users a day and should be over 100 signed-up users by Feb 8. We launched publicly on Jan 23 so it’s been about two weeks to get here.
After our initial addition of paid-up users, that’s stalled recently. We have a very generous free option so it might take users a little while before they need to start paying for the product.
Our conversion from the landing page to the signup page was at about 22% before we submitted it to Hacker News. That got us the big bump in traffic you see above, but it also led to conversions falling to just under 7%.
We’re also interested in how many users are using the product. So we track how much data is being processed and stored by our users and that has been growing. There are some users with a lot of web traffic which has been fantastic to see. Even more important is if Beam users are logging in to look at their data. That ultimately will be the biggest driver of whether our users are getting any value from our product, and if they’ll want to upgrade and pay.
Our operations today have switched fully into focusing on distribution. Product development continues, just not at the same pace as before. We’ve added several features users have asked for (eg. team members on the same account, multiple domains) but we spend most of our time talking to users and responding to their questions.
We also think about different blog posts to write that might pique people’s interest. So each day, we Whatsapp each other an update from the previous day. We ask if anything has happened that should change our bigger strategy but usually, this is a quick no as it’s still too early. We then go about our distribution tasks. I tweet a bunch and fix bugs while Leng writes blog posts and replies to customer support emails.
The first goal we want to reach is to be cash flow positive each month. That will give us (and our wives) some confidence that we’re not just setting a bunch of money on fire. To get there, we just need to keep adding users one by one and figuring out what will get them to upgrade. We remind ourselves that the biggest goal is just not to give up. We believe in our product and our positioning.
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?
This is my third time starting a small business. I knew I wanted to avoid the big ups and downs I’d felt with the previous businesses. So it’s been really helpful having a co-founder to go through this journey with.
It helps that this is not our main job as some days, you just feel powerless to make the metrics move! Just staying patient and giving our strategy time has been a really big lesson.
We try to move fast, but we try to be clear with each other about why we think what we’re doing will be helpful. In the past, I was about motion and activity and not wanting to stand still. I felt I had to be doing something or else entropy would set in. With a co-founder, there are two people bringing energy to the table and smoothing out the rollercoaster ride.
One of our best decisions was getting in touch with TinyBird and figuring out a way to work together. They’ve been supportive of us, and we’re big fans of their product. And just building in public and sharing our journey on Twitter has been great.
Whoever thought of #buildinginpublic needs a big thanks because I think it’s helped a lot of people. We all know it’s hard. There’s nothing to hide. Everyone has failures and it’s great to celebrate when folks succeed. I’ve learned a lot from this community and they’ve been supportive.
What platform/tools do you use for your business?
- Tech Stack - Bunny, Hertzner, TinyBird, Vercel, SupaBase,
- Business messaging platform - Crisp
- Affiliate marketing - Reflio
- Business tools & email - Google Suite
- Team messaging - Whatsapp, Gmail
What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?
We both read a lot of Paul Graham’s early essays. I listen to a bunch of startup-related podcasts (eg. This week in startups) and did Startup School.
We use Techmeme, Hacker News, and The Information to stay up to date. And we subscribe to newsletters like Stratechery, Axios and Matt Levine.
I’d say the most influential books were the ones we read when we were just getting started out - Mastering the VC game, Founders at work, The Paypal Wars.
It’s not to say they’re the best books out there, but we just read them when we knew a lot less so they taught us the most. Now I’d suggest ‘The Power Law’ as a nice primer into the world of tech and VCs.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?
Everyone has heard the phrase ‘make something people want’. This is hard. What we’ve found even harder is figuring out whether you’ve done that or not.
The only way to do that is to get in front of enough people such that you get enough signal that your product is great or a dud.
Without sufficient distribution, it’s hard to say whether your product sucks, or if it’s your customer acquisition. For us right now, we’re 100% sure that our customer acquisition needs more work. And we have to be open to the possibility that there’s no market for our product.
Unlike a VC backed business, we know we can keep just grinding away for a little while to give Beam the best hope of finding its market.
Where can we go to learn more?
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
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