On Tuesday of this week, GoSquared turned 20. Yes, we've been in business for twenty years.
I thought it was the perfect excuse to resurrect the Lost and Founder podcast to reflect on our journey to this point.
In this long-overdue episode, I share 8 lessons from building GoSquared: on team, leadership, and focus. And I dropped in a few inspiring quotes for good measure.
On team
Never underestimate what a small group of focused, aligned, motivated people can do.
Celebrate the small wins. Have fun along the way.
Most meetings don’t need to happen.
Knowing yourself is a superpower.
On business and leadership
Simplicity is a war.
If you think you’re repeating yourself too much, repeat some more.
Focus is impossibly hard, but without it you’re doomed.
Just do it.
To see more about our 20th birthday, you might also want to check out:
This week we released our first major integration for GoSquared in a long time: Numerics.
You can now get your GoSquared analytics data on all Apple platforms (iOS, Apple Watch, and even on Vision Pro) for the first time ever. I’m so excited for this — we’ve wanted to bring GoSquared to the iPhone since… well, the beginning of the App Store.
On a walk in my local high street I stumbled on a plaque on the side of a shop. By some incredible coincidence, I noticed it on the exact day, 80 years on from the event it marks. Dulwich Society Plaque and August 5th 1944.
I’ve gone back and forth on my belief in AB tests. They can be helpful but they can also be a lazy, if not misleading way to make decisions. The team at Equals put forward a strong case for why startups shouldn’t bother with AB testing.
Do you like medieval music? Ever wanted a beautifully designed piece of audio equipment dedicated to generating medieval beats? I thought so! The weirdest gadget I’ve seen in years, designed by Teenage Engineering. I love it.
I’m in Edinburgh for a few days for the Fringe. A beautiful city bursting with incredible talent and buzz, a melting pot of creativity, laughter, and culture.
The Paris 2024 Olympics is now over. It’s been incredible, and has had me reliving moments from London 2012. As usual, the BBC put together a beautiful montage of Team GB’s incredible games.
A quote for the week ahead
“A ship in port is safe, but that is not what ships are built for. Sail out to sea and do new things.” — Grace Hopper (a US Naval officer and an early computer programmer)
Getting an idea off the ground: “Optimism, obsession, self-belief, raw horsepower and personal connections are how things get started.”
Thinking long term: “Cohesive teams, the right combination of calmness and urgency, and unreasonable commitment are how things get finished. Long-term orientation is in short supply; try not to worry about what people think in the short term, which will get easier over time.”
Hiring: “Spend more time recruiting. Take risks on high-potential people with a fastrate of improvement. Look for evidence of getting stuff done in addition to intelligence.”
Coworkers: “Working with great people is one of the best parts of life.”
Making bets: “Concentrate your resources on a small number of high-conviction bets; this is easy to say but evidently hard to do. You can delete more stuff than you think.”
Wasting time: “Fight b*llshit and bureaucracy every time you see it and get other people to fight it too. Do not let the org chart get in the way of people working productively together.”
Time: “Fast iteration can make up for a lot; it's usually ok to be wrong if you iterate quickly. Plans should be measured in decades, execution should be measured in weeks.”
Other things this week
The first week of the Olympics in Paris has been incredible. Beautiful venues, Paris at its best.
I’m blown away by how little separates Olympic athletes between a gold medal and no medal. The men’s 100m final separated gold from silver by just 0.005 of a second.
I figured out how to add the Lost and Founder to YouTube. A while ago I started sharing my deepest darkest thoughts as a founder. I haven’t published in a while but I’m hoping to change that. I’ve just started posting old episodes to YouTube to give them a new lease of life. Stay tuned to YouTube for more.
I’m excited for something new for GoSquared next week. Stay tuned!
A quote for the week ahead
"The ultimate form of preparation is not planning for a specific scenario, but a mindset that can handle uncertainty." — James Clear
P.S. If you’re receiving this via email, you might notice it’s not sent from EcoSend. I’ll be changing that soon!
In the latest episode of Lost and Founder, I talk about eight of the 16 lessons from those 16 years — on building, ideas, and on customer relationships.
We received a ton of great feedback on the post, so I thought it’d be good to share some of those lessons on the show and speak about them a little more.
Here are the first 8 of the 16 lessons we’ve learned along the way so far...
On ideas and building:
Build something people want.
Share early, share often.
Constraints breed creativity — embrace them
The details are not the details, they make the product
On customers:
Use your own product. Be your own customer
Charge the trust battery
Your customers are smart — treat them accordingly
Treat each customer as unique, but scale your process
We also took the opportunity to reflect on some of the lessons we've learnt along the way. 16 lessons to be precise. Maybe you've come across many of these before, but it never hurts to reflect...
1. Build something people want. 2. Share early, share often. 3. Constraints breed creativity — embrace them. 4. The details are not the details, they make the product. 5. Use your own product. Be your own customer. 6. Charge the trust battery. 7. Your customers are smart — treat them accordingly. 8. Treat each customer as unique, but scale your process. 9. Never underestimate what a small group of focused, aligned, motivated people can do. 10. Celebrate the small wins. Have fun along the way. 11. Most meetings don’t need to happen. 12. Knowing yourself is a superpower. 13. Simplicity is a war. 14. If you think you’re repeating yourself too much, repeat some more. 15. Focus is impossibly hard, but without it you’re doomed. 16. Just do it.
Finally, a huge thank you to everyone who has supported us on this journey so far. Friends, family, colleagues, customers, investors, and all the amazing people we've met along the way.
I had the pleasure of being interviewed by prolific podcaster, entrepreneur, and all-round lovely guy Biro Florin this week on the The Startup Corner.
We spoke about how GoSquared got started, why a healthy dose of naivety can be an asset, and how raising money ideally needs to start with asking yourself a big, deep question. Plus a whole lot more.
If you have a spare moment in your day I'd encourage you to check out the show – Biro is a fantastic host and presenter, and a real pro when it comes to producing a quality podcast in record time.
This week we just launched a new product at GoSquared: Lead Forms.
Launches are always exciting, and every time we do a launch we learn from it, so I decided to focus this episode of Lost and Founder on the topic of launching.
When launching a product or a feature, or even launching a whole new business, it’s often difficult to know when to do it. You’re pretty much always going to launch too early or too late — from my experience, it’s almost impossible to launch “perfectly on time”.
If you’re getting ready to launch something, I hope this episode is helpful for you.
Actions / take aways
I’ve outlined some key actions and take-aways for those too busy to listen to the full thing:
Set a deadline for your launch — every time you do this you learn how to get better at setting deadlines.
Assign an owner if you're in a team — if more than one person “owns” a project, then no one actually owns it.
Be clear on your priorities — ensure everyone is aware of what is most important to the launch and the company.
If in doubt, optimise for speed — moving faster tends to solve more problems than it creates. Speed means you learn faster.
If you haven't already, it'd mean the world to me if you subscribe to Lost and Founder wherever you get your podcasts — find all the links to subscribe here.
I co-founded GoSquared all the way back in 2006(!) with two of my best friends from school – Geoff and JT, and have been building, learning, failing, and winning in the world of software ever since.
Monday of this week was a rubbish day for me. I woke up frustrated, anxious, feeling deflated and not sure what to do. I almost felt like calling in sick. But instead I put my running kit on and got out for a run in the rain.
When I came back, I said "screw it" and hit record on my Mac, and spoke about what was on my mind.
Later in the evening, through the wonders of SaaS – tools like Transistor, Descript, and Epidemic Sound enabled me to take my ramblings and make them into a podcast in a few hours.
I didn't overthink this, and I know I can do better, but I started, and I hope I can continue.
This whole thing is a bit scary – I haven't been this open or put myself personally out there much like this before. I hope you’ll like the show and join me as the journey continues.
I saw this tweet and it made me want to smash the “reply” button and disagree. But then I resisted – it needed more words, more thought.
As with most topics, and controversial points: it's nuanced and it depends.
Businesses grow up to inherit traits from their leaders – good and bad
From everything I can see, startups (and all companies) naturally adopt the culture and behaviours of the people running them.
Whether it’s the aggressive, winner-takes-all approach of Uber (and Travis Kalanick), the hungry, fast moving, detail obsessed approach of Stripe (and the Collison brothers), or the decisive, crazy, design-obsessive approach of Apple (and Steve) – I struggle to think of a company that isn’t an extension of the identity of the people in charge of it.
That’s not to say that the company can’t adapt or adjust to address the shortcomings of the founders. In fact, it has to to succeed. We all have flaws – and the bigger the business, the more publicly known those founder flaws are.
I find this all the time at GoSquared – as I’ve grown up, I’ve tried to increasingly make myself aware of my strengths and my weaknesses. I try to ensure we hire for people that fill the vast gaps in my own skill set, and I try to ensure I keep my mouth shut on topics where I really don’t consider myself an expert.
Your identity doesn't need to map 1:1 with your business
The reason I struggle with this tweet, is that it’s a two-way statement – it’s stating your startup = your identity. I find it much easier to agree that one’s startup is heavily influenced by the founder’s identity. I find it much harder to agree that a startup defines the founder’s identity.
GoSquared defining my own identity has honestly been its own small challenge for most of my adult life.
It's been a challenge in small ways and large – for example, my first Twitter account was not "@jamesjgill" it was "@GoSquared" – the very personification of GoSquared and myself on social media back in the day were the same thing. It was this decision to not start a personal Twitter account earlier that almost certainly caused me to miss the opportunity of being "@jamesgill" on Twitter, damnit!
It’s always hard for me to have a conversation with a friend before the question of “how’s GoSquared going?” cropping up within the first 5 minutes. Work is always a logical topic to talk about when catching up with a friend, but I find that answering this question, as a founder who has only ever worked in one place for my entire career, is a deeper question.
It’s a question of “how are you finding work?”, sure, but also “how has this career path you’ve chosen worked out so far?”, and “how is the company
This week we introduced a new product as part of the GoSquared platform – GoSquared Automation.
For the first time, you can now send emails to your contacts using GoSquared, without needing any external tools or integrations, and benefit from the wealth of data, insights, and segmentation options that we've been building for years.
Automation has been a long time in the works.
I remember when we released Customer Data Hub (at the time, we called it People Analytics) – back in 2015(!) – one of the top requests we received from customers from that point onwards has always been: I want to use the data in GoSquared to send better emails to customers.
It's exciting to have this huge new set of functionality in the platform. So many hours of hard work across the team went into this release, and I am so proud of what we've all achieved together to get to this point.
If you run a software business, and you're in the market for a better way to engage with your customers, you should take a look at what we've been up to.
