How I Built A Data Analytics Solution With $100 [Side Hustle]

JR Builder

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Published: March 16th, 2022

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About
Business

JR Builder

Founder, GraphJSON

$150

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

GraphJSON

graphjson.com

from San Francisco, CA, USA

started June 2021

$150

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

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Hi, my name is JR and I'm the founder of GraphJSON. I’ve been building side projects for the past decade and actively participate in the #buildinpublic movement.

GraphJSON is an analytics solution that enables companies to do more with their data. Our user base primarily consists of small to mid-sized companies that use our platform to perform all sorts of tasks ranging from monitoring servers, fighting spam and abuse, to powering end-user analytics dashboards. Currently, we are making $184 MRR, doubling month over month.

my-experience-building-in-public-a-data-analytics-solution

What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?

I've been building projects over the past decade; some examples include an assistant basketball AI to help you improve your shooting form, a social job search engine, and an ephemeral photo-sharing app. When building these products, I've always wanted a flexible analytics solution that allowed me to create embeddable graphs from custom queries, but never found one that met my needs. In the past, I would simply give up. However, for my other company Flurly, a marketplace for digital products, quality seller dashboards is a core offering that couldn’t be easily overlooked. Therefore when I was building out Flurly last year, I decided enough was enough and took the dive to build the analytics solution I believe all builders would want - one where I make the common things easy, and the complex things possible.

After discussing with a few of my builder friends, I discovered that this wasn't a niche problem. And given my years of experience building distributed systems, I figured it would be possible to create a fully verticalized analytics solution.

It took me a month to build out the first version. Luckily I was able to use cloud credits from Digital Ocean, Render and Vercel to get GraphJSON off the ground with very minimal costs (<$100 total).

Take us through the process of designing, prototyping, and manufacturing your first product.

I knew from day one that the most important axes to compete on was flexibility. Many analytics solutions trick customers into using their products with fancy visuals. But then users would quickly realize how constrained and limited these platforms are. Thus I had to architect a flexible data platform from the ground up.

I like to work backward from first principles. For this product to work I needed

A scalable analytics infrastructure
A payments solution
A versatile web framework
A powerful documentation framework
A beautiful charting/graphing solution

I went through each of these requirements and did user research to figure out the best option.

For scalable analytics infrastructure, my friend Jason Bosco from Typesense recommended Clickhouse. After comparing Clickhouse with other solutions including TimescaleDB, Elasticsearch, Postgres, etc. I concluded that it was the right option for me due to its speed and scalability.

For payments, I used Stripe since it's never let me down in the past.

For a versatile web framework, I used Next.js. It is reliable and I've become quite competent with it given my experience building Flurly.

For documentation, I chose Docusarus. It worked out of the box and has a sleek look. I was able to spin up the site in less than an hour.

For charts, I used Recharts - a powerful React charting library. This was key in enabling me to launch in under a month.

I've found it's more productive to ask yourself the question "How is my product better than it was last week?". If you can continually answer that question with 3-4 bullet points every week, you're on the right track.

I already had an existing LLC for my other side projects. Therefore I simply re-used it and didn't have to incur additional legal/operational costs.

Describe the process of launching the business.

I used to immediately launch on Hacker News, Reddit, Product Hunt, etc. the moment I finished my side projects. The problem I found with this approach is;

Oftentimes the product is a leaky bucket, and you experience a massive spike in traffic and very quickly see your growth asymptotically approach zero.
These platforms are often filled with people waiting to abuse your platform. For Flurly, all of my original fraud problems originated from my Product Hunt launch.

Thus for GraphJSON, I went with a different approach. I shared my progress on my Twitter account and mostly had my builder friends use the product. Over the past 6 months, the product has continually improved due to the constant feedback of this community. Word naturally spreads and so does growth. Here’s an example tweet that resulted in very useful product feedback.

embed:tweet

In short, there was no official launch. It was more of a soft launch. Maybe sometime in the next 6 months, I'll do an official launch when the product is more mature.

Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?

To be honest, this is my weakest area. The primary thing I've done is build in public. Every feature I build, every challenge I run into, I tweet about it.

The problem with launching on Hacker News, Reddit, Product Hunt, etc. is that oftentimes the product is a leaky bucket, and you experience a massive spike in traffic and very quickly see your growth asymptotically approach zero.

This has enabled a steady stream of builders to sign up for the product. Since they've already seen many tweets about the product, they come in with some initial context and can often get the most out of GraphJSON without any help.

How are you doing today and what does the future look like?

Overall the product is doing very well. It's doubling revenue month over month. Revenue retention is at 100%.

Recently I've been doubling down on partnerships. You can see below the huge inflection point shift after GraphJSON is listed on the vercel integration page.

I have Segment, Zapier, Slack, Discord, and Github integrations in the pipeline. I hope to see step-function increases in growth from each one of them.

As for goals, I hope to continue doubling month over month. However, my main focus is serving my current customers. I'm a big believer that great products produce word-of-mouth growth, which is the best form of growth!

Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?

The key thing I learned is the importance of constant improvement. Early on it's hard to measure yourself based on business metrics since the numbers are so small and volatile. I've found it's more productive to ask yourself the question "How is my product better than it was last week?". If you can continually answer that question with 3-4 bullet points every week, you're on the right track.

Optimize for learning. Every day, ask yourself the question "What did I learn today?". If every day you can answer with 2-3 novel things, then you're on the right track.

What platform/tools do you use for your business?

Stripefor payments. They think through all of the payments edge cases and their API is fantastic.

Vercel for hosting. They created Next.js and have built a ton of infrastructure to make your web apps fast.

Clickhouse for analytics infrastructure. Originally built within Yandex, it's one of the fastest and most scalable data infrastructure solutions out there.

Docusaurus for documentation. Built by engineers at Meta, it's a simple way to write nice-looking documentation pages.

Recharts for graphs/charts. A comprehensive library that made it easy to make beautiful charts.

What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?

I love podcasts. Here are some of my favorites:

Lex Friedman. Great interviewer with great guests.

Invest Like The Best. Helpful in understanding the mind of an investor.

Acquired. Provides insights into how companies are created, scaled, and sold.

Indie Hackers Podcast. Powerful stories on how companies stay independent while thriving.

Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?

When starting, the only thing you know for certain is that you don't know much at all. Optimize for learning. Every day, ask yourself the question "What did I learn today?". If every day you can answer with 2-3 novel things, then you're on the right track.