Omer (00:11.840)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host, Omer Khan and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
This week's interview is a story about three guys who started their company when they were just 14 years old.
They set out to build an online advertising business.
Inspired by watching the TV show Mad Men, they decided they were going to be the modern day Mad Men themselves.
But nothing worked in terms of their business and as my guest told me, they couldn't even pay for lunch.
And that was school lunch for these guys.
Then as part of their advertising business, they also built a tool with a beautiful design which gave people insights about their web traffic.
And people seemed more interested in this tool than in their advertising business.
So they turned the tool into a product and started selling that.
And over time they've added live chat and CRM capabilities.
Now, 10 years later, they've built a business with over a thousand paying customers and 10 employees.
This isn't a story about rapid growth and raising millions of dollars, but it is a great story about persisting through failures, following your passions, listening to your customers and solving problems you discover along the way.
And most importantly, following focusing on building great products.
This was a fun interview and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Today's guest is the co founder and CEO of GoSquared, a SaaS platform which provides real time web analytics, live chat and CRM products.
The three co founders of Go Squared started the company when they were just 14 years old and they've now been in business for over 10 years.
Go squared is based in the city of London.
So today I'd like to welcome James Gill.
James, welcome to the show.
James Gill (02:24.700)
Hi Omar.
A pleasure to be here.
Really looking forward to chatting some more.
Omer (02:28.540)
Awesome.
I always like to ask my guests what drives or motivates them.
Do you have a favorite quote or something that you can share with us in terms of helping us understand what gets you out of bed every day?
James Gill (02:39.740)
Yeah, sure.
I mean, as a team, we're all incredibly obsessed about building a really nice product.
We're all absolute nerds when it comes to design and product stuff.
But I think, yeah, actually since I was a kid I've had a quote on my wall, which I don't know who it's from, but it's something along the lines of some people dream of great accomplishments while others stay awake and do them.
It might sound a bit funny, but it's actually I have that on my bedroom wall.
So every time I think about going to sleep at night, I just, I just think about that.
And sometimes it's the thing that gets me up and writes something down in my notepad or gets me opening my laptop and working on stuff at crazy o' clock in the evening.
And that's sort of been something I've looked at almost every day for years.
Omer (03:34.810)
So what does that quote mean to you?
Does it mean you want to kind of take as much action as you can every day or.
James Gill (03:41.980)
Yeah, I think it's really easy to talk a lot about stuff and to think a lot about stuff.
And I think it's really important to think deeply about problems.
But sometimes it's just amazing how much you can learn by just doing stuff.
Yeah, it's like Nike's trademark is the whole just do it thing.
But I think that just applies so much in general business life.
You see people, we're guilty of this sometimes.
But you're thinking about product decisions, you're thinking about how to write an email or you're thinking about how to roll something out.
And you can just get so caught up in worrying about things and when you just push forward, often so many of the things you worry about just go away and become non issues.
So yeah, generally it's just a kind of just do it attitude is the thing I always try and strive for as much as possible to balance out that product perfection side of us.
That's kind of what comes naturally.
Omer (04:44.850)
Now, before we start talking in more detail about your story and kind of what you guys have been doing over the last 10 years.
James Gill (04:53.650)
Yeah.
Omer (04:54.050)
Can you share with the audience a little bit in your own words about what Go Squared is and what's the problem that you guys are trying to solve?
James Gill (05:04.450)
Yeah, sure.
So, yeah, the Go Squared product and our product products have changed immensely.
And as you would imagine in 10 years of business, what we started with and what we are today is very different.
Essentially today, I think the best way I'd describe it is Go Squared's essentially a suite of tools that just a beautifully simple software that helps you turn visitors into customers.
As you mentioned, we've got an analytics product, we've got a live chat product, and we've got a CRM product right now.
And one of the things that it's like, what the heck, these guys make all this stuff, how can they do any of that well and how can they balance that all?
How do they figure out what to work on next?
But I think One of the things we really found ourselves in our experience of the tools out there is you can find a few good tools out there, but sometimes one of the biggest pain points is connecting them all together and helping give a really nice experience to your customers.
And often, especially as teams grow, a customer ends up talking to someone on live chat who's different to someone in sales, who's different to someone in customer support.
And all these different teams have a slightly different view of who that person is.
And it just seems crazy that that's the default way.
It is.
It just seems crazy that there's all these different tools out there, all with different information in all of them.
And, yeah, I think we really believe that the more integrated those different tools can be, the better the overall experience for customers will be and the happier and more successful businesses will be.
And, yeah, that's kind of the way we look at things right now.
And, yeah, that's.
You know, we've got loads of customers that seem to agree with that.
So that's going all right so far.
Omer (06:56.600)
Yeah, something's obviously working.
So you and your co founders.
So there's another James and Jeff.
James Gill (07:05.500)
There is.
There's.
Yeah, there's a James or otherwise known as jt, Not Justin, Tim, Blake, and.
And there's a Jeff as well.
Yeah.
Omer (07:14.460)
Now, all of you were 14 when you started this business, and so.
And I know it was a very different business to what it is today and a very different product or offering.
So, yeah, tell me a little bit about that.
Let's just start with why did you guys start getting to business?
James Gill (07:39.100)
Yeah, because we were just so damn cool, right?
Yeah, we.
Yeah, I mean, like, yeah, we were kids.
We were kids.
We knew nothing.
We knew absolutely nothing.
And I think, yeah, between us, like, as a three, we have quite a good balance of skills and.
And desires.
But in the early days, I think, yeah, we all kind of wanted to start something, and it was just.
As the Internet was getting more and more exciting, it was sort of.
I think it was like pre iPhone.
But Facebook was just building a bit of momentum, and people started using that at school, and it was still mostly a university thing, but Facebook was kind of nice, nice product.
And Facebook, to me, seemed like one of those products that was actually like, some people cared about the product experience, the design of it, and it was gaining some momentum in the consumer world, which was just kind of a bit different to something like MySpace, which is just.
But, yeah, we saw that and that kind of was a bit of an inspiration and it was actually the whole thing that kicked off Go Squared, we'd been doing a bit of web design and stuff and just playing around before, but what really got us to start something and vaguely call it a business was we saw this website called the Million Dollar Homepage.
I don't know if you've ever come across that.
I remember that, yeah, I think the guy was called Alex Chu, who just came up with this brilliantly simple idea of if we have a grid of pixels on our homepage of 1000 by 1000 pixels, we could sell each pixel for a dollar each, and if we sell all the pixels, we'll make a million dollars.
And you had this incredibly beautiful homepage filled with just different ads for different companies, just all over the place.
But the point is, the guy came up with this simple, simple idea and made a million dollars from it.
And I think he was London based and he was pretty young too.
He funded his way through uni with that.
And we just saw like, if that guy can do it, surely, surely we can do something here.
And that was the original driver for starting Go Squared.
And essentially it was really simple interpretation of this million dollar pixel idea, which was if we sell squares on our homepage rather than pixels, we'll sell a recurring subscription and you can keep your ad on the site.
And rather than being a few pixels, it was like a Proper, was it 140 by 140 pixels square on the homepage.
And yeah, let's see what happens.
We built that, we built a homepage, we made it look nice and we called it Go Squared and we did not make a million dol.
But the point, I think the thing that was really cool from that though was it got me and my two co founders, Jeff and jt, it got us together and it got us learning how to build a website, how to put something online and how to start working together.
And from then on it was just like, how do we get better at this?
And it's been a bit of a whirlwind since then.
But yeah, it was sort of that simplicity of like, let's just do this.
And yeah, I think it's really hard to get better at any sort of discipline, whether that be marketing, sales, design or coding, if you don't have that kind of project to work on.
So, yeah, each week it would be just us meeting up after school when we're probably meant to be studying for, I know, French homework or something, and just figuring out, like, how do we, like, what's Jquery, how do we charge money, like how do we build a user account system?
How do we, and how do we, you know, like, should we use Twitter to get users?
And you know, all of these kinds of questions and just each week we just kind of keep iterating and improving and it was just really raw, really simple and I don't know, somehow we like tried to find time in between studies and stuff to do it and it was also just really fun.
Omer (11:48.330)
So yeah, so it was about two years after that, which I believe you sort of came up with the first version of an analytics product.
James Gill (11:57.560)
Yeah, yeah.
Omer (11:58.680)
So, so how, how did you, like, how did, where did the idea for that come from?
James Gill (12:03.480)
Oh yeah.
So you know, to be totally honest, like the ad stuff never made us like any money at all.
Right.
It barely paid like lunch for lunch.
And that was school lunches.
Yeah, it was, you know, the ad stuff.
Like we, we had this, this imagination of like, wow, if we can make Go Squared with the advertising stuff successful.
I think Mad Men had come out.
At the time we were thinking like, oh, we'll be the modern day Mad Men.
It'll be like we'll be changing advertising forever.
And it turned out just like that.
There was no way us kids were going to figure that out.
There was just so much complexity.
And we ended up building an advertising network.
So we started getting publishers on board, people with, with websites.
We were very design obsessed.
So we got a lot of really good looking websites on board and our whole pitch to them was rather than putting these ugly Google Ads on your site, AdSense units on your site, put a Go squared unit on your site, and we'll put really beautiful ads on your site.
But we were just really bad at selling ads.
We could get publishers along and made some really good friends that way we could get them to put these ad placements on their sites.
But we, we were really rubbish at finding advertisers and businesses to spend money.
And then on top of that we were just like, even if we could help our publishers and sites make money, we were then pretty clueless about how we would make money because you'd be taking some slim card and dealing with all the administration.
So it was just like, there's just so many reasons stacking up for why it was just not the route that was going to lead us to success.
But one of the things we found was we started iterating on the product for the websites, putting these placements out.
The publishers, we started giving them some really simple, really nicely designed graphs and stats in their account so they could see, okay, I can earn this much from my website because I've got this much traffic.
And we started really digging into some of the metrics on their site.
Everything at the time was very much hit based.
And what the hell is a hit, it gets completely skewed by bots and all sorts.
So we started looking at how many visitors websites were getting, but also whether visitors were sticking around and bouncing or staying on the site and engaging with content.
We looked at the traffic sources of those visitors as well and started just building up some really nice insights for the websites that were using us.
On top of all of that, we started giving these insights in real time in a really slick interface.
And this was all just part of the ads package.
And what we found was just people were coming to us and they didn't even really care about selling ads.
They just wanted the insights we were giving in the data.
And at the time, I think we thought really hard about this and we really wanted the ad stuff to be the main part of the business.
But we just made a call to make this side project called livestats.
And it was a really simple thing.
It was just a view of the visitors that are on your website right now.
So we'd show you visitor by visitor, which country they were in, which page they were on, how many pages they'd been to in their session and what drove them to the site.
And it was, I think, Smashing magazine, the design magazine, online design magazine, they tweeted us out and it drove so many people to our site who wanted to use the livestats product that it completely destroyed us.
It completely took our site down, it completely crushed our servers.
And it was, I think at that point we realized like, man, people actually kind of like this.
Maybe we should focus more of our energy on that.
And it was kind of a few days after that that we were like, let's scrap all this ad stu stuff.
Let's focus and just double down on building the live stats product.
And going down this route of building a product that would show you kind of some insights and information about the visitors on your website.
And yeah, off the back of that, it sort of just snowballed into, okay, we've got users that like it now let's just charge directly for it.
Rather than sort of this weird advertising model where we take a cut of payments and all this hassle, it was just like really simple, like build nice software, sell it.
And it just all in all added up to make a lot more sense for us to focus on that.
And yeah, that's kind of how we kind of, I guess these days the kids call it a pivot.
Right.
But back then there was a lot less of this startup terminology and everything.
And we just thought, let's just change up and do that and focus on that.
Omer (17:06.760)
So the interesting thing is you didn't sort of come up with this idea by looking at the market and saying, well, there's Google Analytics and it's, it's kind of really difficult to use.
And, and if we come up with a product which is more intuitive and easy to use with, there's a market for it and we're going to kind of validate that and then we'll be able to charge for it.
It was more like, this sounds like a cool thing that we'd like to and probably other people might like too.
And even at that point, it wasn't a product.
It was kind of a tool for people to use as the backend for the ad network.
And then the market started telling you, hey, we like the tool better than the ad network.
James Gill (17:57.180)
Yeah, exactly that.
I mean, yeah, to sort of say we had some strategic plan would be a total lie.
We really stumbled into it and I must admit at the time in particular myself, I was really like, I really wanted us to build an advertising business and it really took a lot of persuasion to say, let's not do ads.
Omer (18:23.380)
So kind of fast forward to today.
Tell me a little bit about the size of the business and kind of where you guys are.
James Gill (18:31.220)
Yeah, so we've not taken the standard Silicon Valley approach of raised hundreds of millions and grow, grow, grow.
We've kept the team pretty small.
We're still like, we're about 10 people today, still primarily product focused team.
But I think a lot of people judge companies by their team size a bit too much because we get a lot done with a small team and we get tremendous amounts done on product.
And I think we move very quickly on product with the team we have because I think we have like 10 really awesome people rather than like 100 mediocre people.
And on the side of like overall business growth, you know, we've got well over 1,000 customers today and they range from just like, you know, small startups and people just starting out through to some really big businesses.
We've got a huge range of companies like big e commerce businesses, got some US governments using us.
We've got banks like JP Morgan make use of US Retailers in the UK have a big retailer called Paperchase.
And yeah, it's just a huge range of customers of varying sizes.
Omer (19:50.230)
Okay.
So let's talk about what, what has happened over the last few years to help you get to where you are today and these thousand customers.
So tell me about some, some of the things that have worked for you in, in terms of, of driving growth.
Like for example, I know that you guys started with the blog pretty much from day one.
And has that been a kind of an acquisition vehicle for you guys now that you've sort of continued to sort of invest and write content there?
James Gill (20:29.610)
Yeah, I mean, yeah, in the history of Go Squared, we've probably spent like about a thousand pounds in ten years on Google Ads and all of that is this year.
So, yeah, we've really massively bought into the idea of content marketing from day one.
And I think one of the things for us is we've never really viewed it as this discipline of content marketing.
Actually since the early days, since 2007 or whatever it was, we've just tried to write about the company we're building and share as much as we can.
I think one of the biggest learnings from the early days of Go Squared was we looked at the million dollar homepage and we heard about that and we thought by building Go Squared, people would just see it and see it was a better thing or a nicer looking thing and want to use it more.
But what we found the hard way was no one gave a damn because no one knew about it.
And that was a really bitter pill to swallow.
We were like, how on earth are we going to get people to come to us?
We have no money to spend.
We're just a bun of kids.
We can't buy like, I don't know, we can't buy any ads online, we can't buy any newspaper ads.
We can't, we don't know what to do.
So yeah, we did the only thing we could do, which was like kick up a free WordPress blog and write stuff.
And we wrote.
I mean, I think, yeah, if you look back at like the first post on that blog that are still online, they were just all over the place.
We sort of, one week we were a tech news blog, another week we were a startup blog.
Another week we were a design blog.
Another week we were an engineering blog.
And it was just all over the place.
But some of the things that really made a big difference in terms of just sheer traffic and ultimately resulting in some signups and customers.
We made a bunch of resources early on that were certainly not strategically aligned.
They were not marketing focused or analytics focused, but they got our name out there.
I was always obsessed with design and working on the UI design.
So we'd make a load of UI components in Illustrator files and we'd make a load of icons and just put them up on our blog as a free download.
Not even any lead capture or anything.
We would just give them away.
And this was back in the days of dig.com, digg.com, which was sort of the Reddit of the day.
These things just went crazy on there.
I remember we hit the homepage of Digg and it just again knocked our site over.
And we had tremendous challenges scaling to handle it, but people just went mental.
And I think we just built up a bit of momentum around this because we did that one week and then another week we say did HTML cheat sheets and CSS cheat sheets, JavaScript cheat sheets and just everything we were learning.
We're just trying to turn it into a resource and a piece of, of content.
And I would say, like, compared to today, it was almost just like free.
There's just so much opportunity to do that stuff and just putting the effort in, you would almost be guaranteed traffic.
There was a lot less sort of competition and fighting for who had the best content.
It was just like we really wanted to make good content, but just by putting it out there, people went crazy.
That stuff just drove a really early audience.
And a lot of them were designers, a lot of them were developers.
And often that was enough to get our name on their radar.
And people would start signing up for trials from that or telling their boss about us.
And we'd often go into big offices and see our cheat sheets on the wall.
There would be web developers who would be, you know, working on a website and then have a go squared cheat sheet on the wall.
And it was just awesome.
So, yeah, I mean, part of the offset of that was some people thought we were a company that made cheat sheets, but other than that, it got our name out there and that was a big part of it.
So it was just, I guess you could say it was like brand awareness or whatever.
But yeah, we just did that.
And mainly because it was free.
It just required our time and we didn't really know how much our time was worth.
We were pretty much still just messing about.
So, yeah, that worked nicely.
And then moving forward, we did a few more things.
We've always tried to just.
We've always had this really strong belief that content will pay back way more than any ads.
If we put a lot of work into a piece of content, we want it to be around for weeks or months, sometimes in some cases years.
And it may require that upfront work, but it can just pay off so much in the future.
A good example of that was we did a series of infographics and a couple of the most popular ones were around the London 2012 Olympics.
This was nothing to do with web analytics really, but we just showed off a bunch of data visualization stuff we'd been working on and hacking around with and integrated with a few APIs.
And just the buzz around the Olympics just saw these skyrocket and a bunch of newspapers featured them and to this day they still send hundreds and hundreds of visitors to the site every day.
People come to those and check them out and yeah, it's just amazing.
And so, yeah, they've been a big thing.
And then also another thing more relatively recently was we introduced a part of our site called Global Metrics.
And yeah, essentially because we have this analytics information, we've got a bunch of, well, we've got over a thousand paying customers, we've got tens of thousands of websites that use the Go Squared platform, made up of lots of smaller sites as well.
So we've got this really interesting broad understanding of the web at large and how people are using the web.
We thought if we aggregate all of that and anonymize it and package it up.
We've now got these real time counters on the site under the Global Metrics section, just showing things like, what's the adoption of the Latest version of iOS?
What's the adoption of Android?
How's the latest Mac OS version doing against latest Windows version?
These, these are amazing because now we've got that core technology there to do it.
We can roll these out.
We'll just say one morning, okay, let's do a new metric.
And Apple's about to release a new version of iOS, let's get a new metric up.
And it takes maybe a couple of hours from one of the guys on the dev team, but the amount of inbound traffic and attention it gets newspapers and journalists and, and everyone just when they're writing stories about this, when they're writing stories about new releases and things, they just always need facts and figures.
And if we can be the provider of that at a very low cost for us, then that's great.
So yeah, the Global Metrics is this just amazingly scalable awareness machine that's really great.
And often the people coming to that are interested in data, they're quite tech savvy.
And yeah, we get a bunch of signing up for trials or becoming Joining our mailing list.
And yeah, it's another great source of users for us.
There's been a selection of things.
Omer (28:27.310)
Yeah, I was going to say, didn't a Google outage actually help you guys get customers?
James Gill (28:33.190)
Oh, yeah, that was amazing.
It was a few years ago, but Google had.
I think it was a few minutes of downtime, maybe like 10 minutes of downtime at most.
And it was quite late in the evening here in London and one of the engineers just saw it on the grass.
They just by chance were looking at the graphs and saw this massive drop and thought like, oh, what have we done wrong?
What have we done wrong?
And then realized it was just did a quick search on Twitter for anything going on and found out that Google had had this downtime and just chucked up this graph on.
On a blog post.
We just screenshotted one of our graphs and I think we had the headline, Google Traffic.
Google traffic drops 40% after downtime.
And we just tweeted it out and then it got another tweet, and then it got another tweet and I got another two tweets.
And it just snowballed and snowballed and snowballed.
And by the.
By the time we were waking up the next morning, I think there were hundreds and hundreds of press mentions from not just blogs and tweets, but we were printed on real paper, real old trees.
I think the Wall Street Journal, I think, covered it.
I think one of the national newspapers in Australia and India, it was internationally referenced, our number as fact.
And it was actually slightly terrifying because we by no means say this is a definitive metric for the entire Internet.
It's just like, here's a sample of what we measure.
But, yeah, it just got an incredible amount of attention.
And off the back of that, we made a lot of connections with a lot of journalists around the world.
And it was just.
Just amazing.
And, you know, part huge amount of that down to luck, but it was a really, really fun day.
And I think that put us on the map again with a lot of bigger companies as well.
So, yeah, that was really fun.
Omer (30:44.870)
Now, I know you guys also spend a lot of time, or spend a lot of time thinking about user onboarding and how to make that a smooth and seamless experience for new customers.
Can you tell us a little bit about that and how you think about it and maybe some examples of what you're doing there?
James Gill (31:06.290)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
We've always been really obsessed with user onboarding because, well, I mean, I'm probably preaching to the converted on this podcast.
But you do often just get one chance to make an impression and you do all this work of getting visitors to your website and do all this work of helping increase conversion and getting people to sign up for a trial.
And then it's just so easy to blow it by just making it difficult to get started.
And for us, we have a pretty.
I mean, it could be easier to get started with an analytics tool.
For us, you've got to put this JavaScript snippet, this piece of code, got to copy it from us, and you got to paste it into your website and you got to deploy your site or push your site out with that code on there to get your analytics working.
You compare that to a To do list app.
You don't have anything with a To do list app to do, right?
You add your notes and you're going.
So for us, this has been a real point of contention and we've kind of focused intensely on trying to make sure that if we get someone signing up, they're going to activate and integrate.
And so, yeah, we've done a bunch of stuff, but one of the things we've just been like, one of the things that we really love is if you sign up, the first thing you see is here's your tracking code, here's your JavaScript tracking code, and here's the instructions to put it on.
But when you do actually put it on, the next step in the flow is this fun radar screen.
And it's like spinning red waiting for you to put it on.
And the moment you put it on, it will detect it instantly in real time.
And the fun thing is on the radar, there's a map and we would locate if you got, say, three visitors online, we will pinpoint those three visitors around the world on that little radar screen just as you start tracking.
And it's just like it was a ridiculous amount of effort to do that.
From the.
Yeah, it's mostly like jt, my co founder, but it's just a really fun thing and we really kind of think, you know, most people are not going to notice that, but it's fun and it's nice and it is kind of, if we care about those details, hopefully people will think, okay, they've thought about the rest of the product.
You know, they've thought about not just even like front end stuff, but I think if you put effort into that, people build up this trust in everything that comes beneath that, the quality of your engineering, the security, the focus on resilience and building a reliable product.
I Just think the higher up the funnel you go, the more important that stuff is.
We've really done a lot of work there and then post that initial integration, lots of work around just trying to make it a fun and almost gamified process of showing a progress meter and helping you, just incentivizing you to set up the things that we know are going to make it a really valuable experience for you.
But yeah, aside from that as well, we've done a lot of stuff involving product thinking, product decisions to help us grow.
For instance, we were on the beta of Slack really early just because we were really interested in it.
And we built a really quick little integration with Slack which because part of the product we will alert you to a traffic spike or a traffic dip in real time so you can go and see what's going on.
We've always done those over email, but when Slack came out, we thought it'd be really nice if you could just in your Slack channel, just see you've got a traffic spike.
So we just built this quick little integration with Slack and I think it was one of the first 10, 20 integrations with Slack and that was a really nice win and sent us a lot of product focused techy people signing up for Go Squared.
Another one was Panic Software.
They're really awesome Apple developers.
They build really nice apps for iOS and Mac.
They made this app a while back called Status Board, which is just like a really nice dashboarding thing for your iPad.
I think they've actually since stopped working on it because it's just really hard to make a business out selling iPad apps.
But anyway, they brought us out and we were like, oh man, that is a beautiful app.
And Panic had users of Go Squared themselves and they really wanted some sort of integration.
So we hacked together.
I think we took a hack day and we just built an integration where we would figure out how to get Go Squared Stats onto a Panic status board.
That was just a massive thing because only a handful of companies actually integrated with Panic Status Board and we were one of them.
And that sent honestly over a thousand, probably multiple thousands of users to use us, which was really, really cool.
So yeah, just being sometimes taking a bit of a gamble and seeing an opportunity and jumping on it has really paid off on the product side.
And some of the biggest, most scalable wins on growth have come from just getting the product stuff going and really just building some cool stuff, building it quickly, jumping on it while it's hot.
That's really paid off.
Omer (37:00.670)
So I was, I wasn't Familiar with Panic software.
I just kind of put up their site here.
And.
Yeah, I mean, they're the people behind Coda as well.
The web editor.
James Gill (37:09.750)
Yeah, Coda.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Omer (37:11.350)
And they're actually not that far from me.
I think they're based down in Portland, so it's.
James Gill (37:15.470)
Yeah, they're Portland based.
Yeah.
I really.
Yeah, I would love to get over to Portland at some point and go visit them.
And I'll come see you, too.
Omer (37:27.440)
So here's the deal, right?
You don't have anybody dedicated on the team yet to think about growth, but you guys have clearly been trying and succeeding with a lot of different ways to grow the business, get the word out, find new customers.
You also are, it sounds like, almost obsessive about user experience and design.
And the example that you gave about the radar, which I think is really cool, by the way, and it reminded me of many years ago, I used to work for Disney.
And do you remember who Framed Roger Rabbit?
Maybe it's before your time.
James Gill (38:20.200)
Oh, yeah.
I'm gonna check it out.
Omer (38:22.480)
Yeah, it's basically.
It was an.
An.
Had Bob Hoskins as kind of a real person in this movie, and everything around him was this animated world.
James Gill (38:34.500)
Oh, awesome.
Awesome.
Omer (38:36.420)
In one of the scenes as.
As I remember, like, it's either Roger Rabbit or Bob Hoskins.
Anyway, one of these guys, they hit their head against a ceiling light or a ceiling shade, and.
And this.
This shade starts swinging across the room.
And as a result of that, you see Roger Rabbit, the.
The animation, and Bob Hoskins, the real human.
You see the shadow of these two, and it's kind of moving away.
And.
And anyway, I'll find.
I'll see if I can find a YouTube video or something to stick in the show notes for that.
But the thing that was significant about that was that if you actually thought.
Think through how much work it took with the animators to actually create that scene, and the complexity of not only having an animated character and a human kind of, you know, sort of pushing each other around, and then to also show that as a shadow while the light's moving around in the room was a huge, amazing, complex scene.
And.
And the thing is, it didn't add anything to the story or that particular scene.
James Gill (39:45.170)
Yeah.
Omer (39:45.650)
But it was just this thing about, I guess, the Disney way about kind of going to that sort of obsessive detail of trying to create this really great experience.
And I think when you.
You talked about the radar, it kind of instantly reminded me of.
Of that.
And just saying, hey, there's no reason to do this.
You're not going to get more customers because you have this cool radar.
But it kind of creates a better experience and I think it creates more, more passionate customers and raving fans for your product because you make the extra effort to do things like that.
And I know that one of the things that you guys do is a lot of your growth comes from referrals and you don't have an affiliate program.
And so people who are referring, go square to other people are doing it because they love the product, not because they're getting some kind of commission from it.
And I think it kind of just reinforces what you guys are.
The sort of the things that you guys are doing around the user experience from my view anyway.
But anyway, so where I was kind of getting to this was you've got, you're doing all this stuff with growth, you don't have the growth kind of dedicated people yet.
You're kind of, you know, doing all of these things around UX and design and trying to create a great experience and you only have 10 people on the team.
And then you say, well, let's not just do live chat, let us not do the real time analytics, let's do live chat and a CRM as well.
James Gill (41:23.570)
So
Omer (41:26.050)
why not focus on one thing?
Why did you guys decide that we're going to expand this out to a suite of products?
James Gill (41:32.530)
Yeah, sure, yeah.
So I actually think in many ways there's lots of ways of thinking about this and I think you can be very business focused approach and say this is the category we're in and we're going to take this much market share in this category or you can think about it a bit differently and just we've done a lot of talking to customers and talk to customers and really just go beyond this sort of category like software category, definition of things and move into more.
What are we trying to help customers do and why are they coming to us and what are they doing with us?
And yeah, it seems like people are really liking that.
It's totally against the advice you're always given of focus on one thing.
But I actually really take issue on that advice because I think it's totally fine to focus on one thing, but how do you define that thing?
Like are you totally focused on one category of product?
Like okay, you can do that.
But I think the way we see it is we're totally focused on one problem set which is turning visitors into customers.
And so we just build the stuff to help you do that.
Omer (42:49.469)
Yeah, yeah, I think that's a very wise insight that you just shared there.
That, you know, how do you define that is a great question.
Because, I mean, we could say, hey, let's pick one feature, like, you know, user authentication.
Focus on one thing, right?
And you're gonna say, well, I'm not gonna really have much of a product unless if I just focus on that.
So I need to think a bit broader.
But.
But I think what you said in terms of focusing on, you know, one set of problems, one set of customers, and everything that you're doing here is.
Is an extension of that.
And you guys are listening to your customers and the needs and coming up with products that help solve the problems that you're seeing.
And they're not necessarily, you know, three random products.
One for developers, another one for marketers.
And, you know.
James Gill (43:44.740)
Yeah, yeah.
Omer (43:46.340)
One thing I. I noticed on your site on your about page, you have our stats at a glance.
And, oh, yeah, these look like.
These numbers get updated like.
Like every second.
So they're ticking away and, you know, things like 34 million lines of code written and, oh, God, 10.
10 trillion bytes of data processed per day.
James Gill (44:09.060)
My favorite one is quite obscure.
Yeah.
Omer (44:11.380)
Yeah, My favorite one is 21 million milliliters of tea drunk.
That's very British.
James Gill (44:17.300)
Yeah, we initially thought about putting coffee on there because we do drink coffee too, but, you know, tea is.
Is way more.
More true to our British roots, you know?
All right.
Omer (44:29.230)
Okay, so let's go into the lightning round.
I'm going to ask you seven questions.
Just try and ask them as quickly as you can.
James Gill (44:36.270)
Cool.
Let's do this.
Omer (44:37.630)
What's the best piece of business advice that you've ever received?
James Gill (44:42.750)
Yeah, there's a lot of advice I've received, but one of the great.
One of the things I heard very recently was focus on your customers while your competition focuses on you, which I really liked.
That was a really good.
Omer (44:54.270)
I like that, too.
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?
James Gill (45:01.030)
I find it hard to pick one.
I reread this recently, so I'll mention it.
There's the Salesforce playbook, or I think it's called, like, behind the Cloud, which is by the founder of Salesforce, and it's all about how they build built Salesforce.
In the early days, that was a really, really cool book.
Just around, very practically, here's what we did.
Building Salesforce.
Pretty inspiring.
But two other books I must mention, in the early days of Go Squared, incredibly influential for us, was Getting real, which is by 37 signals and now basecamp.
But that was just such an awesome book of how to.
How to start a SaaS company for B2B 2B SaaS company for small, medium businesses.
It was like a bible for us.
It was amazing.
And then finally, I'm a big fan of Seth Godin on like, it's just like he's a genius.
And I read Tribes quite early on and just always thought about that, like, trying to build a tribe rather than just a customer base has always been really important to us at Go Squared and yeah, it's been pretty influential.
Omer (46:08.010)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?
James Gill (46:13.450)
Yeah, again, boiling it down to one thing is difficult, but I think it'd be hard to talk about Go Squared without talking about sort of persistence and determination.
People often just can't believe we've been doing one thing for over 10 years.
And I can't believe that sometimes.
And I don't know if that's a good or a bad thing.
Right.
But, but I think a lot of people look at startups and think they see these success stories and it often looks like it was a very quick thing and sometimes people do strike it lucky and they make it big.
But I think a lot of the most successful businesses and most successful people, it's rarely an overnight success, it's months, it's years, it's often decades of really, really hard work.
Omer (47:01.360)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?
James Gill (47:07.360)
Yeah, I've never really had like a strict kind of productivity schedule.
I've tried a lot of things out.
I've tried sort of the Pomodoro system where you break your day down into like 20, 25 minute chunks, which has been helpful.
But one of the things that I just, I do at the moment, and I found it pretty useful for just structuring my day as I. I write three to five bullet points at the start of every day of just the things I'm going to do.
I literally just write it in my notes on my phone and I just try and make sure those things get done.
It's just a really simple structure and I have one note file for every week and I just have Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday written down in there.
And yeah, it's just like I reflect on those and I look back on the previous week and I.
It's just if I've got more like points on there than I have ticks, then I'm doing something wrong with how I'm prioritizing my time.
Omer (48:07.920)
Okay, what's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time.
James Gill (48:14.320)
Oh, God, I don't know.
Like, I am incredibly dedicated and focused on Go Squared.
And, like, you know, it.
Honestly, it occupies tremendous amount of my thought process.
But just being like, obsessed with design in every walk of life, I just get really frustrated by products that I use on a daily basis that are not thoughtfully enough designed, if that's even a phrase.
So anyone who knows me knows I'm a massive fan of Apple, but I'm also a fan of people like Dieter Rams from Braun and people like that who just have this immense care for the products they work on.
And it just really frustrates me when I'm using products that just.
Just the people that have worked on them or the companies that have put them into the world just don't care enough about them.
So I think I would just love, in, I don't know, maybe a parallel universe to work on something more product, like real hardware product kind of focus.
Omer (49:16.420)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?
James Gill (49:20.900)
Being in London, I'm not sure how many people listening will know, but the Prime Minister's residence is 10 Downing Street.
It's like this big house in London.
It's very heavily guarded.
It's where the Prime Minister lives when they're in London.
And early on, when we were running Go Squared, we were privileged enough to get invited there to talk about tech in London and how young people were getting started in tech.
And it was just like this huge honor.
But what was most embarrassing was when I was trying to get out, I got completely lost and I just ended up getting stuck in the kitchen.
And, yeah, I just.
I think they thought I was like a security threat or something, but that was just an incredibly embarrassing way to spend one of the most proud moments of my life.
So, yeah, that was all good fun.
Yeah.
Omer (50:10.920)
And finally, what is one of your most important passions outside of your work?
James Gill (50:16.520)
I mean, I've already talked a lot about design, and I think extending from that, I.
The weekends being in London, we have an amazingly cultural city, and it's great.
And I'm really interested in architecture, so I'm kind of really fascinated by architecture, both old and new, and the reasons for buildings being the way they are.
There's lots of history and background to why buildings have been built the way they've been built, and that kind of really interests me.
I mean, in London at the moment, I don't know when you last came, but it's an incredibly fast changing city and it's buildings going up, left, right and center and there's just so much interesting stuff going on on that front.
And then aside from that, I also getting really into cooking as well.
I love cooking and just taking a bunch of raw ingredients and turning it into something that is actually edible and kind of liken that a bit to what we try and do every day in, in the software world.
But yeah, no love cooking and given the time here in London, I probably should be heading off and doing some of that right now.
And yeah, that's another thing I've been getting better at.
I used to be terrified of going near the oven, but now, yeah, it's actually a really fun thing to do and yeah, just love it.
Omer (51:46.170)
If you're interested, check out a website called masterclass.com.
James Gill (51:51.320)
oh cool.
Omer (51:52.120)
I recently discovered that and what they do is they bring on people, like people, people in the kind of creative field who considered to be, you know, best of the best.
They had Kevin Spacey doing a master class on acting and oh, amazing.
Recently they just launched one with Gordon Ramsay which is a four hour class.
I mean it's about $90 to buy it.
And he goes through sort of a summary in four hours of everything that he's learned in terms of what kind of equipment you should have in the kitchen knife techniques, how to poach an egg and everything.
So I'm actually watching that at the moment.
It's very inspiring.
James Gill (52:37.820)
Nice.
I'll check that out.
I'll check that out.
I assume he doesn't teach you the language.
Language as well.
Omer (52:42.350)
He does, he does actually.
He's.
Yeah, it's, it's not appropriate for work, but that's, that's good.
Random, I guess.
Okay, cool.
James, thank you.
It's been a pleasure.
Thanks for making the time to do this and I know it's late in, in London, so thank you for you know, kind of being patient and sharing everything and sort of the story of Go Squared and the lessons that, that you guys have learned along the way.
Now if you.
James Gill (53:09.060)
No, my pleasure.
Omar.
No thanks.
It's really been a real pleasure.
It's been great chatting.
Omer (53:13.740)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, me too.
If people want to find out more about Go Squared, you can go to GoSquared.com and you can sign up for the product there.
If folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
James Gill (53:30.260)
Yeah, sure.
Probably well over email, I'm just JamesowSquad.com, which is the best way to get me on email.
So, yeah, please do email me.
I try and get back to everyone as quick as I can.
And then on Twitter, I am James J. Gill.
So that's James with J in the middle and then Gil.
All one word.
Yeah.
I didn't beat James Gill on Twitter.
It's a real shame.
Like, I missed out on that handle.
Damn it.
Omer (53:57.040)
There's a Super bowl ad running here at the moment with John Malkovich.
I think it's a go.
I think it's a squared space squarespace.
Yeah.
Where he's basically sitting in front of a computer trying to buy the domain john malkovich.com and realizes some fisherman has that.
And then he's trying to call up the guy and tell him, I need this.
I have a movie that was named after me.
Anyway, thanks, James.
It's been a pleasure.
James Gill (54:27.120)
Thanks.
Yeah, real pleasure, Emma.
Cheers.
See you soon.
