How 3 Teenagers Turned GoSquared from a Hobby Into a SaaS Business
James Gill is the co-founder and CEO of GoSquared, an all-in-one platform for SaaS businesses. GoSquared combines analytics, CRM, live chat, and marketing automation in one seamless platform.
The three co-founders started the company when they were 14 years old. They set to build an online advertising business inspired by watching the TV show ‘Mad Men'. But nothing worked. As James told me, they couldn't even pay for lunch; and that was school lunch!
However, 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 added live chat and CRM capabilities. Now, 10 years later, they've built a business with over 1000 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 building a great product.
Book Recommendation
- “Getting Real: The Smarter, Faster, Easier Way to Build a Successful Web Application” by Jason Fried, Heinemeier David Hansson
- “Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us” by Seth Godin
The Show Notes
- GoSquared
- Digg
- Slack
- Panic
- Bump the Lamp: The Reason for Caring
- James Taylor
- Geoff Wagstaff
- James on Twitter
- Omer on Twitter