Blog One year in: we're still in business

One year in: we're still in business

Fishtown Analytics celebrates its one year anniversary today. Read now
One year in: we're still in business

Fishtown Analytics celebrates its one year anniversary today. Last night we had a small soiree to celebrate the event and called it the “We’re Still in Business” party. The name reflects my surprise that we continue to exist—that clients continue to pay us money to do work, that we have a small but growing team of wonderful people, that dozens of companies use our software daily. I wake up every day surprised that this is my reality and take absolutely none of it for granted.

I wanted to take a moment to share our results for the first year, because I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve accomplished. Here are the highlights:

  • We are now five strong: myself, Drew, Connor, Erin, and Elyse. I could not imagine a better starting five.
  • We’ve served 25 clients over the past year, most of whom we continue to work with today. It has been an absolute privilege to work with each and every one.
  • We have over 50 companies actively using our open-source analytics product, dbt. Many of these companies are deeply engaged with dbt, training entire teams on it and putting it at the heart of their data stack.

Those results blew away every expectation that I had when starting Fishtown Analytics a year ago; my only goal at the time was to make enough money to support myself. And we’ve done it all on an initial $10k deposit into a checking account.

(As an aside: To anyone thinking about bootstrapping, I highly recommend it. It’s more achievable than ever and it forces you to run your business responsibly. I love talking about this topic with other folks going through it, so please reach out.)

I wanted to take this opportunity to say thanks to the people who have gotten us here.

Drew, Connor, Erin: thank you, thank you not only for all the hard work but for the investment of yourselves. It’s amazing working with people who care as much about our vision as I do.

To our partners—Jake and the rest of the team at Stitch; Taylor, George, and the Fivetran team; Daina, Keenan, Nouras, and everyone at Looker; Emily and the Mode crew—thank you. Our business wouldn’t work without your amazing products, and your support is so important to our success.

To our dbt users: thanks for investing in a tool that’s so early, for pushing us to make it better, and for really coming together to support each other as a community. We’re obsessed with dbt, and we’re so happy that you see something in it too.

We’re also supported by amazing professionals. Joshua Smith has done all of our design, Ryan Wertman handles our legal, and Jake Cohen handles our accounting. If you’re looking for help in any of these areas, I couldn’t recommend these folks more highly. Thanks to each of you.

And thanks to the Data Science Roundup community—the roundup started as a side-project at RJMetrics and has grown into something really special. Thanks to each of you for sharing thousands of hours of your attention.

We have big goals for the next year. We’re planning on growing our consulting business in both size and capability. We’re planning on making some exciting improvements to dbt that will empower users to use it in increasingly sophisticated ways. And we’re planning on training a whole lot more analysts in how we think analytics should be done.

Thanks again for a great first year. Stay tuned for more in year two :)

— Tristan

Last modified on: Apr 25, 2022

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