And at the time the company was doing the low $1,000. . And the growth was ridiculously slow, the other option for Paul was that he was going to close, fathom down. Hello. Um, welcome back to Indy bikes. The podcast arriving you stories of fellow indie hackers in 15 minutes or less today, I'm joined by Jack Ellis, who is the co-founder of fathom analytics. The simple privacy focused alternative to Google analytics launched in 2018.
Now Jack handles the technical side of the business, but isn't afraid to get on the mic on their podcast, aboveboard or send out some spicy tweeze. JAG also runs a serverless Laravel course, which he launched back in 2020 to some success. After this conversation, Jack can stand into a true friend. We speak for several hours after the podcast, and he's genuinely a nice chap. Jack talks with great wisdom on his approach to bootstrapping a SAS company and taking on a huge incumbent like Google.
Thank you to my friend, Charlie from weekend club for sponsoring this episode with his new project part-time tech jobs, which is a fantastic site for finding and posting. You guessed it. Part-time tech jobs. If you're looking to transition for a full-time role to indie hacking, finding a part-time role might just be for you. De-risk in that transition. And on the other side, if you're looking to hire great entrepreneurial talent without breaking the bank, this is where you should post.
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Let's get into this conversation.
Jack. Welcome to the podcast. How are you doing?
I am wonderful. You are a true professional.
I love it. And I love it when I was speaking to people that have built, awesome businesses like you have with fathom. And when I was looking back into what Jack Ellis has done in the past is there's more to you than just running this privacy focused analytics platform. But what I'm also happy about is that I've got a fellow Brit on the mic which, which is always nice to me. And we can talk about stuff like Brexit and fuel prices or, or whatever else we want to.
talk me through fathom what it is as brief as you can why Paul and Danny started it and what made you join? Because it wasn't something that you co founded or started yourself. You joined an existing project. And for someone like a lot of indie hackers, when they want to start their own project, it's usually their own idea or a group of people come together with an idea. But this was something you joined a little bit later, you went 50, 50.
Was it hard to join in a project that had already started? And wasn't your own idea?
Fathom started, it was Paul's idea on Twitter, right? He posted a screenshot of it. Wasn't privacy focused or privacy. First. He was just sick to death of how complex Google was and getting simple answers from analytics. You just couldn't do that. And he had this vision of how it could be so much better. And then he worked on an open source version version of fathom with Danny.
And because Danny had some code from the past and they sort of, you know, work together, built this thing, the source repo was successful. And then I think Danny and Paul had a phone call put, they had a phone call right before me and Paul, because me and Paul were working on Pico, which was a medium competitor. And we had thousands of people on our waiting list. Very excited. They're very excited about that.
That's a, I forgot about Pico until you mentioned it this morning, but we were working on Pico and put what a call with Danny on Skype. And then we had a call directly after, and Paul's like, Danny's saying that he's done with father. And so when I'm like, oh shit, you know, that's not good poops, you know, Paul's not a developer, Paul's a designer. . And now he's lost his developer. So we immediately get to talking about the idea of me coming on board.
And at the time the company was doing the low $1,000. . And the growth was ridiculously slow, but you know, it was still enough to see that there was clearly product market fit. So we had this hard decision of do we keep doing Pico, which has thousands of people on the waiting list, but doesn't actually have any revenue or do I come on board and working it with Paul and Paul's written about this publicly, but the other option for Paul was that he was going to close, fathom down.
So it was a case that we're going to work together on this, or it's going to be. And fathom grew very, very slowly up until we launched version two, which was a complete redo. And we launched on product hunt and it just blew up from there, kept on growing. We thought, oh, this is actually becoming something.
That's interesting. And you said it when V2 launch did the product hunt launch and then it starts, started to grow quickly from that point. Can you think back to any of the inflection points in growth when you were like, yes, this is really working or maybe what you were doing apart from just having a great product for that growth,
pose. Audience helped a bit to begin with. We still get a few people off of pool, but we were very conscious that that can't be the only funnel. Product hunt helped Twitter, but done a ton of stuff on Twitter. We're very active on Twitter, Our content, game's very active. We're very public about what we do. You version two was just better. I know what he said. Don't just say better software, but version two was just better. So you have a better product.
You're going to get people that actually convert. It's not just about the traffic right before we had this dashboard. Really grossly simple. We didn't have countries browsers, that kind of thing. We didn't have anything like events or goals where suddenly we've got all this stuff and people got excited.
Well, I'm interested to know how you've sort of tried to change people's perception on analytics and paying for analytics because so many people are so used to getting them on a six from free from Google, I think is a powerful product. Marketing teams literally run their whole, content machine based on the data that Google has given them. And that is free. So how did you start to convince people to pay for something that they could originally get for free?
Yeah. So it's a mixture in our content and it's a mixture in general awareness of what's going on. People have learned that free is not free. There's some kind of trade off somewhere. And so the question is would you pay $14 a month for a company that isn't going to screw you? If your data isn't going to track your visitors around the web and is actually going to do the right thing. we're not under any kind of pressure from external investors, or we're not a publicly traded company.
So when Facebook starts doing various questionable advertising things, what are they driven by? They're not driven by being good people. They're driven by profits. , you know, once you're publicly traded. And I talked about this in our podcast, you have challenges too. If you start doing the right thing, but it's not profitable, then you can be sued by shareholders So I think it's harder for big tech companies to do the right thing a lot of the time.
or they're just idiots, like which one is they're either idiots or. Choose not to do the right thing, so fathom, obviously we care about profits, but we're not under any kind of pressure to do the wrong thing to think. Or maybe we can stop what a Google do, a stupid thing where they think they fingerprint your browser. They follow you around the web and they put you in this kind of group to target. You have adverse, and they think that that's better, not better.
So they've just got all the, but they've got these pressures though. They have to do this because they've got these. If they suddenly drop their revenues, then the CEO is going to get sacked or, you know, people will start losing their jobs. We just don't have this.
sort of answered my next question, which was about how do you go about tackling a product that has so much market share? If an indie hacker or an entrepreneur was thinking of creating a product that solves a problem where there is an absolute behemoth What would they have to do to cut out a little bit of that market share for them?
Compete on areas that our company can't compete on. So take a look at Derek Roemer. What he's doing with savvy cow Calendly, can't provide the same attention that he can. You know, innovate on your product. Again, coming back to savvy, Cal, I think Savik has a great idea. He's innovating in areas that Calendly isn't.
Let's move on then from fathom and talk a little bit about PK, because that is a product that I was really excited for. I medium competitor, fantastic medium and stipend ads everywhere and trying to monetize everything. And I was like, I really liked the writing style of medium or, or the writing experience, how it looks. And this was before I really started using ghost or knew what ghost was or or how guys had developed.
But this was your first time working with Paul Paul Jarvis author of company of
Oh, no second times first public time, I suppose. Well, we built a crypto. We built a kind of crypto product before experimenting with crypto technology beforehand. That was a joke project. And we worked on that together and that's how we kind of enjoyed working together.
How did you meet him and ended up deciding to work together on, on something?
So I was in BC for a holiday and I messaged Paul was always a part of Paul's course, actually. And I messaged him saying, whereabouts are you? And he's like, he just happened to be quite close to where I was living. we met for coffee and we just clicked on a bunch of stuff. And then we started Pico shortly after the Crip.
Before working with it with Paul, you always really wanted a hundred percent ownership on something. I understand people that do you want that a hundred percent? But what changed and how have you found the benefits of having a K founder?
Uh, It keeps you focused, keeps you grounded someone else to actually share the responsibility with being a solo founder sucks I mean, I'd worked all through the night till 5:00 AM full of sleep. Wake up, repeat. This was on rural Gainesville. I don't know if we talk about that, but just repeat and then you'd kind of get hung up on things for ages. You've got no one to sanity. Check you. Paul sanity checks me all the time and it always makes me laugh.
People assume that he's not involved in that the tax stuff. He was very much involved in the textile. Paul sanity checks me and helps me through stuff all the time. I think you need to work with someone that compliments your skills. I mean enough, for example, Justin Jackson were transistor. John's an incredibly talented programmer. Justin's great at marketing so you have to find a co-founder that compliments you else just stay solo and just hire people,
and so, so you say Pico is already built ready to go. You mentioned earlier in the episode about choosing to go on with fathom instead, and PK got acquired by ghost, and it's now a lovely little theme you can use. Tell me a little bit about how that acquisition came about.
Oh, easy. Paul's friends with John. They were talking over text and that was it done?
That is one way to sell a company. Uh, Jack, I'm interested in one of your first projects, raw gains, which you quit your job and started.
I was making 20,000 pounds a year. I was 20 something years old and I quit my job to work on this full-time and I thought that I was going to quit in June and by January I'd have enough customers to start making some money. I thought it was gonna be that simple. I go, oh, I was bad back then. I thought I had, you know, I had all these plans. I drew out just, I think analysis paralysis. Right. I wasted more time on things that ultimately just didn't matter.
What I should have been doing is focusing on a small set of features, shipping it, getting feedback, getting people excited. What I did instead was all I'm going to build the whole product before I launch it. I'm going to obsess. I'm going to spend ages on the design. I'm going to spend ages planning. The exact class structure of this PHP class is wasted time. And so I did everything wrong and I ended up shipping it late 2014, just to say that I shipped it, but it was crap.
It was no, it wasn't. It was, the technology was incredible, but it doesn't matter because no one was excited about it. No one really cared. I didn't do the white stuff. I did the opposite of everything I do now. So if I was doing war games again, I would have, like I say, built small bits of it shipped. It got people, excited, got people involved, all kinds of things, but I didn't do that. And I failed and I made no money and I \cried.
did You go back to, to get a job after that?
No, no, no. From that point on, I was doing full-time consulting
Was that up until the point in which she started Pico and father.
Yeah. So the transition I'm a full-time consulting was when I launched my course, the course did like a stupid amount on the first day, of course it's done $150,000 since March, 2020, but it was that income that helped pad things for me and was like, oh, okay. Cause father, like I was making good money. Right. And leaving it for fathom, for fathom to pay the same money that I was making was hard.
you've mentioned this again a couple of times, and it's really impressive what you did with your course, because after switching the entire fathom code base and go to PHB and two months, you thought you put all of this accumulated knowledge. Into your course serverless Laravel. what was your thinking behind putting all this work into a course?
I was tweeting about what we were doing. People were into. I was getting questions. I was getting emails and I just thought, you know what? People are actually interested in this knowledge. I spent more time than anyone else run into more problems because of our scale than anyone else. I've got all this knowledge. I'm going to put it into a course.
And I, at the beginning, I remember writing out my goals and all the goals were things I could control the goal was it doesn't matter if I don't sell. Courses, what matters is that, I mean, the eight you're going to learn a ton from this and I'll be ready for another course or for something else. And I'll actually get to help people, so it was serverless. Laravel that sold me. I need to make a course. I made, I started a course, got a waiting list on that, I shared tips publicly.
I shared what I was working on. I kept on storytelling because I share what I do. Like my goal on Twitter is to try, obviously I do a few shit posts here and there, but my goal on Twitter is to help people is to help them improve their lives. And I can't help everyone. People are, no people are smarter than me and everything else, but I can help a group of people. And that's all I did. And then more hype got people up for the course on, cause it was good. It was a good course.
And then people bought it.
did he make the course? was it just loom videos?
Oh, I can't even remember what I used. I used that one that all people use. What's it?
ScreenFlow.
or ScreenFlow that said, yeah, I use ScreenFlow and then I just kept on promoting it throughout the year. And like I said, it's done $150,000, which is stupid.
Jack. This has been an absolutely marvelous conversation. We've covered a lot of ground, but at the end of every episode, I asked for three recommendations. A book a podcast and an Indiana co-publisher follow or that you're inspired by
the book that really shook me was seven habits of highly effective people. Huberman lab is a really good podcast as a neurology, Stanford, and what, it just gives all the content for free. And then you say indie hacker. None. I don't care about indie hackers. I don't have heroes. I don't have groups that I have alliances with. I look at individual traits and I try to take traits that I like and implement them in my life.
So James you, for example, I very much admire how particularly organized you worked for this episode. I haven't seen prep like that before, so I don't say, oh, James is amazing. I say, oh, well, this thing that James does is amazing. So like, I respect you for that.
Data. I really appreciate that. And throughout the episode, we've had a few people mentioned too, who were doing good things. So, appreciate the honesty. The apps that you wonderful recommendations. Thank you jack for joining me on indie bites
Thank you. Thank you for listening to this episode with Jack Ellis, the co-founder of fathom analytics, all the links to everything we discussed in this episode will be in the show notes or a bites diaphragm. If you'd like to support me on my journey, becoming a full-time indie hacker, you're doing exactly that by listening to this pod. But I'd love it. If you just checked out my new course, just to give me feedback so I can make it better. But that's all for me. See you next week.