Hello, everybody. I am, for right now, Paul Jarvis, and I'm joined by Jack Ellis. And this is the Fathom Analytics Above Board podcast. And today we are going to talk about frying an egg on a carbon steel pan. Actually, no, let's not bury the lead. I'm retiring. Yeah, I'm no longer part of Fathom, but this is a very good thing. So let's get into it. Yeah, the word someone used on LinkedIn was bittersweet. And I was like, yeah.
I'm happy. And I, you know, people have asked me, it's like, you know, why is Paul retiring? And I was like, well, we've been speaking on, like I said, in the blog post on and off. And it's always been, the joke has been that you said, you know, in like a couple of years time, I'll be.
I'll be done. But then that couple of years keeps getting postponed because, you know, we're growing and we're doing stuff and we've got other things to focus on. And it's like, oh, I'm feeling guilty because you've said a couple of years ago. I feel like a couple of years ago or more, and it's just conveniently ignoring that, but it's still on your brain.
Yeah. And I mean, the thing is, though, like, I haven't disliked working on Fathom. And I guess the biggest thing with me was, I didn't want to have to like... retire but then fathom gets sold to like a big company or like has to take on investment or like i i didn't want to like uncompany of one fathom just because i didn't want to work anymore no for sure
Yeah. And that often happens. I mean, you think about a co-founder buyout, it often is another party's brought in to make the deal happen. I don't... know of any i mean i'm sure they i don't know if they do exist necessarily but the way we structured it was yeah company of one ask it was independence first over bringing in outside capital because you know we could have gone to other investors and then
fathom would have become completely different it would have been weird actually yeah and i didn't want to ruin the the growth of the company just because i wanted to exit basically so for sure that's and we don't have to get into like the the nuts and bolts of the deal but basically you're buying my shares and we're doing it over time and that means that
Things can basically, and then you're hiring me as a freelance designer, which is kind of full circle for my life because in the 90s, that's what I started as. So it's kind of fun. Yeah, it's weird, man. I mean, yeah, early October or late October when we discussed it, it was definitely... I'm happy for both of us, but I'm also not happy. It's a mixture of emotions. This topic doesn't make me go, yeah, like...
I'm done. Paul's gone. Woohoo. Like the witch is dead. I think we ran it for five years and. In the blog post, I said we didn't even have a shareholder agreement, and I always got a kick when the lawyer's like, where's your shareholder agreement? We haven't had one. We haven't needed one. Yeah. And there's always been good faith. Even our partners, you know, good faith in everything. There was a lot of trust between everyone. Yeah.
And I mean, I think it took us like maybe an hour to come to like what the terms were. And then obviously, because lawyers and accountants and everything were involved, it took an extra five or six weeks. Yeah. Just to get the actual documents sorted out. But essentially, the agreement that you and I had was like, maybe an hour tops. Yeah. No, we had it done. It was making sure we're both protected.
everything else and i think honestly for me when we were doing the negotiation it was just a case of okay what happens if paul dies what happens if jack dies like that was where i wanted more if i knew for a fact that neither of us would die I wouldn't have cared about a contract. It was really just making sure that, you know, if I die or you die, that everyone's good. And we managed that. The contract was good. The lawyers delivered. Yeah.
Yeah. I don't know, dude. I'm excited. I'm excited for you. I'm sad for the five years coming to an end. Like I say, it feels like a relationship. It is a relationship, but it's not a relationship ending because we're literally talking. It's not like it's gone.
You're giving me cooking tips this morning, but it's not like it's gone. Yeah. I just, yeah, I don't know. The nervous system and the body was used to that for a long period of time. And then now it's different. So like, whilst I'm happy, I don't get enthusiastic at the idea of you leaving. Does that make sense? Yeah, no, and I feel the same. Like, obviously, I want to be done with working, but...
The thing is, I didn't dislike my work. I've never disliked my work. Obviously, I've had shit days working and stressful days. Running a company isn't... yeah um all like fairies and butterflies and rainbows shooting out of your fingertips but like i wake up every morning and like don't hate like designing and writing for an analytics company right so no it's been good and the people we work with it's been it's been really good and we got a lot done it's been
It's been a crazy and weird, interesting five years, like all of the words. It's been everything. So much going on. It's such a ride. Yeah, it's funny too, right? Because like... Fathom was never meant to be a business. Like it was just, I designed a screenshot because I was sick of Google analytics. And then I started it as like an open source project with another person.
And then he left. And then I was like, I don't think I'm going to keep doing Fathom. And then I told you this and you were like, oh, well, I could step in and be the technical co-founder.
like sure i got and then that ended up being like the best decision right because i thought them's done well oh yeah and it was weird thinking because at the time i was doing freelance work and i was billing hourly and i still remember having to work less hours so i was like oh i'm gonna make less money but i have to trust that hopefully like it was a calculated risk yeah i made another money to cover my bills but if fathom didn't grow then i'd be okay
And then what ended up happening was I had to leave my freelancing work, which I actually, I love my freelancing work. It was good fun. And I had to say to them, I'm sorry, I can't do both. And it was the day after we had our first viral customer. I got to learn about database IO on AWS RDS, which is, yeah, I'd never had to worry about that before. And then they launched in Germany. I think it was, they launched universal basic income.
surprise surprise everyone wanted to be a part of that it went viral and we yeah I had to spend the whole day trying to do that and I just said you know I can't do freelance and this yeah I was done
Yeah, it's funny. You came on board. I think our MRR was like a thousand bucks. You came on board before we were doing any real income. And I was the same. I stopped doing courses and books, which were... doing quite well for me because i was like oh let's let's try something else and see see how that works then it ended up working so well also you helped me as i said in the post you know you helped me do my course
You had a lot of strategies or just ways of positioning, ways of communicating. I kind of like non-marketing ways of marketing, if you like. They were good techniques and I learned from those.
And that did really well. And that then helped me pad out my leave from freelancing into Fathom before we could take good salaries and what have you. So then... then what happened so we then we just we yeah we went away in the business there was a ddos attack in 2020 which was exhausting uh definitely some burnout from because like things felt easier before then and it was like oh no we actually have a business that
can be attacked quite easily i mean any business can be attacked you know and you know a lot of people don't think about that i hear people talk all the time and they kind of like slap cloud flare flare in front of it but it's like that isn't always the solution for a lot of you know a lot of cases it is don't get me wrong but it isn't always the solution like we can't do a capture on a background request you can't really do that so
Yeah. And then we've just been building ever since. And you did, you retired your mail chair. Do you think like, so, I mean, this is kind of coming into the retirement. Obviously, you're going to be doing design, but do you think that you will ever get back into business or are you done? I mean, I can't say never. I don't know. I don't think so. basically at a point where i can keep living the way that i live and not have to make more money but
I also, I don't know, like in a year I might get bored. Like it's hard because the last month I've been so busy, like between. taking my wife away on like a last minute trip like basically we went to southern california and we decided it like 12 hours before um for a couple weeks um and then we had a horrible storm on the west coast of canada so i've been
like doing cleanup at our house and our neighbor's house for a while. So like, I haven't, I haven't had time to just be like, okay, like I'm not working. Like, I don't know what I'm doing, but I'm also like. I also don't really get bored. Like I have so many hobbies. I have so many things around the house. Like I try to fix everything myself. So I bicycle hours a day. Yes.
Yeah. So like, I don't, I, I, it has, I guess it hasn't sunk in yet because I, I haven't had a chance to like slow down because I'm just as busy now as I was like two months ago when I was working. So. Okay. Yeah. Honestly, I don't know. I was funny. I was talking to another entrepreneur this morning and he was like, well, are you going to start something else? I'm like, I don't think so, but like, I don't know. And he's like.
He's training somebody right now to take over his business. And he's like, I think I'm ready for just not doing anything as well. And he's like, a lot of people don't understand. Like a lot of entrepreneurs don't understand that. like a bunch of my friends have been like i can't see you being retired for more than like a couple months and like
I can. So I don't know. Your identity. So there's another thing. I was talking to Ruben Gomez about this, but a lot of entrepreneurs would tie their identity to the business. You never did that. You killed your... mailing list which no one would ever do by the way yeah i still don't fully understand and you're chill with it and it's like you're happy with it but
you had this huge mailing list of people and like huge audience you're like i'm just done with that it's not working for me anymore and uh yeah you've had your twitter account with tens of thousands of followers which you casually, without any stress, were able to remove. Yeah. Which, yeah, it's funny because a lot of people wouldn't be able to do that. Yeah, I just had enough of having an audience.
And that's kind of what drew me to want to like go all in on Fathom because it didn't need to be my audience supporting the business. Like obviously people sign up for Fathom because they... like read my stuff but it's not like it's it's not like 50 or anything it's probably like one or two percent at this point well no you can probably go back in the podcast we intentionally tried to expand that because at first it was your audience right you got distribution through your audience yep
Then it was, okay, well, Paul's audience is one thing and Paul's audience is, you know, going to drip into fathom throughout the years. And I mean, it's still happening because then what's his face? Who's the deep work guy? Cal Newport.
Cal Newport. He wrote about you in his new book, which then, you know, and then your book's still selling all over the world. People don't know this about your book and it's really funny. So your book is selling globally really well to the point where you've got a crazy audience in China.
like what the hell yeah it was a it was a number one bestseller there for close to a year which is hilarious yeah did i tell you so remember i i showed you the cover of the russian version of my book which is like a chef cutting into a cake made out of brains. Lovely. And I've always said this is my favorite book cover. And I wish I had had a copy. And for some reason, the foreign publisher, I guess because, I don't know, sanctions or whatever.
um with russia like i never got a caught like i got a copy of all the other foreign book covers and so a friend of mine she's actually in the uk found a way to buy a copy of the Russian book and send it to me. And it is possibly now my prized possession is the Russian version of my book. I cannot read a single word of it. I don't even know that it's like the only reason I know.
Yeah, I know. Because the person who designed it posted a picture of it. And if you look on Russian bookstores and type in the English for my book, that's what comes up. But I have a copy of the Russian chef brain cake version of my book. And I got it like last week, I think. So fucking happy. Sorry, you could write another book. Why? I don't know. I don't know. You could. I don't know why. I haven't got a good reason. Because you can. I don't know. That's not a good reason.
yeah i mean my agent definitely wants me to because the last the last one did all right but but now it's like there's an exit too like it adds to the story it's like additional proof of you know a lot of people are like teachers and they make their money by teaching you how to make money right but you've actually done it and done it at multiple levels it's interesting
Yeah, I've been pretty conscious of never teaching or sharing anything that I didn't do myself. Like I'm not going to read a post on Medium and then make a course about how to do that thing because I read a bunch of blog posts about it. Okay, so not going to write a book or might write a book. I don't know. You say why. I don't know why you'd write a book because you want to sell some books. I don't know.
I didn't. So I guess the thing with books though, for me is like, I don't dislike writing. I actually really enjoy writing, but why did you stop more? So more than 50% of a book is promoting the book. Oh, I see. And I don't like, I don't, I'm not like Obama or something who can write a book. And then like, I literally like, I'm sure he's done promotion for his book. I'm sure he didn't even write his book because most celebrities just have ghostwriters. Yep. But.
like you could if you're at that level like stephen king i don't think needs to do like book tours or whatever right yeah Whereas I would have to promote it. The last book I did hundreds of interviews and I was so burned out on doing podcasts. I was angry about doing them. It's not a good place to be interviewed by somebody who you're like...
I don't like, it's nothing to do with you personally, but I don't want to fucking be here. I don't want to talk about it. I mean, it must get so boring because the conversations are then just repetitive. Yep. Okay, fine. So it's promotion and that promotion. What about if you've got an AI of you that could go on the podcast? I mean, that could solve things.
I mean, possibly it might just, yeah, it might just lose its shit and just go off on, which honestly I wouldn't care. Like that would actually be kind of funny. Oh man. Okay then. So retirement unknown as to what comes in. into retirement yeah okay i mean cycling traveling yeah yeah that's fair enough okay yeah for now so what about fathom how is this going to change
I found them for, I was going to say for our customers, for your customers. Yeah. So like, honestly, nothing big changes. I mean, this is what I put in the blog post, you know, we were already aligned on, I think on most things. Yeah. The only things I can think of off top of my head where I've pushed in one, even when I've pushed in one way, like I tried to push a free plan before and then we run the, you know, the complexities of that.
And what comes with that? It's not just, here's a free plan, then everything's amazing. A free plan is a lot of work to sustain. I think a lot of people don't get that part is it's like, oh, why can't you do a free plan or free plan? People don't see the amount of support that come from people that aren't them. Do you know what I mean? Like I might look at it and go, I need a free plan. This would be fine. I wouldn't take up any support.
For every one person like that, there'll be 10, this is me making up numbers, but there'll be 10 people who will take up lots of support and then you can't... You can't be profitable because then you have the paying customers subsidizing the free customers. And that does work at venture scale and everything, but that's not where we're going.
No. And we have one support person who will spend as much time as needed for every single ticket. That's why we hired him. Yep. That's why we hired him. Yeah. You get a proper support person and it's not outsourced to... you know cheap labor we haven't done it so like you can do support for five five dollars an hour or whatever it's like no we actually invested in this so no i pushed on free a few times i mean
You know, I've said as well, I would like to do more on the enterprise stuff if possible, just because I'd want to explore it and see if we can actually make it work. And I know you've had no care in the enterprise stuff. Since we started, you've been met on enterprise. Yeah, because I know the level of legal. It's bureaucracy. It is bureaucracy.
not a fan of bureaucracy it undermines it undermines the lifestyle part of the lifestyle business it does but i want to explore it and actually feel it do you know what i mean i want to see what it's like and then I was talking to Ash about this and I said, if it's really bad, we don't have to keep doing it. I just want to try because we may be surprised and may be able to hire someone to handle it. And there may be a way to make it profitable.
Yeah. If there's a process that can be put in a place where like they follow like our or your. like process to sign up then yeah but i mean like we did try it with one vendor and i signed up for like their vendor port i still get fucking emails from their vendor portal I didn't even finish signing up because I got to page like 870 out of like 200, 2,853. And I gave up. This was a huge, huge, huge, huge, huge, huge, huge tech company.
Yeah. I mean, literally one of the biggest. Yeah. Literally one of the biggest. Yeah. So no, we gave up on that. But again, like we could have, I just, I feel like there'll be energy at some point to explore that. And there probably is going to be a position or something. but I know I'm more excited about the opportunities on that one. I know you weren't, yeah, that one you didn't care about.
No, I mean, I was more like, let's get features done and to a place where we're happy with the feature set and then explore those kinds of things, which. No, I agree. I mean, there's a few things. You know the things. Things right now that we need to get out that actually then make Fathom, as far as I'm concerned, borderline. I don't want to say complete because everything will always change. Yeah.
There are some nagging features. I mean, to get these features out, I mean, even thinking about it now, yeah, the roadmap over the next few months is really just switching up the ingest. We have a new... like faster more scalable ingest that we're going to be deploying
which will be absolutely amazing. But it's like, that part's not exciting unless you're in tech, right? It's more just what that delivers in terms of features. And the reason that, like I think about it a lot, like why was it built like this in the first place? It was built like this in the first place because I didn't know any better.
we had ideas on what we were going to do so we built it like this and now you're like oh you've got to switch from this to this but you have to make this kind of foundational change there's a lot of that happening and one thing one change i have made already um like i'm no longer
doing there's no feature branches basically it's just everyone commits to the main branch and i just have to review it yeah which is like trunk based development or whatever that was i think i made that a while back now but That's happening because reviewing feature branches and code getting out of date, finding ways to be more efficient with the code stuff. But no, Enterprise isn't coming now. Yeah, there's too much.
Too much on the roadmap to do before I can even think about enterprise. Yeah. But at some point it'd be cool. But like outside of that, outside of the core roadmap we already have, I don't know, we run it. We always talked about everything. We always shared our thoughts. I don't know. I don't feel like it was like, oh, I'm not doing what I want to do because I can't. It never felt like that. So nothing really changes, to be honest with you. Literally, I can't think of anything.
Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, it's exactly the same. Yeah. And as needed, I'll be designing a couple of things here and there. So yeah, no, it's just, I'm excited to get back to coding, to be honest with you.
yeah this is taken up yeah i mean this i guess as well that's why it doesn't really feel like i've retired yet because we spent so there was so much like back and forth with just like lawyers justifying the rates that they charge for every project they take on okay yeah and that was very frustrating they ended up delivering and they were very good but it is frustrating in the moment when you're going through it
yeah oh we need to involve like this tax person and then oh we need to involve somebody from another province and then it's just like until it was finished it felt like it wasn't going to get finished and i think that's why i was stressed out and then as soon as it was finished and they delivered the documents we were like
Okay, they did a good job. This is good. They delivered on time, which we didn't know if that was going to happen. And everything ended up working out. But until it ended up working out, it was stressful because it was like... I don't know if this is going to happen on the date that we needed it to happen. We needed the date really just for ease of tax filing. So we just wanted to keep a date December 1st for that. So it was less complex.
free for you filing taxes it was the tax stuff the control and everything and tax and blah blah yeah because we like to keep things simple keeps it clean yeah yeah no that was it and you're right it has it's been a grind i have like i have not done much code it's been a stress and oh dear that's yeah i'm excited for that stuff to just be in the background and done and not even have to we still have a few documents to sign not related to the actual acquisition but the um
Dotting the T's. No, dotting the I's and crossing the T's. I don't know what language you dot T's in. Yeah, no. Russian. Yeah, probably with your brain cakes. But yeah, Fathom doesn't change. It's kind of boring in that no grand thing is happening, which is a good thing. Customers are happy that things are staying the same. Yeah. I'm excited for the future. Still grieving things a little bit, less so than I was in October, but I'm happy for you.
I'm happy for the next steps. A part of me thinks that you will happily spend the rest of your life gardening and doing like, if you become an extreme biker or something, I won't be surprised if you're like competing in races. That also won't surprise me. I won't be surprised if...
If you do end up starting another business, I think even before fathom, you weren't trying to start a business and you accidentally did. I don't know. Like I won't be surprised if you do something, but I also won't be surprised if you just like grow the world's biggest. I don't even know, like apple or strawberry or something like that. I wasn't surprised. I'm starting for them analytics. Yes. That works. No, thanks. I did it once. I don't need to do it a second time.
Yeah. I don't know, man. We'll see. Yeah. I'm curious to see what happens if anything. Yeah. But if you enjoy it, just chill and do nothing. That's also, I like the thing is you can't do nothing. You'll do something. It just won't be business. don't know if it'll be business yeah i mean the week after i retired i ripped out most of our electrical heating system and rebuilt it so in our house so like i
I like doing that kind of stuff. I got to take the ceiling fan, probably next week I got to take the ceiling fan out of our master bathroom and switch it for the other bathrooms. I don't think it's working properly, but I want to test it before I buy a new one. So, okay. So, okay. So you have been retired for, you've been retired. When did you start?
When were you done? Because we signed on December 1st. Yeah, but I think I stopped after we had the conversation and agreed to the basic terms at the end of October. So you've been retired, but super busy with everything. Yeah, yeah.
but cool yeah i don't know summertime it's winter time too so like it's not great outside so like most of the things i like to do although right now it looks like it's sunny so i am gonna go for probably a three or four hour bike ride after we record snow blizzard here yep Yeah. And then I'll edit this as well, probably later today, so we can get this out either tonight or tomorrow morning. Sweet. Another thing too, I got to decide what to do with the podcast. Like, do I just-
I don't know if I'm going to do it solo, if I'm going to do like, you know, guests have worked well in the past. Yeah, they have actually. Some of our most popular episodes have been like... guests on the show like rob and justin and a couple other people so and i think too you know you've written lots over your many years on the internet and it's like you're not going to come in and do like thought leadership stuff you know yeah on a podcast
so then we talk about ideas we talk about privacy maybe a bit of politics which isn't which is fun for us but like me and you don't take we like we haven't got the hard positions where you're going to get the crazy debate me and you are both is it apolitical where you just like fuck all politicians anti-political anti-political whatever yeah and that's not anarchist because i do like order but i just anyway um like we talk about what's happening at fathom like it isn't really
But that's it. What's happening? I'm working on this, doing this. So I don't know. We'll see. I mean, I have to have a think about that. Like in my head, I'm like, oh, I could do, I could start another podcast where I talk about tech stuff. And I'm like, oh, I don't know yet. this one already has a lot of subscribers so there's that as well yeah i could continue there's stuff to share i need to get an idea on how technical the audience is yeah i don't know it's things things to work out but
Yeah. That's, that's probably one of the biggest stresses actually is what I want to do with this podcast. Honestly, if I think about it, I feel like we're good about everything. I'm just like, I want to do the podcast though. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Anything else you want to share?
No, I mean, I feel kind of the same. Like I feel a bit sad that that chapter is coming to an end that like a big chapter in my life has come to an end work. Yeah. But I'm also excited for what's next, even though I have no fucking idea what that is. Yeah, that makes complete sense. Yeah, but I mean, I'm still just as keen on Fathom succeeding as I was pre-October.
yeah i just want you guys to uh to crush it and do as well as possible yeah get that first um series a round of investment hundreds of billions of dollars that's how i grew in my life yeah I don't forget that. You know, when I did that troll blog post about us taking a hundred million dollars of investment, I had people I haven't spoken to in years messaging me saying, congratulations, click on the link. And they go, fuck.
Yeah. Well, even yesterday when you tweeted that Fathom had been acquired and linked to the blog post that explained what happened, everybody was like, oh, congrats on it. And it's like, you didn't actually read. So this is how social media works. Like people don't read the article. They look at the headline and form.
decision got it yes that is social media sometimes yeah some people read it i think a lot of people expected it to be a troll because it's coming from me like waiting for the rick roll so they didn't click it because they're so used to it
yeah oh man i don't know it's fun i like to have fun i do like sure i could have just written like uh yeah this is how what's happening i could have been really boring and prescriptive but it's like i want to have fun with it it's fun like why not have fun with it
yeah and i mean kind of a month let's have some fun with the news yep and it worked and it ended up yeah exactly a lot of people have read that we were both refreshing the um are not refreshing just looking at the uh the real-time visitors yesterday which is fun Dude, I mean, yeah, it's insane. It's insane how many people have already read it. I mean, even right now, people are on that post. It's really cool. How do I know that? Fathom Analytics. Oh, man.
Okay. Well, it was nice podcasting with you for the episodes and goodbye. Yeah. Take care, everybody. And thanks for listening to me over the last bunch of years. And thanks for putting up with me as being part of Fathom. And I'm leaving Fathom in great and capable hands. So cheers, everybody. Bye.