Above Board

Paul has once again quit the internet, but this time he’s left Twitter (namely, this personal Twitter account). What does this mean for Fathom, if anything?NFTs were the final (minor) strawFathom’s recent launch of FathomCatz was the final straw in my decision to leave Twitter behind. I was excited to launch this fun new project, thought through the environmental aspect of blockchain things, and set up a local animal shelter to donate most of the proceeds to.But then, the second I shared it, a troll surfaced to cut down my tweet. At first, I was mad, but then I realized:I don’t feel like defending myself and my ideas to everyone, everywhere, all the time.I don’t need to “be right” to others who don’t matter.I don’t need to argue with strangers.I don’t need my attention and mental bandwidth to be taken up by social media.So while the NFT troll didn’t matter and wasn’t why I left, it was the final straw (of thousands) that led to the decision to remove my Twitter account permanently.Does this decision impact Fathom?Initially (i.e. years ago when Fathom Analytics started), a large chunk of new customers and awareness for Fathom came from my personal audience—via my mailing list and my writing.Currently, this is no longer the case. Fathom isn’t just “Paul and Jack do software”; it’s its own brand. Sure, “Paul and Jack” the people are part of it, but the order goes Fathom first as the brand, then us.So while removing my personal Twitter account could impact sales and growth with Fathom, it’s undoubtedly very minor. And, we have no plans to get rid of our Fathom Twitter account.We’ve (especially myself) been very conscious about how we build the brand for Fathom: where the product is always first (or our cats are first?), and Jack and my personalities are a far second. Yes, who we are as cofounders of the company matters a great deal, but it’s the most important thing. And thankfully, we’re now at a place where my personal brand disappearing shouldn’t have a noticeable impact.Scale scales negativityWhen you have a small audience, there’s typically less negativity because there are just fewer people. But as an audience grows (as mine did), the number of trolls also increases.Tim Ferriss has written about this (and the negative aspects of fame), as his audience is as big as you can get on the internet. And with it can come a volume of responses that one person could never be able to have time or mental capacity to deal with.The Fathom NewsletterYes, at the start of the episode, I spoke about deleting my personal newsletter, but the reasons for deleting that don’t apply to… the new Fathom content newsletter.The Fathom newsletter exists because we wanted a better way to distribute the articles and podcast episodes we’re creating all the time and putting a great deal of time and energy into. So it’s not a “personal, Paul Jarvis” newsletter; it’s a roundup of what Fathom has been up to, what we’ve written about or what we’ve talked about on our Above Board podcast.

Jack and Paul get into the pros and cons of indie companies sharing their MRR and MRR milestones publicly. There’s definitely an appeal to sharing this, as many companies do, but is it worth doing, or more importantly, actually helpful, useful or beneficial to do so? Or, is sharing your gross revenue, just gross?

In today’s episode Jack and Paul get into why they had to roll back a piece of a new feature they spent a year building (and had to delete an episode of this show). As well as touching on why ad-blockers hate us in the most misguided way, why our EU isolation is such an important feature, and most importantly, why Fathom doesn’t simply guess at privacy laws - we hire multiple experts to inform our decisions. Not going as far as we do in the legal department would put our customers at legal risk.

Sometimes Jack and Paul feel like every day is groundhog day, and that not much changes day-to-day. But in reality, lots has been launched, updated, changed, and made progress on. Including: a content survey, a new freelance writer, Fathom NFTs, open-sourcing a Fathom project, disabling MRR emails and how we think about support as it relates to growth.

Jack and Paul get into all the things that have been happening behind the scenes at Fathom Analytics, including: a new graph, some nerdy details about infrastructure updates, better labels for data on our dashboard, the new high traffic page, and our latest multi-domains feature.

Jack and Paul discuss what it means to work in public and tweet about “coming soon” features. They also talk about how the momentum from releasing new features plays a pivot role in Fathom’s growth, and how it’s simply not possible to stay on the feature momentum train at all times.usefathom.com/above-board

On today’s show, Jack and Paul speak to the enigmatic and mysterious founder of Carrd, “AJ”. Carrd is a single page website builder that started in 2016 and now has over 2 million users, 3 million sites and is doing over $1 million in ARR. Our conversation covered how Carrd caught on and grew, what led Kim Kardashian to share a Carrd website, and why AJ decided to accept venture capital funding for his business.

Should you compete on price? Should you go after lots of smaller customers or a few massive customers? In this episode Jack and Paul have an honest conversation about who Fathom is for, and who Fathom isn’t for. They discuss pricing, enterprise customers, and how they are adapting the business to be more in line with the specific type of customers that best suit the software.

Jack and Paul figure out live, on-the-air, how they want to approach bringing more people into Fathom to work on the core product and integrations. They also cover the “VC vs non-VC: fight!” debate and where Fathom’s operating philosophy fits.

Jack and Paul get candid about the behind-the-scenes of launching a major software product release (previously known as “v3). What went wrong, what went right, how feedback is going, and of course, what’s next.

In this episode Jack and Paul speak with Julia Angwin, the co-founder and editor in chief of The Markup, a newsroom who uses technology to investigate technology (Big Tech). The conversation covered why The Markup is a non-profit, what their methods for investigating are, why digital privacy is important, and what the potential solutions are to fixing Big Tech’s inclinations towards deviousness.

Caffeine is the most consumed psychoactive substance in the world. Jack’s gone from 6 or more shots of espresso daily to cold turkey—and has been noticing a clearer head and improved thought processes. As well as a lively discussion about caffeine, Jack and Paul chat about the latest news from WWDC as it relates to privacy, as well as a brand new (secret) Fathom podcast project which Paul is working on.usefathom.com

Jack and Paul share their views on the turmoil at Basecamp and why they deleted the episode of this podcast that featured DHH. They also talk a lot about what’s coming as far as updates to Fathom (and v3), and why Fathom has switched from “coming soon” marketing to “now” marketing… and what that means.https://usefathom.com/podcast/basecamp

Today Paul caught up with Rand Fiskhin, co-founder of Sparktoro (market research + audience intelligence SaaS). They spoke about starting a business at the start of the pandemic, why aggregated data (i.e. trends) can useful, why Rand isn’t growing a huge company but hiring consultants instead. And, of course a lively debate about digital privacy and targeted advertising.

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Jack and Paul give their professional(ish) opinion the weight and risks of using external scripts on a website. They talk about what is considered with Fathom's embed script and what the ramifactions are of other scripts (like Facebook). There's also a touch of cryptocurrency, pair programming and a smattering of database migration too.

A quick catchup with Jack “and team” about what’s going on with Fathom and our upcoming V3 release. As well as why we believe ad-blockers got it wrong about unilaterally blocking all third-party scripts… and why that’s fired us up to create something that’s (as Jack puts it), “completely unblockable”.Here more episodes at usefathom.com/podcast

A virtual cornucopia of topics in this week’s show. We cover getting an amazing new customer using Fathom, the DogeCoin revolution and investing in general, and of course, some very specific details and features that are coming soon to Version 3 of Fathom.

If you’re starting a new business (like a SaaS) you may think, “let’s make this a really low price so that everyone will use it because it’s really cheap”. A race to the bottom in pricing is never a good idea (both for you or your customers). Jack and Paul discuss why the best-case scenario with that idea is you’ll get screwed by your own growth.usefathom.com

What happened when Paul quit the internet? What does it mean for Fathom? What does it mean for Jack now having to field every Paul-related tweet? This, and talking about professionalism/tone as a business, all in today’s episode.usefathom.com

In this episode Jack and Paul speak with Bron Gondwana, the CEO of Fastmail and how they’ve managed to run their privacy-focused email software since 1999. The conversation covers balancing privacy with real-world usability, competing with one of the worlds biggest tech company, why they no longer offer a free product, and much more.usefathom.com

A malicious person decided they wanted to have a go at ruining our company and it’s reputation. In this episode Paul interviews Jack about a high level attack that was targeted at Fathom Analytics. We cover what happened, how we responded and talked to our customers about it, and then what we’re doing to mitigate this type of threat in the future.usefathom.com

Jack and Paul connect with DuckDuckGo’s Communications Manager, Daniel Davis to chat about their search business, DDG's take on digital privacy, and how DDG competes with big tech (Google). This is the first of many episodes where we speak with other companies in the digital privacy space.usefathom.com

Jack and Paul talk about taking a short break from this show until November or so. Also hear Paul lose his sh*t about the state of banking in Canada, a bit more on enterprise sales processes, and how they're slightly tweaking their charitable donations.usefathom.com

Jack and Paul get into a smorgasbord of topics on today’s show including: Jack’s Laracon talk, building an audience, what to do about all the virtue signalling in the ethical product space and much, European privacy laws and their impact on American businesses and services, and much more.usefathom.com

On today’s episode Jack and Paul chat about using competitiveness to your advantage, the good and bad of video games, how we dealt with a very viral customer, the logic of a privacy-focused company like Fathom using a platform like Youtube and Jack’s upcoming Laracon talk.usefathom.com

On today’s show Jack and Paul talk about the reasons Fathom asks for a credit card up front, and how that impacts our growth. They also get into why people buy certain SaaS products. As an added bonus, Jack calculates how much it’d cost you to use Facebook is they removed any/all ads and targeting and charged their users instead. Spoiler: it’s a LOT less than you think.usefathom.com

On today's show Paul and Jack chat about bringing a privacy officer on board, why taking proper breaks are important (even if you run an indie business) and what we are considering for the future of Fathom Analytics (version 3). Jack makes a joke about steak-cations, which does not land well.usefathom.com

Jack and Paul dissect a few issues they've had with other companies and leadership at those companies, and then how those companies responded (both the good and the bad).usefathom.com

Jack and Paul answer questions from listeners today, including: our favourite pancake recipe, the tools/apps we use to collaborate, how we determine hiring vs bringing on cofounder vs freelancers, and our full design and development processes. We also touch on food and routines (because it's not an episode without Paul mentioning he's vegan).usefathom.com

Jack and Paul speak about having to fire a customer for the first time. It was tough, but it had to be done. They also discuss boundaries, tolerance and office politics.usefathom.com

We’re not trying to sell you anything right now, we’re only here to share our experiences making money working for ourselves. The techniques discussed in this podcast episode can help you generate millions of dollars.usefathom.com/podcast

Jack and Paul get into if Fathom should create and post videos to YouTube (which is obviously owned by Google). Are you a bad person if you watch YouTube? Are you a worse person if you upload videos to their service? usefathom.com

Joe Rogan recently signed an exclusivity deal worth $100M with Spotify which goes into effect sometime after September 2020. Is this a trend towards the end of podcasts being a free and open platform? Is this moving more towards how televisions shows have functioned with networks since the start? Are listeners going to suffer or benefit from deals like this? Jack and Paul debate the pros & cons… two enter the cage, one leaves (sorry, we had to make a bad MMA joke).usefathom.com

Jack and Paul discuss the pros and cons of supporting enterprise clients, along with a SPECIAL GUEST: Ben Orenstein from Tuple. How are thinking about working with bigger clients while still ensuring our smaller clients are happy and taken care of?usefathom.com

A lot of businesses put money before their customers’ happiness. We’ve all been there: we get a bill for a yearly subscription, but didn’t get any warning about the charge happening. And then, if we want to cancel, have to go through the onerous process of cancelling… sometimes via phone, to get the charge (hopefully) reserved. Jack and Paul dive into this topic, explain why Fathom doesn’t do this (and why it works out well), as well as cover several other topics like general expenses, standing desks and new features in our privacy-focused website analytics software.https://usefathom.com

Jack and Paul talk about the benefits and problems involving taking venture capital for a software company, what we think about competitors copying us, and why “free markets” should potentially have some limits or at least some regulations.usefathom.com

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Paul and Jack get brutally honest about the current pandemic, and it’s horrible effect on small businesses. Oh, and they also get into cruise ship bailouts, the Canadian government (and what they’re doing right), and building toilet paper roll forts while video conferencing.

Jack and Paul dive deep into what goes into a design (if you're a designer, like Paul), and talk about the value of design. Jack queries Paul about his process and approach, and how developers can learn a few tips to make their designs suck a little less.

It's the end for Jack, as he has a heart to heart discussion about wrapping things up for good.

As you know, Jack and Paul are the cofounders of Fathom Analytics, a 50/50 split. What do they think about working as cofounders? Is it better to be a solo founder? What are benefits of only making half as much (and giving the rest to someone else)? Let's dive in on this nail-biting episode.

From content marketing, to paid ads, to social media, Jack and Paul dive into every single type of marketing they’ve done to promote Fathom. They talk about the effectiveness of each, as well as the difference between “marketing as brand awareness” vs “marketing as driving conversions”. Paul also drops a #thoughtleader bombshell, “Marketing is talking when you have something to say, not just when you have something to sell”.

Jack and Paul ring in the new year with a hearty debate about how many hours you need to work per week. Is it as simple as “no more than 40”, or is this debate more nuanced?

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https://usefathom.com

Welcome to the Above Board Podcast. In this podcast Jack Ellis and Paul Jarvis will discuss all things Fathom Analytics (the product they co-own), ethics and business, and whatever else comes up as they build and sell their software product. Learn more at usefathom.com