Above Board

In this episode of the Fathom Analytics Above Board podcast, hosts Paul Jarvis and Jack Ellis dive into a significant transition—Paul's retirement from the company. The conversation is both heartfelt and insightful, reflecting on the bittersweet nature of this change.Key Highlights:Retirement Announcement: Paul shares his decision to retire, emphasizing it as a positive step rather than a departure from something he disliked. He discusses the importance of leaving Fathom in a strong position without compromising its independenceBittersweet Emotions: Both hosts express mixed feelings about the end of their five-year partnership, acknowledging the deep connection they've built while also looking forward to new beginningsCompany Evolution: The discussion touches on Fathom's unexpected journey from a side project to a thriving business, highlighting the trust and collaboration that defined their co-founding relationshipFuture Plans: Paul contemplates his next steps post-retirement, sharing that while he doesn't foresee jumping back into entrepreneurship , he remains open to possibilities. He reflects on how he has never tied his identity to the business, allowing for a smoother transitionThis episode is not just about retirement; it's a celebration of growth, friendship, and the unpredictability of entrepreneurial life.Read more about this announcement on the blog.

In the latest episode of The Above Board Podcast, hosts Paul Jarvis and Jack Ellis discuss the decline of Google as an effective search engine, particularly in light of its increasing reliance on AI-generated content. They share personal anecdotes about their frustrations with search results, noting that traditional search engines like Google and DuckDuckGo have become less reliable, often returning irrelevant or incorrect information. Jack expresses skepticism about AI's ability to replace developers, arguing that while AI can assist with basic tasks, it often fails in more complex scenarios, leading to wasted time and confusion. Both hosts lament the impact of SEO practices on content quality, which they believe prioritizes keyword optimization over meaningful information, resulting in a frustrating user experience filled with ads and irrelevant content. They conclude that many users are outsourcing their critical thinking to AI and search engines, which may ultimately hinder their understanding and knowledge retention.TakeawaysGoogle search has become less effective over timeAI is not a reliable tool for complex technical tasksSEO practices have led to a decline in content qualitySearch results can significantly influence public opinionUnderstanding the incentives behind search engines is crucialAI-generated content can often be incorrect or misleadingThe reliance on AI may lead to a decline in critical thinkingUsers are increasingly frustrated with the quality of search resultsThe future of search engines may involve more AI integrationTrust in search engines is diminishing due to advertising influence

Jack and Paul discuss what's new at Fathom Analytics recently, like the ongoing refactor project. This paves the way for great new features, including entry and exit pages. They also give their opinions on the recent drama in the WordPress (WP) community between Automattic and WPEngine.

In the latest episode of the Above Board Podcast, hosts Paul Jarvis and Jack Ellis discuss various topics, with a significant portion of the conversation focuses on the recent arrest of Telegram's CEO in France (Pavel Durov), exploring the implications of privacy and censorship, encryption, and the responsibilities of social media platforms in policing illegal activities. The hosts debate the complexities of freedom of speech, censorship, and the role of government and corporations in regulating discourse, emphasizing the importance of allowing open discussions to foster understanding and informed opinions.

Things are humming along at Fathom Analytics - we've released several new features, have more in the pipeline coming soon, and the redoing of our internal processes is going quite well. Jack and Paul also discuss the Stripe acquisition of LemonSqueezy, the CEO of Paddle stepping down and finally, why Fathom does't do discounts or sales (ever).

Jack and Paul get into updating the application's interface design and how that paves the way for new features coming soon. They also discuss why no one should trust Google's business model (and their penchant for killing off popular products like Universal Analytics), the lengths Fathom goes to to support old analytics data, why you should lean into what works for you (even if it's not the consensus), why companies should care a lot more about protecting their customers data, why public corporations are incentivized for being sociopaths, and so much more.

The conversation delves into the ethical implications of AI, the use of AI in software, and the impact of AI on various industries. It also explores the challenges and limitations of AI technology, as well as the importance of privacy and data protection in AI development.TakeawaysAI has the potential to revolutionize industries but raises ethical concerns about privacy and data protection.The use of AI in software development presents challenges and limitations, including the need for accuracy and reliability.Privacy and data protection are crucial considerations in the development and use of AI technology, especially with what data is used to train these models.The impact of AI on various industries requires careful evaluation and ethical decision-making, not just “moving fast and breaking things”.AI's ego is it's problem: it thinks it's correct when it's not, and attempts to be convincing about things it can't know for certain is true.

Today Jack and Paul discuss what's not been working with getting the next version of Fathom Analytics launched. They come up with a plan, in real-time, to overcome this hurdle and get back to a regular cadence of releases (i.e. not a big project). They also come up with a set of rules to govern internal projects.

Software is complex. This episode goes into the pros and cons of how Jack (developer) and Paul (designer) work in terms of how they each make progress in huge projects, start and execute tasks, and deal with analysis paralysis that comes with complicated things.

It's been a while since Jack and Paul have recorded an episode of this show, so there's a lot to catch up on! A new marketing site was launched, we're still a small team navigating focus, we're working on a brand new version of our software, and we've prototyped a new ingest to be the fastest analytics ingest in the world.

Last week, we released several new features in our software and a fresh coat of paint in the UI. Jack and Paul discuss these features and how they relate to what's coming up next, and they chat through the pricing increase that happened simultaneously. Lastly, they talk about why analytics software is more expensive than most hosting.

What do you do when you can't always please all your customers? Jack and Paul discuss how they deal with negative feedback, the different types of negative feedback, when it's valuable (and when it's not), and even how they deal with negative feedback internally in the company.

Jack and Paul get into what's going on inside Fathom Analytics right now, and then answer some questions about what it was like starting the company, what they'd do differently (or the same), and if there's anything they'd change if they had to start Fathom again.Special thanks to Ben and Adam from the "Hackers Incorporated" podcast for the most of the questions answered on this episode.

Can bootstrapped founders take time off for vacation? Is that even legal? And under what circumstances is that possible? Jack and Paul dive into vacations for indie founders, as well as a short update on what's going on with Fathom Analytics on this episode of Above Board.

Jack and Paul dive into Paul's routine and how he approaches tasks and work that needs doing. They chat about motivation, complex work, focus and so much more. 

Is it harder for startup founders to hire consultants when they're used to being the ones who do all the work? Why hire a consultant in the first place? Why not hire full-time instead? Aren't good consultants ridiculously expensive? Jack and Paul dive into these questions and more on this episode about SaaS companies hiring consultants.

Old friends Justin and Paul catch up for the first time in years and catch each other up on the state of Transistor and Fathom. They cover lots of lessons for new and veteran entrepreneurs, spanning their decades of experience in the world of indie software: cofounders, markets, surfing, experience, product moats, free time, the importance of putting things out there, and so much more.

Maybe it's not even that advice is “incorrect”, maybe it's just that it's simplified to the point of being uselessly reductive. Regardless, Jack and Paul get into dissecting popular business and startup advice found online, and see what fits, what doesn't, and where nuance and reason should be liberally applied.

Can we retire? Do we want to retire? Can we adjust our work now (pre-retirement) to get the most out of life while we're still young (ish)? Jack and Paul dive into what retirement looks like both for each of them, but also what their retirement from Fathom could look like too.

Jack and Paul get into a discussion about what happens when the company you started begins to do well, and you have to prioritize things that all seem equally important, and all seem like they need to get done at the same time. While they may not have any answers here, they do discuss what's worked (and not worked) as far as Fathom Analytics is concerned.

Jack and Paul discuss changes to how Fathom Analytics develops features, moving from long-lived branches to "continuous development." Why did we start doing this? What are the benefits? And most importantly, what could go wrong?

Universal Analytics is dead. GA4 is a dumpster fire of complexity. So what what did we do at Fathom? We build an importer to save your historical data from Google. How'd we build it? Why'd it take so long? What worked and what didn't work? Jack and Paul get into the whole story about building one of their biggest features.

Back in 2020, we recorded an episode about all our marketing efforts to grow our software company. In this new episode, we look at what we've changed, what's still the same, what we've abandoned in terms of how we promote our bootstrapped company, and look ahead at what our marketing strategy could be. Meowing cats, TikTok kids dancing to analytics, and costumed protestors — all this and more.

You don't need to have a huge audience or social following to start and build a successful and sustainable business. People have started companies this way for centuries. Jack and Paul speak with Ruben today on how marketing and sales work at his companies, how he's managed to succeed long term with two companies, what a lot of bootstrap founders get wrong and so much more.Ruben Gamez is the founder of Bidsketch and SignWell and can be found on twitter at @earthlingworks

Jack and Rob Walling get into the nitty gritty of running a SaaS company with an honest and transparent conversation, based around Rob's new book: The SaaS Playbook.You can learn more or pick up a copy of the book at https://saasplaybook.com/.

In this episode, Jack and Paul chat about what happened with SVB, if they feel that more banks are going to fail, how it affected and could affect indie or bootstrapped companies, and how they'd (this is not legal advice, just opinions loosely held) fix things if they were in charge.

Our guest today was Matt Wensing, the founder of Summit. Jack and Matt get into an in-depth conversation about: What things do many entrepreneurs get wrong? How to pivot well, starting a business with slow funding. Why crowdfunding may be a bad idea for investors. How his SaaS excels at enterprise sales (and why it's their main focus) Summit is a zero-party marketing data platform - usesummit.com. Matt Wensing can be found on Twitter at @mattwensing.45m

Jack and Paul discuss changes at Fathom Analytics. What used to work in the past in terms of workflows and specs is no longer working and actively blocking them from moving forward as quickly as they'd like. So, they sat down, formulated a plan, and shared it on this episode.

In today's episode Paul and Jack get into using AI to help write code for software. Is it useful? Is it accurate? Can it be used to write entire applications? And most important of all, will OpenAI tools like Github's CoPilot eventually replace developers and take their jobs?

Listeners and customers sent in their questions for us to answer, and we did just that! Questions about burnout, Google Analytics importer, our new hires, and more.

Listeners and customers sent in their questions for us to answer, and we did just that! Questions about our brand, infrastructure, upcoming features, and more.

Jack and Paul catch up on the last few weeks. They cover a wide range of topics including: Do you really know what your weather forecast means, dots on charts, T-Rexs hunting you at coffee shops, wobbly desks, hiring our first customer support person (exciting!), Peppa Pig Land, North Korea, existential developer crisis', Winnie the Pooh and so much more.

In this episode, Jack and Paul look back to the beginnings of Fathom Analytics (which started in 2018). There was no big break here or instant success. Instead, it was a series of small bets, iterations, and tiny risks. Thankfully enough of them paid off and moved us forward enough to go from a side project to full-time jobs, not only for us, the cofounders, but for our employees too.

When the economy is hurting, do small businesses have to suffer? Jack and Paul discuss how Fathom is (hopefully) built to be able to weather financial storms by not growing beyond our means at any given time and because we optimize for where we're at, not where we hope to be if things go well. May all the huge hyper-growth companies who are laying off their staff could learn a little from leanly-run bootstrapped companies.

It's no secret: Fathom Analytics is growing. So what are Jack and Paul deciding to do about growth regarding development, support, and the business in general? How do they decide how to make the best decisions for the growing business and its long-term sustainability? Tune into this week's episode to find out (hint: we're hiring 197 people tomorrow).

Today Jack and Paul get very candid about what's going on with Fathom Analytics lately, specifically regarding distractions. At the beginning of a bootstrapped business, other things are distracting (like how you make the bulk of your revenue). But eventually, as a bootstrapped business grows, it becomes a distraction from the product in and of itself—because you've got to juggle support, taxes, running a growing company, hiring, and so much more. So you can't just remove distractions because the distraction (your company) is just as important as the product you're building.

At the time of recording this episode, Coinbase just laid off 18% of their workforce and they rescinded all job offers that had already been already accepted. Jack and Paul have a lively discussion about fast-growth, Big Tech monopolies, and whether or not the best way to compete with monopolies is to change the game and focus on slow, sustainable growth (instead of market share or competition).

Jack and Paul talk about a wide array of topics related to running a growing software company. From how the job of cofounder changes as a company grows, from using your skillset to becoming more of a manager; to how their minds are changing about enterprise plans; to ensuring a product company isn't wholly reliant on a single customer; to how Fathom's tech stack has changed lately; to the importance of moving slowly to move quickly. Jack talks through the reasons for moving Fathom's codebase from Ember JS to Inertia.js and Vue.js.

Jack and Dr. Sherry Walling dive deep into our minds to discuss burnout, depression, the benefits of neurological diversification, the mental health fallout from Covid, psychedelic assisted therapy, and more for people who work for themselves.They also get into the mindset, values and traits of becoming and sustaining going out on your own as an entrepreneur.Dr. Walling is a clinical psychologist, speaker, podcaster, best-selling author, yoga teacher, and mental health advocate. Her company, ZenFounder, provides mental wellness resources to leaders and entrepreneurs as they navigate transition, loss, conflict, or any manner of complex human experience. 

Universal Analytics (the version most people use) of Google Analytics is being sunset shortly. And worse, there's no path to migrate that data into GA4 (their new product). But even worse still, they'll be deleting all Universal Analytics data as well. Yikes! Jack and Paul ruminate on why Google Analytics is so awful to use, so hard to understand, and why it feels like Google doesn't care about the end user of their software. Is it because free users of GA aren't their true customers? Is it because Google is tired of being bogged down by privacy rulings against them? Is it because SMBs weren't converting to their paid GA360? Or, is it because the true customers of Google Analytics data are advertisers, not the website owners who install GA?

Jack and Jordan share stories from the front lines of indie companies. Starting and running a software business, mistakes made along the way, exiting a company built from the ground up, living with bigger competitors who get all the industry press, and so much more. They also get into the rise and meteoric fall of Fast, who raised over $120m in funding, ended up only making around $600k in revenue total, and then shutting down. Jordan discusses his point of view on what mistakes they made as a company and how they moved far too fast (pun intended). Jordan's company Rally helps online merchants offer a more profitable checkout, post-purchase offers, and helping boost conversions.

Jack and Paul briefly chat about launching a few small features in Fathom Analytics: search filters, event currencies and a graph update. They also try to think through whether or not validating "Product Market Fit" is something you can plan for, just luck into, or if it's simply a trailing metric you can only learn after the fact.

Jack and Paul discuss our business failures... past, present and possibly even future ones. Even with Fathom, there was a point were it was only doing a couple grand a month and didn't feel like a success (so why keep going with it?) The answer to that and much more in this episode. Jack also announced that the Google Analytics import feature for Fathom will be released before April 1st.

How a higher than usual growth rate has been affecting Fathom Analytics.

Businesses aren't people, but they're run by people. That means your own values can help inform actions and stands you take. With Fathom, we've always been a values-driven company and don't shy away from letting our customers and audience know how we feel about certain topics, so when Russia illegally invaded Ukraine, we decided that Fathom should do something.

See: https://usefathom.com/above-board/rob-walling

Often in business, people talk a lot (or only) about the money they make and not about the money they spend to run their business. And it's important to consider how much of your revenue you should be spending, what to be spending your money on, and how to best prioritize what expenses should before others.

In this episode we were joined by our buddy Brian Casel, the founder of ZipMessage, to interview us on the backstory of Fathom and what it took to get Fathom off the ground.

In this episode Jack and Paul talk about the ruling from the Austrian DPA stating that Google analytics is illegal. Who does this affect? What can be done? Did Fathom Analytics have the inside scoop on this, and that's why they created EU Isolation in 2021? All this and more in today's episode."

Paul has once again quit the internet, but this time he's left Twitter (namely, this personal Twitter account). What does this mean for Fathom, if anything?NFTs were the final (minor) strawFathom's recent launch of FathomCatz was the final straw in my decision to leave Twitter behind. I was excited to launch this fun new project, thought through the environmental aspect of blockchain things, and set up a local animal shelter to donate most of the proceeds to.But then, the second I shared it, a troll surfaced to cut down my tweet. At first, I was mad, but then I realized: I don't feel like defending myself and my ideas to everyone, everywhere, all the time. I don't need to “be right” to others who don't matter. I don't need to argue with strangers. I don't need my attention and mental bandwidth to be taken up by social media. So while the NFT troll didn't matter and wasn't why I left, it was the final straw (of thousands) that led to the decision to remove my Twitter account permanently.Does this decision impact Fathom?Initially (i.e. years ago when Fathom Analytics started), a large chunk of new customers and awareness for Fathom came from my personal audience—via my mailing list and my writing.Currently, this is no longer the case. Fathom isn't just “Paul and Jack do software”; it's its own brand. Sure, “Paul and Jack” the people are part of it, but the order goes Fathom first as the brand, then us.So while removing my personal Twitter account could impact sales and growth with Fathom, it's undoubtedly very minor. And, we have no plans to get rid of our Fathom Twitter account.We've (especially myself) been very conscious about how we build the brand for Fathom: where the product is always first (or our cats are first?), and Jack and my personalities are a far second. Yes, who we are as cofounders of the company matters a great deal, but it's the most important thing. And thankfully, we're now at a place where my personal brand disappearing shouldn't have a noticeable impact.Scale scales negativityWhen you have a small audience, there's typically less negativity because there are just fewer people. But as an audience grows (as mine did), the number of trolls also increases.Tim Ferriss has written about this (and the negative aspects of fame), as his audience is as big as you can get on the internet. And with it can come a volume of responses that one person could never be able to have time or mental capacity to deal with.The Fathom NewsletterYes, at the start of the episode, I spoke about deleting my personal newsletter, but the reasons for deleting that don't apply to… the new Fathom content newsletter.The Fathom newsletter exists because we wanted a better way to distribute the articles and podcast episodes we're creating all the time and putting a great deal of time and energy into. So it's not a “personal, Paul Jarvis” newsletter; it's a roundup of what Fathom has been up to, what we've written about or what we've talked about on our Above Board podcast.