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 w...
Dec 04, 2024•30 min•Ep 98•Transcript available on Metacast 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 deve...
Oct 15, 2024•30 min•Ep 97•Transcript available on Metacast 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.
Sep 30, 2024•19 min•Ep 96•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Aug 27, 2024•47 min•Ep 95•Transcript available on Metacast 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).
Jul 29, 2024•29 min•Ep 94•Transcript available on Metacast 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 corpora...
Jul 15, 2024•42 min•Ep 93•Transcript available on Metacast 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. Takeaways AI 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 accura...
Jun 04, 2024•22 min•Ep 92•Transcript available on Metacast 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.
May 22, 2024•37 min•Ep 91•Transcript available on Metacast 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.
May 06, 2024•42 min•Ep 90•Transcript available on Metacast 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.
Apr 22, 2024•23 min•Ep 89•Transcript available on Metacast 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.
Dec 18, 2023•18 min•Ep 88•Transcript available on Metacast 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.
Nov 14, 2023•24 min•Ep 87•Transcript available on Metacast 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.
Oct 30, 2023•30 min•Ep 86•Transcript available on Metacast 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.
Oct 16, 2023•30 min•Ep 85•Transcript available on Metacast 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.
Sep 25, 2023•31 min•Ep 84•Transcript available on Metacast 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.
Aug 28, 2023•27 min•Ep 83•Transcript available on Metacast 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.
Jul 31, 2023•1 hr 14 min•Ep 82•Transcript available on Metacast 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.
Jul 17, 2023•32 min•Ep 81•Transcript available on Metacast 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.
Jul 03, 2023•40 min•Ep 80•Transcript available on Metacast 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.
Jun 26, 2023•17 min•Ep 78•Transcript available on Metacast 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?
Jun 06, 2023•24 min•Ep 77•Transcript available on Metacast 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.
May 22, 2023•25 min•Ep 79•Transcript available on Metacast 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.
May 08, 2023•29 min•Ep 72•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Apr 24, 2023•51 min•Ep 74•Transcript available on Metacast 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/ .
Apr 10, 2023•57 min•Ep 76•Transcript available on Metacast 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.
Mar 27, 2023•30 min•Ep 75•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
Mar 13, 2023•1 hr 12 min•Ep 73•Transcript available on Metacast 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.
Feb 27, 2023•34 min•Ep 71•Transcript available on Metacast 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?
Feb 13, 2023•28 min•Ep 70•Transcript available on Metacast 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.
Jan 30, 2023•35 min•Ep 69•Transcript available on Metacast 
