Above Board

Jack and Paul answer your questions (Pt. 1)

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.

Paul and Jack are back

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.

A brief history of (Fathom Analytics) time

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.

Can bootstrapped startups survive a recession?

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.

The art of making great decisions for your business

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).

When the business itself becomes the distraction

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 th...

Can Matt Damon save Coinbase?

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).

Does Jack Scale?

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 fro...

Dr. Sherry Walling on the mind of entrepreneurs

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, Z...

Is Google Analytics 4 a middle finger to SMBs?

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 beca...

Jordan Gal on competing with giants

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 c...

Is product market fit really just luck?

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.

How we've failed

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.

Growth is testing Fathom

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

How can small businesses make a difference to Ukraine?

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.

Should we take funding? (feat. Rob Walling)

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

When to spend money

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.

What it took to get Fathom off the ground: Jack and Paul interviewed

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.

EU Ruling: Google Analytics is now illegal

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."

Our daily routines

Paul quit the internet… again?!

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) straw Fathom’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, ...

Sharing MRR is egotistical

Jack and Paul get into the pros and cons of indie companies sharing their MRR and MRR milestones publicly. There’s definitely an appeal to sharing this, as many companies do, but is it worth doing, or more importantly, actually helpful, useful or beneficial to do so? Or, is sharing your gross revenue, just gross?

Adblockers & breaking the law

In today’s episode Jack and Paul get into why they had to roll back a piece of a new feature they spent a year building (and had to delete an episode of this show). As well as touching on why ad-blockers hate us in the most misguided way, why our EU isolation is such an important feature, and most importantly, why Fathom doesn’t simply guess at privacy laws - we hire multiple experts to inform our decisions. Not going as far as we do in the legal department would put our customers at legal risk....

The episode where we initially think there’s nothing new, but in actuality a whole ton of things are new

Sometimes Jack and Paul feel like every day is groundhog day, and that not much changes day-to-day. But in reality, lots has been launched, updated, changed, and made progress on. Including: a content survey, a new freelance writer, Fathom NFTs, open-sourcing a Fathom project, disabling MRR emails and how we think about support as it relates to growth.

What’s been happening at Fathom?

Jack and Paul get into all the things that have been happening behind the scenes at Fathom Analytics, including: a new graph, some nerdy details about infrastructure updates, better labels for data on our dashboard, the new high traffic page, and our latest multi-domains feature.

The pros and cons of being the Chief Hype Officer

Jack and Paul discuss what it means to work in public and tweet about “coming soon” features. They also talk about how the momentum from releasing new features plays a pivot role in Fathom’s growth, and how it’s simply not possible to stay on the feature momentum train at all times. usefathom.com/above-board

Interview with the the founder of Carrd: going from bootstrapping to raising venture capital

On today’s show, Jack and Paul speak to the enigmatic and mysterious founder of Carrd, “AJ”. Carrd is a single page website builder that started in 2016 and now has over 2 million users, 3 million sites and is doing over $1 million in ARR. Our conversation covered how Carrd caught on and grew, what led Kim Kardashian to share a Carrd website, and why AJ decided to accept venture capital funding for his business.

What’s the best pricing model for a SaaS?

Should you compete on price? Should you go after lots of smaller customers or a few massive customers? In this episode Jack and Paul have an honest conversation about who Fathom is for, and who Fathom isn’t for. They discuss pricing, enterprise customers, and how they are adapting the business to be more in line with the specific type of customers that best suit the software.

Hiring, firing and retiring

Jack and Paul figure out live, on-the-air, how they want to approach bringing more people into Fathom to work on the core product and integrations. They also cover the “VC vs non-VC: fight!” debate and where Fathom’s operating philosophy fits.

Version 3 is live

Jack and Paul get candid about the behind-the-scenes of launching a major software product release (previously known as “v3). What went wrong, what went right, how feedback is going, and of course, what’s next.