A podcast exploring running an indie + bootstrapped software (SaaS) company. Follow Jack and Paul (the co-founders) in their journey of building and growing Fathom Analytics. Published every two weeks, listen in on lively debates about profit, customers, software, and how they’re working to keep their business in line with their values. This is a podcast from Fathom Analytics (usefathom.com).
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In-depth conversations with bootstrapped entrepreneurs building profitable internet businesses. Including both members and friends of the Ramen Club community. Ramen Club is building the community, content and tools supporting founders to ramen profitable, and beyond.
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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 D…
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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.By Fathom Analytics
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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 poli…
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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).…
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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 in…
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Exploring the Ethics and privacy implications of AI
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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 ethica…
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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.…
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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.By Fathom Analytics
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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.…
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Version 3.5 and the shape of things to come with Fathom Analytics
18:28
18:28
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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.…
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Growing an SEO Content Agency to $700k ARR: Julian Canlas
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On this episode, we spoke to a friend and long-time Ramen Club member, Julian Canlas, the co-founder of Embarque.io. Embarque is an on-demand content marketing productised service. Started 3 years ago, it’s now making $700k+ ARR, having worked with clients like VEED, Riverside FM and Buy Me A Coffee to name just a few. We discussed the future of SE…
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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.By Fathom Analytics
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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 o…
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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.By Fathom Analytics
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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.By Fathom Analytics
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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.…
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Building Fathom Analytics to 450k+ Sites: Jack Ellis
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49:51
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We spoke to Jack Ellis, Jack is the co-founder of Fathom Analytics, along with Paul Jarvis, and host of the Above Board podcast. Fathom is a privacy-focused web analytics SaaS and excellent Google Analytics alternative. I use Fathom personally on about 5 different websites and can confirm that it’s far easier to navigate and use, in addition to bei…
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Boostrapping to $25k/month: Dominic Monn (MentorCruise)
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We spoke to Dominic Monn, a longtime Ramen Club member, about bootstrapping MentorCruise - the go-to marketplace to find a career coach or mentor. They help career professionals turn their knowledge into a marketable coaching business, and also make it possible for mentees to find a perfect mentor with just a few clicks. Covering all sorts of topic…
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Justin Jackson and Paul Jarvis chat about starting and maintaining a SaaS
1:14:05
1:14:05
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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 putti…
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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.…
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What does retirement look like for a SaaS founder?
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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.By Fathom Analytics
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What’s important when everything’s important in your company?
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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 con…
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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?By Fathom Analytics
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The saga of building our Google Analytics Importer
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25:09
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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.…
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How our SaaS company approaches marketing and promotion
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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…
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Ruben Gamez on marketing, long-term success and making the right decisions as business owners
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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 g…
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How to build a multi-million dollar SaaS without funding (an interview with Rob Walling)
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56:36
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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/.By Fathom Analytics
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Growing an email lead list builder to $20k MRR: Valentin Wallyn (FindyMail)
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39:04
In this episode, Ramen Club founder, Charlie Ward, has a conversation with long time member, Valentin Wallyn. His main product, FindyMail, is now at $20k MRR. It's a high quality email finder tool with an automation layer. Designed to help B2B salespeople build lead lists faster for cold outreach. It lets you scrape Sales Navigator, Apollo and much…
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Silicon Valley Bank and bootstrapped companies
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29:56
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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.By Fathom Analytics
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Matt Wensing on Product Market Fit, raising money and enterprise sales in SaaS
1:12:29
1:12:29
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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 z…
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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.By Fathom Analytics
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Are programmers going to be replaced by OpenAI?
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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?By Fathom Analytics
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Jack and Paul answer your questions (Pt. 2)
34:41
34:41
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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.By Fathom Analytics
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Jack and Paul answer your questions (Pt. 1)
25:54
25:54
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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.By Fathom Analytics
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Scaling an Airtable extension to $10k MRR: Andy Cloke (Data Fetcher)
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In this episode, Ramen Club founder, Charlie Ward, has a conversation with long time member, Andy Cloke. They discuss Andy’s unconventional journey to becoming a software engineer, how he discovered indie hacking and how he’s grown not one, but two, successful bootstrapped projects. His current product, Data Fetcher, is a tool that allows you to br…
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3.2m YouTube Views Growing Weight Loss Business: Richa Prasad (Coach Viva)
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We interviewed Richa Prasad, Co-Founder of Coach Viva, on growing her weight loss business large enough to make a living from it, using YouTube as an effective growth channel (3.2m+ views) and much more. The Ramen Club Podcast brings you in-depth conversations with bootstrapped entrepreneurs building profitable internet businesses. Including both m…
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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 muc…
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A brief history of (Fathom Analytics) time
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19:19
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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 c…
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Can bootstrapped startups survive a recession?
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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 …
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The art of making great decisions for your business
38:53
38:53
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38:53
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…
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When the business itself becomes the distraction
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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 its…
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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 …
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$15m GMV by age 19: Che Sampat (SuperPay)
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50:49
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We interviewed Che Sampat, Founder of SuperPay & SuperPortal ($15m GMV). The Ramen Club Podcast brings you in-depth conversations with bootstrapped entrepreneurs building profitable internet businesses. Including both members and friends of the Ramen Club community. Ramen Club is building the community, content and tools supporting founders to rame…
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Growing a maid service SaaS to $1.8m ARR: Amar Ghose (ZenMaid)
52:05
52:05
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We interviewed Amar Ghose, co-founder of ZenMaid, on growing his maid service SaaS to $1.8m ARR. The Ramen Club Podcast brings you in-depth conversations with bootstrapped entrepreneurs building profitable internet businesses. Including both members and friends of the Ramen Club community. Ramen Club is building the community, content and tools sup…
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Growing a mobile app to 500k downloads: Matthew Callery (CV Engineer)
40:56
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We spoke to Ramen Club member Matthew Callery on growing CV Engineer, his iOS/Android native resume building app to 500k downloads and 90k Daily Active Users. The Ramen Club Podcast brings you in-depth conversations with bootstrapped entrepreneurs building profitable internet businesses. Including both members and friends of the Ramen Club communit…
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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 Fatho…
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Dr. Sherry Walling on the mind of entrepreneurs
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58:12
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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 e…
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Is Google Analytics 4 a middle finger to SMBs?
28:32
28:32
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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, …
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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 fun…
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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.…
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