Ryan Kulp Fomo Ryan Kulp

Introducing Fomo Open

while making our website honest we identified a technical challenge:

  • every landing page has a 2 hour cache for speed and performance
  • live counters (customers, websites) therefore, aren't really "live"

we can address this issue by ignoring it (most startups) or disabling the cache (low IQ startups).

instead we built an API that returns metrics on-demand, and some JavaScript to fetch live values asynchronously per page load.

cache: check. live data: check.

introducing Fomo Open

it's no secret this API endpoint is public, so why not let anyone consume it?

beginning today, developers and marketers alike can review Fomo metrics anytime they want.


visit fomo.com/open to download charts with popular metrics like recent signups or paid clicks from our ad network.


if you're a JSON kinda gal, leverage the /open endpoint to get even more data including filtering for date ranges.

why?

first and foremost, we believe too many marketers are dishonest. we've written, podcast-ed, and spoken at conferences about this for years.

second, we want to encourage entrepreneurs to have a bias towards sharing. great products that deserve to exist, don't, because inventors don't know how to sell.

third, to publicly shame companies run by shit-heads. more on that later.

more, later

publicizing the health of a private business isn't new, and we give credit to companies like Buffer and Baremetrics for paving the way with public revenue dashboards.

but for us, being open means more than sharing numbers.

over the next year Fomo will open source:

  • marketing campaigns
  • server crashes
  • annual goals
  • failure post-mortems
  • our design system
  • security vulnerabilities (after they're patched, we're not stupid)
  • and more

we're doing it to make a point, and we're doing it to save competitors precious time as they struggle to copy us anyway.

many core tenets of "how to business" are illusions and we're spending next year's marketing budget challenging these rules to learn what's true.

but how

in most organizations, everything requires approval. whether you're on a team of 5 or 5,000, you probably want "buy-in" from your boss or counter-parts before executing a project.

at Fomo we don't have this limitation. everyone is an owner, and my role as part-time marketer is the same: get stuff done, report whether or not it worked, and figure out why.

if you are unable to follow a similar process at your company, i'm sorry. here is some motivation to fix your problem:

painless. no bureaucrats. stream of consciousness. easy.

startups are easy

i've said this for years and in 2019 we'll prove it.

good marketing is a process by which entrepreneurs ask two questions:

  1. who is your customer?
  2. where is your customer?

join us in finding the answers.

#entrepreneurship #marketing