Above Board

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.

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...

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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-r...

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).

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, r...

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).

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 importan...

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 psychologis...

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 th...

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...

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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."