Above Board

Paul (00:01)
Hello, hello, hello. I'm Paul Jarvis and I'm joined as always by Jack Ellis. You are listening to the Aboveboard Podcast from Fathom Analytics. All right, sir. Let's get into it. How's it going?

Jack (00:13)
going good and I'm just looking down and you know people say I'm dusting off my mic. My microphone is actually covered in dust. Not like properly but covered. You know, it needs dust.

Paul (00:23)
Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Yeah, I keep mine in a closed closet and it's... why the fuck is your closet dusty?

Jack (00:30)
So do I. Yeah. I dunno, it must get in under the doors. There's like little gaps around it and whatnot and it must get in. But it's been a while since we recorded.

Paul (00:39)
Weird. It has, think it's probably been about a month, maybe something like that.

Jack (00:44)
I mean it always feels like it's less than what it actually is and because at some point if we go too long we'll start hearing from people saying what's going on but listeners of the podcast have come to realize that we will either be on holiday you never know why the podcast doesn't have an episode because we're maybe on holiday or we just focused and doing stuff like we you were on holiday this is true yeah I mean yeah that's fair yeah you're right a month ha our last episode was on politics

Paul (00:48)
Yeah.

Exactly.

Yep.

was on holiday and you were focused so yeah.

We did be any bad. I would say we didn't get any backlash, but I have no way of knowing.

Jack (01:12)
That was a funny episode.

because it was balanced, I think. When you don't have a team, there's not a fight. I actually am tuned out from politics though. I've updated my ex, my Twitter, and so I only see who I follow. I don't see anything from the algorithm. It's completely, that's it. And it's amazing. Exactly, that's all I follow on Twitter. It's even got the Twitter logo. I think this was made by someone who didn't like Twitter.

Paul (01:27)
Yeah.

Yeah, just cat videos and goat pornography and that's all. Yeah. Gotcha.

Jack (01:49)
It doesn't like the rename, it doesn't like the mascara and all of this stuff, but it's really helping me. It's helping my brain, it's helping my energy. And I don't have to see, like, I've seen videos of people getting stabbed and bleeding every, like, I don't want to see that stuff. And it's not like I want to watch it, but like you, there's a curiosity that happens when you open it. And the last video I saw, I don't even know if I want to go into this, it was a bit gory, but it was like, it was a stabbing and it was to the neck. And I've already gone too gory, but I don't want to see that.

Paul (02:02)
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Jack (02:18)
I'm like, I just open up X and where's people? And you see that and you then think, well, this is happening all the time everywhere. And it skewed my view on the UK. And like the UK, London's always had knife crime. It's always been, you know, this is all big cities. There's going to be crime. And it just made me think of, I don't know, distorted my view, even though I know what the UK is like in the good parts, is. And no offence, Londoners. London's okay. London's okay.

Paul (02:18)
Nah me neither.

Yeah.

Jack (02:47)
certain areas of London are not okay. Let's just put it that way. And they've got people going around on mopeds and, it is, London's a weird topic by the way. my friends say they got London, it has got worse, noticeably worse. And these aren't political people. These are people just noticing what they see. So it's not, they haven't got an agenda to try and scare people and whatnot. They are noticing London has got worse. So we'll see what happens. Well, I'm sure we'll get some feedback on that. Lots of people who listen live in London, but no politics today.

Paul (02:51)
Yeah, as with all big cities.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

I mean, no, exactly. So what are we? So what's going on? What's new with them? What are we working on? Yeah.

Jack (03:22)
Yeah, I start on Fathom, sure. Yeah, so we're working on, I've tweeted a bunch about this. We're working on the data refactor. This has been a weakness we've had for a long time where we've chosen to, unlike Google, we've chosen to work with our historical data. We've chosen to try and model new data to the same model we've had since day one, effectively, even in the open source version, similar data modeling. And it's not fit for where we want to go with the new data.

When I say new data, I mean data since 2021. Simple things like we have to pre-aggregate the data. And by pre-aggregate, I'm not actually even talking about aggregation, but we have to fit it into the same model as V1 data, which was rolled up by the hour. And whilst we don't roll up by the hour, we've had to keep roughly the same model. That has stopped us from doing things like we wanted to ship entry pages and exit pages, but we haven't been able to do that without... And it's funny because...

Paul (03:54)
Mm-hmm.

Jack (04:21)
Is that easy? If we had a small amount of data, would that be easy to ship? Absolutely it would, but we're dealing with billions and tens of billions and we want our database to be fast and we don't want to have to keep upgrading it and upgrading it. We want it to work well with what we've got. And we have some huge sites. Out of all of the smaller analytics companies that aren't Google, I think we have one of the biggest sites. And I'm not going to say who, but it's a website that every single

Paul (04:25)
Yeah

Jack (04:50)
developer in the world has visited multiple times. I'll keep it, I'll keep it, I'm cool with keeping it vague, but this site is gigantic and I'm not, convinced no one has a site as big as this. I've never, they dwarf the rest of our customers for the most part. So, and we have big customers. So yeah, working on all of that. And then we're just getting into a position, multiple phases. We're shipping phase one very soon. It's nearly done. And then we'll be moving to phase two and phase three and phase four.

Paul (04:54)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yep.

Jack (05:17)
Phase three is when we get the entries and exits and the new ingest or the new ingest tweaks. So a few things behind the scenes, but also actual features that is going to be useful. And we're talking about a bunch of stuff and lots of stuff is really happening. We're moving at good speed. It's just, it has been hard with the data because the data has effectively been holding us back for a long time. And it was just, we just happened to say, you know what, let's attack this. And then we came up with a good way of doing it with the spitting up of the data and whatnot.

Paul (05:23)
Great.

Yeah.

Jack (05:47)
and now we're gonna attack it and it will just give us more room to actually attack things as we want to in the future because we can just use the new data and just say, you know, the old data is the old data. That's fine. We've got that GA data, whatever. Great.

Paul (06:00)
Yeah, and even me Mr like customer facing features like I understand how important this is and how this will make us be able to move faster with features in the future which which we need to get to so. It makes sense.

Jack (06:12)
Absolutely. It's a good example, actually, you people talk about technical debt and developers are always having to fight to get time to pay down technical debt. And we've done, we've paid down technical debt. We've, you know, we've introduced thousands of tests. I remember one point we spent, I to say a month or two, and we just added tests. And it was just because we'd done so much stuff and we hadn't got enough test coverage. So we added that. And then, yeah, the data has just been a one that we've had to not focus on. I guess we did in 2021, didn't we? We moved to single store.

Paul (06:42)
Mm-hmm.

Jack (06:42)
That was a data refactor. And we've done data migrations. We just haven't done the kind of core analytics refactor. But it was needed. This is one of the best interfaces ever and it's going to pave the way for so many cool things. Yeah. And I did start refactoring the front end, but I had to kill that because it was going to turn into probably a month long project.

Paul (06:50)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yep.

Jack (07:05)
That's honestly, that's been my focus. Yeah, on the data and unlocking us there. So I've been busy with that and yeah, it's all, it's going really good. I'm stoked. I'm just ready to have it shipped, know, really, really. There's a lot of stuff at the moment that needs to be shipped. So yeah, and that's the Fathom stuff, really focusing on that. And then we've got the WordPress drama, which I'm sure everyone's heard about. Well, yeah, and I did a tweet and I tweeted because of you.

Paul (07:11)
Yeah.

Yep.

Yeah, Shortly.

Jack (07:33)
because they're going off a WP engine. And it just, it feels like jealousy and he has a really jealous vibe, this guy. And I've never talked to this guy, but I don't, the vibe is weird. And I said to you, I watched the interview with Primogen and I had a weird vibe when he started the call with, howdy, howdy, howdy, howdy, I go, this is like watching South Park. This is really weird. And I've never seen that. And maybe Americans will say to me, that's a normal thing for someone from that area, but it was really.

reminded me of South Park. And then the way he was smiling, I know, dude, I read up on, I read people's body language and how their mannerisms and things, and I get vibes and I pattern match and whatever else. And I just got some vibes from this guy. I don't know this guy. Maybe he's a really great guy, but the stuff he's doing is weird. And the WP engine stuff is like WP engines extracting open source. They're literally providing hosting for WordPress. I don't get how this is.

Paul (08:29)
Yeah.

Jack (08:32)
It's like saying that we have to, you know, I've talked about PHP and or Laravel, I've talked about Laravel in our marketing. It's like Laravel turning around and being like, you use Laravel, so you've got to pay us. mean, they've saying that they do manage WordPress hosting and stuff like that. I mean, it's a service they offer. Like it's open source. don't get, I don't actually understand what leg you have to stand on. If you provided open source, it's completely free and open. Someone's offering a way to host it.

Paul (08:44)
Hmm.

Jack (09:01)
And dude, let's be honest, this is a reason why we don't do open source because we did have, had, was, I don't even know if wanna say, but it was a company that wanted to host our product and undercut our hosted solution and then wanted us to spend time helping them. And if we were VC backed, we would have jumped on this and we would have been like, yeah, who cares about money? You know, we just care about growth. Exactly. And by the time we had to say, no, no, we need revenue to be able to work on this.

Paul (09:13)
Yep.

Yeah.

Yeah, brand market growth,

Jack (09:28)
I don't, like what does WordPress need? I don't understand it. WordPress is already, sorry, automatic or whatever, is already making tons of money. Or WordPress, the WordPress foundation has money, does it not?

Paul (09:33)
Yep.

Yeah, and they promote an ecosystem of people. I mean, like I was part of that. So like I know a bit about it because like I was part of it. I built WordPress themes that I built custom that I sold as templates. I built WordPress plugins. The last company that I had is a WordPress plugin company. Like I understand the ecosystem. And even like with WP Engine, what I what I had told you, which which led you to tweet was that in their

Jack (09:49)
Mm-hmm.

Paul (10:05)
terms or at least previously in their terms was don't call your product WordPress something call it WP something which is literally and exactly and precisely what WP Engine did because I a had a plugin called WP complete and I did the same thing was WP because that's what you were supposed to do that's what WordPress said that's what automatic said you were supposed to do so

Jack (10:13)
Yeah.

Yeah, and they changed that to have a go at WP Engine. And they got upset because they have plans and the plans are called, have they renamed them? But it was called like Core WordPress and stuff. It really is grasping and it really feels like jealousy.

Paul (10:45)
Yeah, I think because WordPress now also has hosting and they haven't always had hosting they were just a CMS company way back in the day.

Jack (10:54)
And you know, we have a story about, I'm not even gonna talk, we could talk about it, but it feels like adding more fuel to the fire. But we have a story and why we didn't do something, we didn't work with a certain something somewhere because of gut feelings. Anyway, yeah, I'm not gonna, I've been tempted to tweet about, you know exactly what I'm talking about. And I've been tempted to mention it, but no, we don't need to say anything. That's just me being spicy.

Paul (11:11)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Jack (11:23)
I don't need to be spicy.

Paul (11:25)
Yeah, mean, they're yeah, it's just like they're hosting company same with like flywheel that they also own. It's just a host like these are just hosting companies for WordPress, which there are thousands of hosting. Well, maybe hundreds, maybe thousands of hosting companies for WordPress. So should should all of them go away? it? Should you only be? Should they have a monopoly on hosting?

Jack (11:34)
Yeah.

Yep.

Yeah, it's very strange. And then what's the revenue limit? How much can I make before I'm going to start getting slagged off by someone at WordCamp? It all feels really ridiculous. And I don't even necessarily.

Paul (11:56)
care.

Well, that felt like a shakedown to like either change it or I'm gonna I'm gonna talk shit about you at a conference that feels like I don't know if that feels like blackmail, but I don't know. I'm not a lawyer. Yeah.

Jack (12:08)
It definitely sounds like a shakedown and I don't know the ins and outs, but it's funny. I always think of WP Engine and I think of Jason Cohen and I at the idea of WP Engine not giving back because I immediately think of Jason's blog and all of the stuff Jason's done for producing value for entrepreneurs, for helping people. He's responsible probably for, I can't even imagine actually how many companies have read his stuff, but.

Paul (12:18)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Jack (12:37)
He very much gives back for free. He very much is on Twitter. I appreciate there's other owners, but I still think of WP Engine as Jason Cohen. This guy is giving advice. This is a very successful entrepreneur and he's still in the community giving advice. He's giving. It's not like he's selling a course. He's like, I'm giving you this advice to someone. He's just giving it out. I just, this is a good guy and it makes me laugh when they're like, then they don't need to give back.

Paul (12:46)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Jack (13:04)
sure maybe they do but I don't think it's right to do what they did it looks really really bad I haven't heard anyone give a sensible argument for actually one person who's apparently quite well known in the WordPress community made clear to me that this isn't the WordPress community it's Matt who's going off on one

Paul (13:22)
Yeah, well, it's also automatic, which is a company that's not the WordPress like open source product.

Jack (13:31)
But who controls the foundation? Matt does. Is there a board? There can't be a board. No, who am I kidding? There can't be a board. Maybe there is a board, but I find it hard to believe there's a board after seeing what happened. Like yes, WP Engine is making a bunch of money. Yes, you could have made that money. Yes, you feel like a certain way because they are providing something and they are, they're making a ton of money. And it's sure you can be like, this is my software and I built it. I just...

Paul (13:33)
Yeah. Maybe, I'm not sure.

Jack (13:59)
I don't think you can be an open source if that's how you're going to feel.

Paul (14:02)
No. I mean, I posted in our group chat that similar happened to me where somebody had an open source, like one page statement of work contract. And that I use that in a product that I made, that I sold, and that I referenced the open source thing that I had. And then the guy emailed me and is like, I can't believe you're selling this. And I looked at the open source, how it worked. And it was like, doesn't say anything about like, it doesn't say anything about like, you're not allowed to resell it.

And like I linked to it as well. I ended up sending him a couple grand. wish I had, I still wish I hadn't like, still feel like I was too much of a pushover for doing that.

Jack (14:39)
You were trying to be fair, but. You were trying to be fair. man. Yeah. And it's, think this, honestly, this jealousy that they're feeling and because I think it is, try and play devil's advocate though. Can you think of like, so they're, they see it as extracting from open source and not providing anything back to the WordPress community. To me, it's they're providing a service where they're offering hosting for WordPress. Like that's how I see it.

Paul (14:41)
That's just being fucking Canadian.

Yeah, why does a private company have to like private company like corporations are basically sociopaths like.

Jack (15:11)
No it doesn't, that's it.

So because if I say that I'm going to, yeah, no, absolutely. mean, yeah, you can't hate a company for making money. Sure, you could say, it'd be great if they gave back more time. I'm sure that'd be great. I mean, it'd be great if I contributed to Laravel Core. know, like there's a bunch of stuff, but the idea that they can't say that they're offering hosting for WordPress because WordPress is trademarked and that they need to pay a fee to be able to have the privilege to say that they're hosting WordPress. I made a joke and I said,

Paul (15:20)
Yeah. Yeah.

Jack (15:44)
It's gonna go from managed WordPress hosting to managed hosting for the company or the software that shan't be named like a Voldemort thing from Harry Potter. That's literally how it feels.

Paul (15:52)
Exactly. Is it because they're like, do they better SEO? Like, is that what it is? I'm on I'm serious. Like, is that what it is?

Jack (15:59)
I never Matt led in Matt led in in one of the paper articles he wrote it was like my mum thought that WPNG was WordPress and like no yeah I can't it's like and I that was my joke I said that my mum my mum confused Bill Gates's bank account with my bank account you know I'm gonna sue but it doesn't it's not a good reason like you know I don't know how old his mum is I'm not gonna have a go at his mum but

Paul (16:08)
Your mom doesn't know what WP Engine is, like give it a fucking break. Come on.

Yeah.

No, of course not. like, that's also just such a weird test. Like WP Engine, at least in Google on my computer, not logged in or anything, but Google obviously changes results based on the person. if I put in WordPress hosting, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, nine, WP Engine is ninth.

Jack (16:48)
Yeah, they've got a strong brand though. And it is this brand. I think they've done a great job. I have good, they don't get, they are providing hosting. can't, my brain, I may be going in circles here, but I can't find a world in which they're doing anything wrong.

Paul (16:51)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yep.

Jack (17:05)
And it's weird, like we're gonna open source our software, but don't you dare mention like that you host? It's so weird. It's fake. And then it's like, okay, is it real open source? Fuck man. I can't, I'm exhausted with this topic to be honest with you. I'm ready to move on if you are. I just, this is weird. Imagine having that much money though and still caring about this stupid stuff. Maybe it's investor returns. So imagine you've got millions. I don't know how much money this guy has, right? But imagine you're that rich.

Paul (17:11)
I know.

Yeah, yeah, that's fine. So.

Yeah.

Jack (17:33)
and you wake up and go, I'm just gonna pick a battle because this company's making more money than my company. Like, who cares? You've got millions of Is it about principle? Like, sure, I can try and make it about principle, but a lot of people aren't buying that it's about principle.

Paul (17:40)
Yeah.

I I think that's what Matt is trying to make it about. I think that's his core argument is that it's the principle of the thing, but then that also doesn't make logic sense to me. So I'm not sure to be honest. Yeah. Maybe we can have Jason and Matt on the show and you can referee.

Jack (18:03)
Alright.

It's funny. Jason gives me really, we actually, we're having no Jason said he'll come on the show. We, yeah, actually this was, this has been in the works. Yeah. I like, yeah, this has been in the works. I I watched Matt on, on a interview with primogen and I didn't, it was like a, it felt like a bit of a politician and I wouldn't, I wouldn't talk to Jason about WordPress stuff anyway, cause there's legal stuff going on. Right. And I was happy when I saw, yeah, I was happy when I saw WP engine and no Jason, I want to talk to you about just managing teams and growing the technical staff and

Paul (18:12)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, there's more interesting stuff to talk about.

Jack (18:37)
all of the things that I feel that he has felt and been through, want to see, you know, that'd be really fun to pick his brain. Because I know I think he's actually the CTO now of WP Engine. He didn't want to be CEO and they have someone else and yeah, very interesting guy.

Anywho, so yeah that's it, Fathom work and some WordPress drama. That's it for the most part.

Paul (18:58)
Alright, this is a shorty, but I think we can probably call it there because we both want to get back to work. Alright man, well yeah, thank you everybody for listening to us talk a little bit about Fathom, a little bit about developer type drama. And yeah, we will catch you again in a couple weeks, probably.

Jack (19:03)
Absolutely.

Tata for now.

Bye bye.