Fathom Analytics

These Two Founders Are Disrupting Google Analytics & Grew 70% Last Year

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Paul Jarvis

Founder, Fathom Analytics

Founders

Employees

Fathom Analytics

usefathom.com

from Victoria, BC, Canada

started April 2018

Founders

Employees

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I’m Paul Jarvis, the cofounder of Fathom Analytics. I run the company with Jack Ellis, our technical co-founder and Chief Hype Officer.

We pioneered the world’s first simple, privacy-focused website analytics software. We did it fully and proudly bootstrapped. We’re GDPR compliant, including Schrems II, and bypass ad-blockers so our customers see 100% of their data (not just the half who don’t use ad-blockers).

We started as an open-source side project, but quickly grew it into a hosted + paid SaaS, which now runs on enterprise-class infrastructure.

We’ve now got thousands of customers, including folks like Github, IBM, Buffer, and many more companies and governments who value the privacy of their website visitors. While we don’t focus specifically or exclusively on growth, it happens because we put our customers first, and in the last year we’ve grown more than 70%.

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What's your backstory and how did you get into entrepreneurship?

I’ve worked for myself for almost 25 years. I started as a freelance designer, working for companies like Microsoft, Mercedes-Benz, Yahoo, and startups around the world.

If you make a profit right from the beginning, then you can figure out everything else.

I then shifted into writing and content, with my most recent book being Company of One (which has been translated into over 20 languages so far).

In 2018 I was feeling annoyed that Google Analytics was bulky, hard to use, and didn’t care about the privacy of visitors. But it was also on 85% of websites on the internet. So one day I decided to quickly mockup what I thought analytics should look like, and I tweeted it out. To my surprise, thousands of people liked it and wanted to pay for it as a product (even though it was just a visual of what I thought it could be).

From there, we built Fathom into an open-source project, which has been downloaded millions of times. So the validation for Fathom, from start to now, has been seeing how many people are interested in using it and wanting us to keep going with it. Even once it transitioned into a paid product, our growth has been incredible, our churn has been low, and our biggest sales channel now is our customers telling everyone they know to give our software a try.

Take us through your entrepreneurial journey. How did you go from day 1 to today?

I went to university for Computer Science and artificial intelligence but dropped out after only a year because I got a job offer that paid more than I figured I’d make with a degree. I honestly haven’t looked back since then, as not all my entrepreneurial endeavors have been successful (only about half have), but I’ve tried so many things that enough have paid off and helped me level up to the next idea.

I spent 15 or so years doing client work as a freelancer, which was great, but showed me that instead of having a single boss at a company, I had dozens of bosses a year with each project. So I wanted to change things up and become the boss—so I started making my products.

Since my background is design and writing, I started making products that were courses and books. Those sold well and helped me build a pretty large audience, but it felt like to generate income each month, I had to either be doing updates or creating something new all the time. The piece that was missing was recurring revenue.

After I built an audience, I started to try my hand at software (with technical cofounders). I co-created 5 or 6 SaaS products, but not took off the way my courses and books had. It wasn’t until Fathom that I saw how amazing it was to find a real product-market-fit. And while we do work hard at marketing Fathom, we know that there’s a great fit for people because it’s not been nearly as hard to amass customers as it was with my previous software companies.

How are you doing today and what does the future look like?

We define “profitable” as including our salaries. Because a company isn’t profitable unless it can cover its expenses AND pay the people working on it. So while we never took money or operated truly in the red, we’ve made enough to cover our full-time salaries for a few years now (which has felt great).

Currently Fathom is Jack and me (the co-founders), with a full-time developer, and part-time folks helping with content, SEO, servers, lawyers, and our Privacy Officer. We’re a pretty small team, but we work well together and accomplish quite a lot for our size.

I have no idea if our margins are good or bad compared to other SaaS companies that do similar. We spend a lot on serverless infrastructure because we don’t want to deal with managing servers, so we have best-in-class, enterprise-level systems architecture, which isn’t cheap. We also hire the best people (who cost a lot), so we don’t have to manage or watch over their work. Another huge (but worth it) expense for us is legal—because we deal with a lot of privacy laws and compliance with them, we don’t want to guess at these things because we don’t want to risk our customers getting fined. So we have lawyers around the world who specialize in privacy law, and our first hire was our Privacy Officer.

We spend very little money on ads and customer acquisition, instead of spending time on crafting compelling content on our blog and podcast. We also sponsor a lot of open-source software that we use and donate 2% of our gross revenue to environmental charties.

In terms of the future, we plan to continue to add features to Fathom, to innovate on things related to privacy and privacy law compliance, and just ensure our customers continue to be happy with their choice to use our software.

Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?

I fully admit that I’ve been lucky enough to always have well-paying work that afforded me enough time for side projects. So I could work on things like Fathom on the side until it took off enough to stop doing what I was doing full-time and switch over to Fathom full-time (but still make a decent living).

Being the guy who the book on questioning rapid growth and running a calm company, I’ve always approached my work in the same way.

With any endeavor, I’ve always worked to reach profitability as quickly as possible. The point at which your business is operating in the black (we’ll call it MVPr from here on in)—keep in mind that the lower the number, the quicker you can reach it. The assumption at work here is that your MVPr—not the number of your customers, not your measured growth, not even your gross revenue—is the most important determinant of the sustainability of your company. If you make a profit right from the beginning, then you can figure out everything else.

I’ve also always been ok with having a lifestyle business. As in, I want a business that supports my life, not a life that supports my business. I would challenge that with the idea that every business, at any size, is a lifestyle business—each comes with its own choice in how you want to live, so knowing that gives you great power to make better decisions. All business is simply a choice in the life we want outside of it. One choice isn’t better than any other, they’re simply choices, guided by internal factors.

I honestly feel that the byproduct of business success isn’t growth, it’s freedom.

Bringing it back around to “luck” (from the start of this answer), we were also lucky to launch Fathom at a time when the world was starting to wake up to the implications of digital privacy and surveillance capitalism. I remember the day we launched our v1 on ProductHunt was also the day Mark Zuckerberg was testifying in front of congress about Facebook continuing to violate its user’s privacy. We didn’t time it that way, but it worked out that something we cared about (digital privacy) was starting to take center stage in the consciousness of the more general population of internet users.

What platform/tools do you use for your business?

As a privacy-focused company, we always lean towards other privacy-focused tools when possible. That’s why we use products like Fastmail, DuckDuckGo, 1Password (full list can be found here).

As far as our tech stack goes, Jack is the technical co-founder, and he’s written about it here.

We don’t use many marketing tools or software to run Fathom. We use Twitter for our main social channel, we use our blog to tell stories about our brand and what we’re working on, and our podcast to share the day-to-day of running a bootstrapped company.

We programmed our affiliate program to be as privacy-friendly as possible, and lots of other small things that other companies would just go out and by, but because we want to ensure the privacy of our customers, we tend to build ourselves.

What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?

It sounds kind of weird/egotistical, but our company does run on the principles from my book Company of One.

It’s not tooting my own horn either, there are lots of ways to run a company, but I wrote the book because that’s how I feel about business, and luckily my co-founder Jack agrees.

I listen to Art of Product and Build your Saas, because they are doing the same thing we are, and it’s great to have insight into their companies.

Jack and I also spend a great deal of time talking to other SaaS founders directly—what they’re working on, what they’re struggling with, and how they’ve managed to solve problems on their end. It’s much easier to run a business when you’ve got support from other folks in similar situations.

Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?

I think there’s an obvious thing that a lot of folks miss and then spend months or years languishing over:

Did we create something that other people want to buy from us?
Do those same people want to keep buying or can we find new people to also buy from us?

If those two things can’t be satisfied quickly, it’s going to be a huge uphill battle from the start. A lot of times people start a business because they guess at what people want, then spend months or years building it privately only then to test it in the market.

Instead, what I’ve found to work better, is to build the smallest version of the thing and test it in the market quickly. Then you can either adapt/pivot for product-market-fit, or abandon it and start something new.

Lots of times people will say “Oh ya, I’d buy that!” but in reality, they won’t. So it’s best to give them away to put their money where their mouth is quick, so you aren’t wasting time or money.

And remember, success is personal. If we chase someone else’s version (like Elon Musks, for example), at best we end up with their life, at worst we feel like we failed at something we probably didn’t even want.

Where can we go to learn more?

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