I'd been meaning to jot down some thoughts on Fathom for a while, and did not have a particularly good reason to do so until the news broke that Paul Jarvis was selling his share of the company to Jack Ellis, the technical co-founder. [1]
Anyway, the two thoughts:
- I think Fathom is a picture-perfect example of how to succeed in a niche that would otherwise be considered a fool's errand. Their biggest competitor is Google who is considered to own the industry and gives away the product for free, and almost entirely through counterpositioning and branding they are/were able to carve out a significant amount of revenue.
- Paul is, to my knowledge, the only person who achieved significant success from branding and marketing themselves as a thought leader and then, rather than double down on the onanistic meta-spiral of "here's how you become an author/creator", completely pivoted to SaaS and left the zeitgeist behind. Incredible!
The market for Google Analytics alternatives is crowded in 2024 compared to 2020; I'm still very happy that Buttondown's using Fathom. (Though, Jack and Paul, please — funnel support would be really nice.)
The blog post itself is a great example of Fathom's deftness at threading the needle between being annoyingly clickbaity and being effective. See also the cake. ↩︎
