Above Board

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-run bootstrapped companies.

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, running a growing company, hiring, and so much more. So you can’t just remove distractions because the distraction (your company) is just as important as the product you’re building.

At the time of recording this episode, Coinbase just laid off 18% of their workforce and they rescinded all job offers that had already been already accepted.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 importance of moving slowly to move quickly. Jack talks through the reasons for moving Fathom’s codebase from Ember JS to Inertia.js and Vue.js.

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 psychologist, speaker, podcaster, best-selling author, yoga teacher, and mental health advocate. Her company, ZenFounder, provides mental wellness resources to leaders and entrepreneurs as they navigate transition, loss, conflict, or any manner of complex human experience. 

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 the end user of their software. Is it because free users of GA aren't their true customers? Is it because Google is tired of being bogged down by privacy rulings against them? Is it because SMBs weren't converting to their paid GA360? Or, is it because the true customers of Google Analytics data are advertisers, not the website owners who install GA?