I joined Greg Head on the Practical Founders Podcast for a wide-ranging conversation that covered both sides of Wicked Reports: the attribution problem we solve, and the practical way we built a company around it.
The heart of it is the thing I talk about everywhere. Most brands running paid ads are trusting the ad platforms to grade their own homework, and they have no reliable, independent way to see which marketing actually drives revenue. Wicked Reports exists to give them that: multi-touch, first-party attribution that ties real orders back to every touch along the customer journey, so you can tell the difference between a channel that is genuinely creating customers and one that is just claiming credit for demand that already existed.
I told Greg who this is really for. Our wheelhouse is direct-to-consumer and ecommerce brands spending real money on ads, where the cost of measuring wrong is high, though we support plenty of businesses smaller and larger than that too. The common thread is that they have gotten past guessing and want a scoreboard they can actually trust to guide budget decisions. That is the job we are hired to do, provide clarity on what to scale, chill, or kill.
The origin story is the part Greg's founder audience latched onto, and it is also the clearest way to explain what we do. The company started because a friend running a lobster business was about to write off a marketing channel that was actually working, because the platform reports made it look like a failure. Tracking the full journey showed the opposite. That one problem, proving what really drives revenue, is what turned a data side-project into a software company.
We also got into the business itself: why I chose to bootstrap rather than take the VC money on the table, and why the growth rate that funding would have demanded did not fit the company we wanted to build. It is a candid look at building a practical, profitable software business without big funding, and at the attribution problem that made it necessary in the first place.
Whether you are a founder or a marketer trying to measure what actually works, this one covers a lot of ground. Watch the full conversation below.