I’m happy to announce that Pirsch has performed better than ever this year. We continued to add exciting new features, increased MRR, onboarded new enterprise customers, and received a lot of helpful feedback from you. Before I start, I’d like to say THANK YOU to everyone who has supported us over the years.
The main purpose of this article is to give you some insight into what it’s like to be a “mid-sized” SaaS.
The Numbers
Let’s start with the numbers:
- We grew our MRR from ~$6,000 to ~$11,000 (+83%)
- Monthly growth rate was 1.4%
- Net volume was ~$114,000
- Subscribers grew from 432 to 553
- We added two new enterprise customers
- Employees grew from 0 to 1 (one of the two founders)
Overall, we almost doubled our MRR, which I think is really good and I hope that trend will continue.
The Features
Here’s a quick summary of what’s new and what we’ve improved in 2024:
- A comparison mode to compare statistics with the previous period
- Tag-based segmentation to support A/B testing
- View sessions individually
- Webhooks for custom events
- Traffic spike notifications and alerts
- Tracking by region and country map
- Dashboard translated into multiple languages
- A new “excludes” filter
- Multi-step marketing funnels!
- Google Analytics 4 import
- Tracking of hostnames and attribution channels
- Visitors by day and hour graph
- Improved email reports
And so much more! Looking back at our changelog, it feels crazy what we have accomplished in just one year. Mostly this has to do with our personal situation, which comes next.
Our Personal Situation
As you can see from the numbers and progress above, we now have one of us (me) working full time on Pirsch. We did this right at the beginning of 2024 and it has helped a lot to increase our output and reduce stress. I used to work for an agency and spent about 60% of my time working on Pirsch. This meant that I worked 2 days at the agency and at least 3 days a week on Pirsch. This of course meant that I had a relatively low income combined with a lot of pressure when I couldn’t respond to incidents or customer requests.
Fully committing to Pirsch was really overdue and helped a lot to reduce my stress level. It also allowed me to focus on improving and fixing as much as possible, reducing manual maintenance and support requests. It is really stressful not being able to respond to urgent support requests while working on another job.
Daniel is now working as an engineer, which is what he wanted to do and which is fine for us. He’ll continue to work on Pirsch from time to time, mostly in the design department.
Being In the Weird State of a Mid-Sized SaaS
I’m sure you’ve read success and failure stories before, but as a mid-sized SaaS, you really feel the pressure from all sides. As a “winner” you worry about smaller competitors growing to compete with you or new players entering the market with big (VC) budgets. As a “loser”, you never really got to the point where it’s worth worrying about competition. In this case, you can write off your SaaS as a failure and keep looking for a better idea to work on.
A “winner” doesn’t necessarily have the better product.
If you’re a “loser” and your SaaS doesn’t make money, it’s not necessarily a failure. It’s always worth a try.
As a mid-sized SaaS, we’re threatened by both the “winners” and the “losers”.
The winners have obviously taken most of the market share. Potential customers hear about them first, and most customers don’t really try different options before deciding which is best for them. This is especially frustrating when the competition had a first mover advantage. Although we were relatively early in the privacy-friendly analytics market, there was already strong competition. Being early usually means getting more attention and backlinks, which gives a product an “unfair” advantage. It’s extremely difficult to compete with other SaaS products that are considered standard by some, although when we talk to customers, they often switched to us from another tool after hearing about and trying Pirsch.
On the other side, there are the “losers” (including new competitors who aren’t neccessarly bad, but don’t have market share yet). When something looks simple, like our dashboard, people assume it’s easy to replicate. This leads to cheap alternatives that are produced in a relatively short amount of time, flooding the market and drawing even more attention away from our product.
Considering the market situtation and our MRR, we’re in a situation where we are “too rich to die and too poor to live”. That’s probably a very German thing to say, but it means that we make enough money to sustain ourselves, but not enough to really make it worth our while. I could make a lot more money working as a regular developer. On the other hand, I have a lot of freedoms and it’s a lot of fun working on our own project. I always had trouble motivating myself to work on other people’s dreams.
That said, I hope Pirsch will continue to grow slowly over time, but we’re also looking at other product ideas. We’re not going to put Pirsch into “maintenance mode”, but I feel like we need to start reducing our risk by running more than one product. But first, there’s a lot more to do with Pirsch however, and I hope you’re as excited about it as we are!
Plans for 2025
In 2025, we’re going to continue working on Pirsch and improve it as much as possible. Talking to our existing and potential new (enterprise) customers, we learned a lot about their pain points that we want to address.
One of them is reliable tracking of link clicks. So we started working on a link shortener that is directly integrated into Pirsch. This allows for much better analysis of external link clicks and ad attribution. Connecting it directly to the analytics tool means that we can track clicks on your dashboard instead of relying on query parameters or other connection points passed by an external tool. It also saves you money, as these tools are often priced similarly to Pirsch itself.
Next we want to work on the API version 2.0. We’ve always been in a unique position because Pirsch can be considered the only true “analytics as a platform” solution today. Our customers often integrate Pirsch into their own products to easily provide analytics to their clients. While the current API is powerful enough to support these use cases, the statistics API has become bloated and difficult to use. Mainly because each stat has its own endpoint. In the future, we will provide a cleaner and more unified experience.
Conclusion
Hope you had fun reading it! Thanks again to all of you who have helped make Pirsch what it is today. We hope you have a wonderful holiday season and a happy new year!
Your Pirsch Team
