GoSquared

A 11-post collection

GoSquared on iOS, coincidences, and medieval beats — Weekly Roundup

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.

Numerics integration for GoSquared

Other notes from the week

  • 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 posted a few more episodes of Lost & Founder on YouTube.
  • 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)

Olympic precision, and advice from Sam Altman — weekly roundup

Last week I shared a post summarising what I had learned in the week.

I found it helpful for myself, and hopefully it may be at least mildly interesting for others too.

Here’s a few things I found interesting this week.

An incredibly densely packed set of wisdom from Sam Altman. I found this very motivating to read:

7 frameworks Sam Altman wishes someone told him earlier

I found this via Joel Hansen of Napkin Notes.

  • 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.
  • We wrapped up July at EcoSend and it was a busy month.
  • 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!

An interview on the Misfit Founders podcast

The incredibly generous and supportive Biro Florin recently invited me on his show Misfit Founders.

The show was filmed in his beautiful house in Brighton, UK, and we chatted about building a SaaS business, and a whole lot more.

It's the first time I've spoken at length about our work on EcoSend and how GoSquared fits into a bigger picture more than ever.

It's a very long show (the best part of two hours!) so if you have the time, I hope you enjoy it.

Thank you Biro, for inviting me on, and helping to set my life goals for a podcasting setup like yours!

Episode 15 of Lost and Founder — What we've learned from 16 years of GoSquared

On 3rd February GoSquared turned the grand age of sixteen.

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.

Recently when GoSquared turned 16 years old (or young?) we shared a blog post with 16 lessons from those 16 years.

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:

  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

On customers:

  1. Use your own product. Be your own customer
  2. Charge the trust battery
  3. Your customers are smart — treat them accordingly
  4. Treat each customer as unique, but scale your process

Thanks, and see you next time!

Music: Jakarta by Bonsaye. Podcast hosting: Transistor.

16 lessons from 16 years of GoSquared

Today marks the 16th (yes, you read that right — sixteenth) birthday of GoSquared.

We were just kids when we started building this thing.

We were meant to be doing homework and getting into trouble, but we were obviously far too cool for that.

To celebrate this milestone, we put together a timeline of our journey from February 2006 to today.

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.

If you want to dive into any of these lessons further (and have a cup of tea in hand), then please take a look at the complete post over on the GoSquared Blog.

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.

Building a long lasting startup – interview with Biro Florin and yours truly

Building a Long Lasting Startup

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.

View the show on YouTube

Episode 8 of Lost and Founder — How soon should you launch?

Lead Forms by GoSquared

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.

As I’ve written in the past, I feel launching is a bit like inviting your friends or relatives over to your house. Inviting someone over forces you to get your house in order — to tidy, to prepare for a deadline, and to prioritise unfinished tasks.

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.

Subscribe for future episodes

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.

Thanks and see you next time!

Introducing the Lost and Founder Podcast

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.

Here's the show: Lost and Founder podcast

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.

15 years of GoSquared

February 3rd 2021 marked the 15th birthday of GoSquared.

It’s crazy to look back at those 15 years – it’s more than half my life!

Of course, what we’re doing now is slightly different to what we started out doing all that time ago.

We’ve learnt a lot, and I wrote about just three of my biggest lessons in a blog post on the GoSquared Blog:

  1. Build it and they will not come
  2. You make your own luck
  3. People are more difficult, and more powerful, than code

I hope you enjoy the full post: 15 years and counting running GoSquared

You might also be interested in the visual timeline of GoSquared – there’s something in there for everyone!

Is your business your identity?

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

GoSquared Automation

A quick intro to Automation from yours truly.

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.