Ep. 204 - James Gill, GoSquared Founder on Building a Small Business Platform

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, founder of InsideOutside.io, a provider of research, events, and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we give you a front row seat to the latest thinking, tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's get started.

Interview Transcript

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today with us on our second IO Live event is James Gill. James is the founder of GoSquared. Welcome to the show, James. 

James Gill: Hi, thanks for having me, Brian pleasure to be here. Looking forward to chatting. 

Brian Ardinger: Well, I'm excited to have you back on the show and regular listeners will know that we had a chat probably about a year ago when you were on the show. Talking about some of this no code stuff that was just popping up and that. And so, when we decided to go to a live event, I figured, Oh, I want to get James back in to talk about...a lot has happened in the last year or the last week. Exactly. Why don't you give the audience a little bit of background about your journey as a founder, a long time ago when you started GoSquared as a wee lad, as I like to say, and then we'll go from there.

James Gill: Thanks again, Brian, for having me. It’s crazy times. Sure, we've got a lot to dig into. Just as a bit of background on me, I'm one of the founders of a company called GoSquared. We're a software as a service business. We perhaps haven't taken the traditional route of a software business. We started the business, back when I was in school with two of my friends back when we were just wee teenagers.

So over 10 years ago, we'd been together running a company. We used to build websites together and stumbled into building software, and we really love it. And fast forward to today. Continue to be a self-sustaining profitable software business. We got thousands of small businesses that use our software all around the world. GoSquared as a platform is all about helping small businesses grow online. So, we help you with that full customer journey from acquiring leads at the top of the funnel through to engaging with them throughout their journey, and ultimately looking after them and keeping them happy as they continue to be customers of our customers.

We really love running a business. It's been a wild ride. There's so much to get into, but myself I'm pretty much a self-confessed like product geek. I love design. Obviously, there's a lot we can dig into in terms of software. We use GoSquared, and the lessons we've had since becoming an entirely remote team and trying to keep things running smoothly.  Happy to take whatever questions people have.

Brian Ardinger: Let's start there. You're in London right now? Talk a little bit about your team. And did you have an office? Were the people working remotely? How are you hanging in there? 

James Gill: First of all. Yeah, I think were hanging in there okay. Thanks, Brian. I hope you are too, in terms of how we operate. It's a weird one actually. When we were at school, we used to all work from home. We used to work from our family homes, you know, probably coding away in the early hours of the morning or in the night when we should have been doing homework, building things and working from home. And that was how we started building GoSquared back in the day.

And then as time went on, we became more of a proper business and gradually we moved to London and then we sort of centralized there and that's kind of the way we'd been until literally like a month or two ago. And we always had a team in London that was always when we had face to face, lots of benefits of that. But last year, one of the team. Well, he moved up to Scotland with his partner and he really pushed us to think like how do we operate with everyone in one office and one person in Scotland. And so, it started making us rethink quite a few things around how we communicated, how we operated. 

As 2019 went on we found it was working really well. And then we made our first hire from the outset. There was a remote employee and we brought in someone who is based in Costa Rica of all places. By the end of last year, we already had two people full time, remote employees, and he really taught us a lot about how to communicate, how to make sure people are, hopefully not left out of the loop, how to prioritize sort of asynchronous communication because Costa Rica, you've got a time zone issues too.

And so, we've kind of tried a lot of that stuff out and, but the rest of the team remained in the office. And then obviously with this all happening, as soon as things started getting serious, like we insisted on everyone working from home. We didn't want to take any risks. And, you know, all, any of us need really is a laptop to work from home. So as far as I'm concerned, as software businesses and SaaS businesses, like we are in no rush to get back to the office. Like we are very happy to be the last businesses returning to offices. The more we can stay out of public transport and mingling with the rest of the people. Like there's no urgency for us to be back. More than happy to chat more about like some of the stuff we've been doing more recently to make this work.

It's been a whole lot of stuff from tooling. Like we use Slack for team chat, but we also obsessively use great a tool called Notion for like internal documentation. We obviously use GoSquared to understand and communicate with our customers. There's been a bunch of lessons from that and also just process things as well like how we engage with the team. 

Brian Ardinger: Let's talk a little bit about this no-code movement. You know, one of the things that how I found GoSquared is I'm not a technical cofounder, but I put a lot of stuff together and I cobble and hack together stuff. And I found GoSquared as a really easy way for me to take a lot of the marketing automation and specifically the chat robot. I put that onto my events and that, so I could have real time interactions with customers. So, talk about how you've seen the no-code movement come to bear. And how's that affecting your customer's ability to actually interact and do more stuff with their customers. 

James Gill:  I think it's an interesting one, I guess, adopting that term "no code" has made it a movement, but from my perspective, I've always viewed it as making stuff easier to do and use. And, and I think just fundamentally, like we're just continuously on this train towards enabling anyone to do what they need to do online and brew software. And so I think a lot of it could be replaced from like from code to no code to just stuff that was hard to do, that's now easy to do. From my perspective, I'm not a coder. I can tinkle around with HTML and CSS, but I'm all about design and how it looks, how it works. Whereas I've always been very fortunate to have co-founders that are now a team that can actually code and engineer and develop real hardcore software. It's always frustrated the hell out of me whenever I hit that block of like, not being able to do it, you know, if you need to write some Java script or whatever, and it makes engineers almost seemed like mag...