426: How Your Data Model Shapes Your Product

Hey. It's Arvid, and this is the Bootstrap founder. My dear friend, Jack Alice, is this unending source of founder inspiration for me because not only has he he recently started embracing AI agentic coding, which is really cool, and it's something that he's been holding back on for quite a bit. I think I've mentioned several times on this podcast alone how he and I seem to have quite opposing views on embracing this technology, But something has clicked for him, and he's been diving headlong into it. So I'm just excited over the next couple of months. I hope he'll explore it more. And after that, I've been trying to get him to come on this podcast and talk about his experiences. So let's give him a chance and some time to explore it fully, and then we'll talk to him about that particular thing. But Jack said something else recently, which I found equally interesting and maybe even more generally applicable for all of us software developers building these digital businesses. It's just a quote from a tweet of his. He said, the biggest mistake I ever made was storing our page views and custom events in different database tables. They're now on their way to a single table. And obviously, Jack refers to this wonderful product of his, Fathom Analytics, something that I highly recommend using for your own software products because Fathom Analytics is privacy forward and very easy to use. I've been a big fan of their work for a long while. And what he's talking about here is how the data model that they had in the past has been holding them back. And that's what we're gonna be talking about today. A quick word from our sponsor, paddle.com. I use paddle as my merchant of record for all my software projects. They take care of all the taxes, currencies, they track the client transactions and we capture them and update credit cards in the background so that I can focus on dealing with my competitors and my customers instead of banks and financial regulators. If you think you'd rather just build your product instead of doing all these other things, check out paddle.com as your payment provider and merchant of record for your SaaS. Now Jack is no stranger to massive migrations. And if he sees something that needs to be migrated to something better, well, I think he just goes for it at this point and writes a really cool blog post about it. And I find that admirable and instructive, particularly because I've been running into some of the same issues, and it's really been helpful to see another perspective. I've been building PodScan for almost two years now. And obviously, the choices that I made on day one weren't necessarily the most forward thinking ones. Because as we all know in this world of entrepreneurship, we're just all trying to figure it out as we go along. Right? The …