Jason Fried, welcome to the Andy Hackers podcast.
I would call the original class of self-funded software businesses on the web.
And I would also wager that you've done more than pretty much anyone to inspire people to follow down the same path.
The very least, Andy Hackers will not exist and not for you guys and your writing and you're speaking over the years.
And that's probably true of many hundreds of thousands of other businesses too.
It's pretty amazing that you can just get on the internet and share your thoughts and thousands of people who you've never heard of and who will never meet will literally make life-changing decisions based on something that you wrote last Wednesday while you're eating a sandwich or something.
And most of the time you won't even know they did that unless they write you and tell you about it.
But it's been a role that you've played for the last 15 years.
So I'm curious, what are some of the things that you've learned in that time about how to be successful?
What are some of the things that you've learned in that time about how to be effective?
How to be persuasive when you're sharing your ideas with so many people?
Not to worry about being persuasive, basically.
I've never really tried to change anybody's mind.
I should say maybe I used to try to do that.
Maybe a better way to say is I used to try to do that and I don't anymore.
I can trust software as a service and that kind of stuff, which of course people don't think about quite as much today.
But back then they thought about that.
And I remember trying to convince people that, you know, well, it's safe in this.
And at some point you just can't convince anybody.
And I just stopped trying.
Instead I just try to communicate clearly and try to tell the truth as I see it and let the chips fall where they may.
If you try too hard to change people's minds, you're just going to end up frustrated.
That's the best advice I have if you want to be persuasive is just not to try.
You have a lot of strong controversial opinions as well.
How important is it that the thoughts that you share online be unique or controversial?
I don't aim to be controversial.
I just call it as I see it.
And sometimes that is controversial.
I think what's important though is that you have a point of view.
I think when you have a point of view, you automatically become controversial to people who don't share that point of view.
When you don't have a point of view at all and you're just very muddled and whatever,
then you can't really move anybody one way or the other.
Again, I don't mean change their mind.
I just mean get them engaged.
For me, what's important is to say something that has a clear point of view and that I believe.
I don't write things to get reactions.
I write things to share something if I believe it.
If some people disagree, that's great.
If people agree, that's great.
I don't really write for any other effect other than to share an idea.
One of the ideas that you shared a lot back in the 2000s was that people should consider bootstrapping their businesses.
They should consider charging customers money instead of raising money from investors.
Back then, I was in college.
I had to start something and the only information I could find said that what you needed to do was go to Silicon Valley and raise money.
Try to get into Y Combinator, try to pitch Sequoia and hopefully investors will invest and then you can start something online.
Then I found you guys, you and your co-founder, DHH.
I got hooked on your message, which was very different than what everybody else was saying at the time.
In fact, I went to Mountain View to this startup school event that Y Combinator put on.
They brought up this whole parade of investors and founders to talk to us.
I think you were the last speaker and you basically said, yeah, don't listen to any of these people.
You don't need to raise money. You don't need to move to California.
You can just charge your customers for what you're building.
For whatever reason, that was a pretty radical thing to say in 2007.
Why do you think so few people were putting out that message and agreeing with what you said at that time?
Well, I was never invited back to speak at Y Combinator.
I think it's unfortunately still a radical message in the software industry.
The thing is, it's not a radical message anywhere else in the world.
Pretty much every single business in the world, like 99-point-whatever percent.
They just have to figure out how to go on their own and figure it out.
The dry cleaner in the corner, the pizza shop in the corner, the little coffee shop.
Most businesses that exist just have to figure it out.
It's funny how in our industry, we're seen as radical, but really we're extremely mainstream.
What's radical to me is the alternative, which is going and raising a bunch of money
and aiming as high as you possibly can.
The only thing that's going to be a success is eternal rapid growth to become a billion-dollar business.
That seems exceptionally radical.
The odds are hugely against you.
From our point of view, building a sustainable business is a lot more reasonable.
The odds are more in your favor.
Still against you, of course, starting a business is always challenging.
You have a much better shot at staying within your means and growing slowly
and reaching profitability than you do becoming a billion-dollar business
or knowing how to spend that $30 million that you raised.
I don't understand that.
I guess I understand it, but I don't agree with that way of doing it.
I know back in 2007, it was, I guess you could say, more radical since now.
There are certainly more people doing it.
There are great examples of companies that have done this, like MailChimp and a number of others.
Now there's a new crop of investors that are not out to help you raise millions,
but maybe $100,000 or $150,000 just to get going.
They'll take a small portion of your business and then maybe you can buy them out.
I feel like that's a good pattern, a good path, and good progress.
I'm not against taking any money ever, although I think it should be something you do later
and not too early on.
People can get in a lot of trouble.
One of the reasons not to raise money is that you get to keep your independence.
If you don't have a board, if you don't have anybody to answer to,
then it's your company.
You own it and you're free to do whatever the hell you want.
What are some of the ways that you've taken advantage of your freedom at Basecamp?
Independence is probably the most valuable thing that we have
because within independence typically comes flexibility
and certainly with profitability comes flexibility.
There's all sorts of things we've done that probably people would tell us not to do.
It makes very little business sense in the case for us to write books
and share all the information that we do and spend all that time on writing and sharing.
Technically, it's hard to justify.
If you were really someone looking at the numbers, it'd be very hard to justify,
but we do it because we can and we want to.
Building seven or eight products over the course of our careers
and then deciding to go all in on just one of them
and change the name of the company five years ago to Basecamp
and focus on Basecamp and build a brand new version of Basecamp from scratch every few years.
That on paper doesn't make a lot of sense to a lot of people.
To us, it makes plenty of sense.
Staying as small as we can in terms of the number of people who work here
to most companies wouldn't make a lot of sense
because there's all sorts of things we want to do.
We have a million ideas. We can only do two of them, let's say.
But that's true no matter what size you're at.
But still, people think that more people means you can do more things.
Certainly, maybe you can, but you certainly tend to do them slower
and all sorts of other problems creep up.
There's a lot of things that we've done, I think, that wouldn't make sense on paper.
Had we had a board, we'd have to really justify ourselves.
I just don't have any interest in justifying myself.
I just want to do the best work I can with the best people we can find,
enjoy ourselves and make our own decisions
and do things on behalf of our customers and ourselves, and that's it.
To me, that's just more valuable than anything.
You really have come to appreciate that flexibility and independence.
I wish it on more people because it's a really special thing.
The moment you take outside money from an investor
who expects a return in a short period of time,
you've given those things up.
I think a lot of people don't really recognize that they've given those things up
until much later on in the process and then they regret it.
I would encourage people to stick to their guns
and try and do it themselves first
before they would ever seek outside funding at a certain level.
Of course, to borrow some money from your friends or your family or yourself
or even the bank a little bit.
Of course, you need to get going sometimes,
but I'm talking about investment with strings attached.
I think you're going to be very careful about that.
In a lot of ways, having a company is almost like running your own little country.
It's like your own little fiefdom and you're the dictator
as long as you aren't accountable to other people.
You don't necessarily have to be a bad dictator.
In fact, hopefully you're a great benevolent dictator
and you create this great world for yourself and your employees
and your customers to exist in.
It's one of my favorite ideas that you guys export,
this idea that your company is a product
and you should iterate on it, you should work on it,
you should make it into something that you actually enjoy.
That's a net good for yourself and for the world.
Where did you get that idea from?
How did you first realize that a company
doesn't have to be the cookie cutter thing
that does everything that everybody else is doing?
I think we looked back on our behavior
and realized that at some point.
We've changed the way we've worked a bunch of times.
We've changed our approach to work,
our approach to hiring, all these things.
Really, at the end of the day, in order to make something,
you have to use your company.
You use the company to make the other things that you make
and therefore the company is a product
and probably your most important product.
We've been in business for 20 years
and we'd love to stay in business for another 20.
If you want to be around for a long time,
you have to build sustainable practices.
As you grow, we have 54 people now.
We're the biggest we've ever been,
but we're still relatively small, all things considered,
but we're a lot different than we were when we were 30
and when we were 20, when we were eight.
You have to change your processes and your ideas as you go,
but they don't have to become more rigid.
I think that's what typically happens
in a lot of organizations.
As they grow, they form a lot of organizational scar tissue
and they tighten up.
We've tried to continue to iterate rather than scar.
Scarring would be like,
this is the way we do it and that's that.
It's a permanent fixture now
versus like we've changed the way we've worked
and approached a whole bunch of things over the years
and continue to do so.
I think that's the healthy way to do it
and I think that if you realize that your company's a product
that you can improve the product,
like you improve your other products,
that it means that your company can get better
and we want our company to get better as we age as well.
I think it's a mindset.
Once you just start to explain it to people,
people start to realize, oh, that does make sense,
but I don't think a lot of people thought about it that way.
They think of a company as a static.
It grows and it shifts size,
but it doesn't really change that much.
I think it really probably should change pretty frequently,
just like a product should change frequently enough
if you have new ideas and you want to improve it further.
Companies have bugs.
There's all sorts of things about companies that don't work.
The way they work, the way they communicate,
the way they sanction time and the way they divide time
and the tools they use and all these things,
this is all important stuff and you need to be really thinking
about what it's doing to the organization,
what it's doing to the company,
and not just buy something and start using it.
What is it doing?
What impact is it having?
Is it hurting?
Is it helping?
Just because it's the latest and greatest
doesn't mean it's any better for us.
It could be worse.
Lots of things are worse.
Open floor plans were the latest and greatest thing
a couple of decades ago
and they've made office life worse for a lot of people.
So it's important to revisit these decisions that you've made
and iterate and tweak them and adjust them
and not go, that's just the way it is.
If the way it is, it might have been the way it was,
but it doesn't have to be the way it has to be.
So I think that's sort of our approach to these sorts of things.
I don't know what it is about being a human
and just loving to copy other people,
but it's a natural thing to just feel comfortable
doing something that everybody else is doing
and to feel a little bit afraid.
Yeah, it's easier.
Not only is it easier, but it's safer in a way
because you're like, well, everyone else is doing it,
so I'm not going to be out and put my neck out
and doing something different.
Why am I right and everyone else is wrong?
That sort of thing.
The thing is that everything is contextual.
Because XYZ works over here,
it means nothing about whether or not it's going to work for you.
Very little, I shouldn't say nothing, but very little.
It has very little impact on whether or not it's going to work for you
because it works for them.
Their organization is different.
You see this all the time when it comes to small companies
following big companies.
I think this is one of the big mistakes that startups make
is that they look to companies like Apple and Tesla
and Airbnb and these kind of companies,
which are enormous companies
and have nothing at all to do with the scale you're at
when you're six people.
Zero. Absolutely zero.
The way they work, the way they function,
the way they make decisions,
completely irrelevant to a six-person company,
yet those six people, or those companies with six people,
they tend to look at these bigger leaders and go,
we want to be like them.
Well, they weren't like you when they were your size.
You're probably better off being more like them
when they were your size than they are now.
So I think it's important for people to look around
if they're going to take some lessons from others,
from people who are a lot closer to them.
So, for example, I'll often say that
I'm the worst person to talk to about starting a business.
I've started a successful business,
but I started it 20 years ago.
What the hell do I know about starting a business today?
I know very little.
You're much better off talking to someone who started a business
three weeks ago or three months ago than talking to me
or talking to anyone who's been successful over the years.
Things are different. Context is different.
So talk to people who are doing the thing you want to do right now.
They're going to be the best source of information for you
and the most realistic source of information for you.
So I'd say look for people your own size,
look for people your own age, look for companies your own age,
that sort of thing, and learn from what's going on around you.
It's not that you can't pay attention to other people.
I love Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger,
who were in their 80s and 90s.
I pay attention to their fundamental wisdom and whatnot,
but I just think there's probably more to be learned
from people who are closer to your own context.
Yeah, you're spot on with early stage founders
spending way too much time trying to copy these companies.
They have nothing to do with them. They're way too big.
The analogy I always give is you wouldn't go to the gym
and just try to bench press 500 pounds
because that's what the biggest person there is bench pressing.
You just get squashed.
But for some reason, as a founder,
there's something missing that doesn't make it that obvious
that you can't just copy what the bigger people are doing.
I talked to Natalie Nagel.
She runs a company called Wildbid. I'm sure you've heard of it.
They've been around for a similar amount of time as you guys,
running a bootstrapped and profitable business with multiple products.
She describes her company as almost like a playground.
I asked her a question and she gave me an interesting answer.
I want to ask you the same question.
Let's say you could try something unconventional at Basecamp
and you didn't have to worry that it wasn't going to work.
It was definitely going to be an experiment that panned out.
What would you change about how you run your company?
I'd probably just take a year off, actually.
I think the way we run our company day-to-day is good
when we reiterate, so we're not in a place where we're unhappy.
I'd be very curious just to see what would happen
if I took a year off, for example,
and what good things would happen specifically?
What patterns would emerge? What changes would be made?
That sort of thing I think would be really interesting to do.
I've contemplated that before but never had the courage to do it.
I think that could be interesting.
We're also doing something we said we would never do.
Right now, we're building a new product, an entirely different product,
like Basecamp. We're still building Basecamp,
but then we're going to build another product,
which is something we used to do a long time ago,
and then we stopped doing.
We said we're going to go all in and focus on Basecamp,
but now we're going to do something else too.
That was a decision we made earlier this year,
and actually probably late last year.
Anyway, so we're doing that.
That probably would have been something two years ago.
I would have said,
maybe we should do another product, and now we are.
We do do some of these things that are kind of big bets and strange decisions
and contradictory, basically,
and conflicting with another thing we may have said a number of years ago.
But I am a big fan of changing my mind,
and I think you should be changing your mind all the time.
This is one of those times.
But anyway, I think to answer your initial question,
taking a year off would be a cool experiment.
I'd like to try that sometime.
Let's go down this path that you've led us down.
You built a ton of products, not just Basecamp.
You built HiRise, a CRM tool.
You built a chat tool, I believe it was called Campfire.
You built Todoist app called Todalist.
You built Backpack, Writeboard, and probably some others,
as I'm forgetting.
I just talked to another indie hacker on the podcast.
He bootstrapped his product to about $4,000 or $5,000 a month in revenue
and then got the edge and just launched a totally new product a couple months ago.
Now that's at like $300 in recurring revenue.
It's something that I see people at all stages doing,
building lots of products.
What's your mindset here?
How do you make the decision to not just build one thing
and branch out to do different things?
This kind of snuck up on us.
First off, we had an idea that we wanted to explore.
But more than that, we realized that, or we think,
I shouldn't say we realized, we think,
because we don't know if it's a good idea or not,
that it's a good idea to what we're calling TikTok,
basically go back and forth between two things.
One, we built a brand new version of Basecamp.
We did it after we explored something else.
For example, Basecamp 3, which is the current version,
before that, we built a product called Know Your Company,
which is now called Know Your Team.
We spun that off and someone else runs that now.
A lot of the ideas for Basecamp 3, visual ideas and some of the structural ideas,
came from us exploring another product, making another product,
and then returning back to Basecamp to make a new version of Basecamp.
Now that Basecamp 3 has been out for, it's been changing all the time,
but been out collectively for almost four years
and we're skearing up to make the next version of Basecamp,
we think it's a good idea to explore something else first
so we can get some new ideas,
and also to have something to go back and forth on.
Two different kinds of products with different approaches
and different interfaces and different concepts
and bring new ideas to each one of them
through other explorations that you can't get to.
We found that you can't get to by exploring the same thing.
The fact that we had new idea
and that we wanted to begin working on a new version of Basecamp soon
and the fact that we feel like there's a point in a product's life cycle
where, for example, we have 54 people in the company
and we're pointing all of our efforts right now
into making marginal improvements in an existing product that's really, really good.
Basecamp 3 is the best version we've ever made.
It's really damn good.
It can replace five other products.
You don't need to use Slack.
You don't need to use Trello.
You don't need to use Asana.
You don't need to use Jira.
You don't need to use email.
You don't need to use Google Docs.
It's one thing you can use and replace all these things.
It's really damn good.
But like I said, it's about four years in.
And while we're making improvements along the way,
there comes a point where the improvements you're making
are ultimately marginal at the end
and to focus all of our company's energy into making those kind of improvements
versus if you start something new,
you can put all your energy into something taking it from zero somewhere
versus taking something from, let's say, 98 to 100.
It just seems like a better allocation of resources
plus all the benefits you get from exploring something new with fresh eyes
and then being able to bring those lessons back into the other product.
So those are kind of some of the reasons
aside from the fact that we just want to make something
because we use this one thing every single day
and we just don't like the way it works.
We haven't found anything else that we like.
So typically when we get to that point,
we decide to make our own version of whatever that thing is
and do it our own way and hopefully other people like it.
So that's the plan.
This other thing will be out and I'm being extremely vague.
But it'll be out either later this year or early next year.
It'll be out later this year for some people
and then early next year for everybody's consumption.
Is there a point where it's too early
to start splitting your focus onto a second product?
If you haven't gone to the point of diminishing returns
and all the features you're building, is it foolish to split your focus?
I do think so, yes.
And I think this is where a lot of founders go wrong early.
So they have this itch to make to create which is good.
That's why they are who they are.
But making something is actually the easy part.
The hard part is maintaining something
and improving something over time.
Anyone can go start a business tomorrow.
You just get a domain name.
You don't even need one of those either.
But you just put up a website or whatever
and you're essentially in business.
But are you going to be in business a year from now
or two years from now or three years from now?
A lot of people make products and they think that's it.
No, no, it's not it.
That's the easy part.
Making something is easy then releasing it to the public
and fielding requests and handling all that stuff
and doing customer service and improving the product over time
and dealing with downtime.
All that stuff is challenging.
And if you take your eye off that ball too early
and start to jump on something else,
I think it's a pretty good chance that that first thing is not going to survive.
It's kind of like a baby.
You just need to take care of that baby for a while.
I know some people have babies in rapid succession.
But for the most part, the first nine months, first year,
you've got to pay all your attention to that human, baby human,
that living thing in order for it to survive.
And I think that the thing is true for products,
but I think the products you need to pay more attention to.
I'd give it a couple years before you really start to jump into something else.
So especially if your team is very small because then you're very diluted
and it's very, very difficult, I think, to maintain a high level of quality
and two things at once when you're very, very small,
especially when the public is going to be pulling you in different directions
and all sorts of issues are going to pop up
and you don't have the space and the time to really dedicate to anything.
Instead, you're sort of siphoning off time from this to that.
I think that's probably not a great move.
So anyway, that's my general point of view on it.
There's, of course, exceptions and whatnot.
Maybe that second thing is actually the first thing.
Maybe the second thing should have been the first thing.
So there's certainly an opportunity for that second thing you make
to be better than the first and maybe the first thing
you shouldn't have spent any time on.
So, you know, sometimes you have to get through the first mistake
before you hit the second one.
So it's not that the second thing is going to be bad at all.
It's just a matter of focus.
I think it's important to nurture focus and self-discipline here,
especially with making sure that whatever you put out in the world
can get better over time and you can support it
and you get used to supporting things versus just letting them sort of flounder
and it's very easy for things to fall apart if you don't pay attention to them.
That's not the case necessarily with mature products,
but it's the case with new products.
I think it's hard just to focus because, for example, with IndieHackers,
my list of things that I might want to someday work on, it's bigger every month.
It's never the list that gets smaller.
It will always be true.
Yeah, I don't expect it to ever stop being true.
It's not like I'm going to run out of ideas.
It's not like people are going to stop suggesting,
oh, why don't you do this or do that?
And I'll probably never do 99% of those things.
I think I'm fine with it, but it's really easy to be like a dog chasing a car.
Yeah, you have to be fine with it.
There's no other option.
If you're someone who makes to make things,
you're always going to want to make new things.
You're always going to see problems in the world.
You're always going to want to fix them or whatever
or put your version of it out there,
but simply can't do everything you want and that never ends.
Every company, it's funny because people just think like,
all you got to do is hire more people and you can do more things.
I mentioned this earlier on the show.
You can do more things, but you'll never ever do everything you want to do.
That's good because most of the things you probably want to do aren't worth doing
or they're worth doing for five minutes.
Then you get into it and you're like,
I shouldn't have started this.
I thought I knew this problem, but I really don't.
Or I thought I had this idea, but once it starts to take shape,
it's like, no, this is not really what I thought it was going to be.
That's healthy and a good thing.
So anyway, I wouldn't hit yourself over the head with that.
It's a good thing to practice focus and it's also a good thing to be selective
about the things you choose to put your energy into.
You have very limited energy, limited focus, limited attention,
and the things you choose to spend that time on
and the energy on should really earn it and be worthy of it.
Not everything is.
It's also, I think, more fun to focus on something that's a little bit smaller
and really be able to do a good job.
I was thinking about this yesterday when I was prepping questions for this podcast.
There have been times in the past where I've sat down to come up with some questions
and I've got a ton of code that I really want to write.
And I'm like, I don't have time to do both of these.
And I sort of rush through the questions and then it's not fun to do the questions
and I just feel the whole time like I should be coding instead.
Whereas if I just give myself time to really just give something the time that it needs
and do a good job, it's actually a really fun thing to do.
And so I think it's the same with all the different features
and opportunities you can chase with your product.
If you just sort of pare down your focus and limit sort of what you're focused on,
you might find yourself enjoying it a lot more, at least in my experience.
And I think you can reach a different depth, which is, in my opinion, the exciting part.
I think if you balance between too many things, you're just kind of scratching the surface.
And that's cool. That's fine.
Now, some problems are just surface level deep, but some things are really interesting.
And if you give yourself complete focus, give those things complete focus
and you give yourself dedicated time, you can go really deep on a problem area
and really do something new and interesting.
In Basecamp 3, there's a feature called Hill Charts.
And Hill Charts is a brand new innovation, totally new invention that we came up with,
which is that a lot of people look at projects and try to track them linearly.
They're 42% complete or 68% complete.
And all these tools have bar charts and pie graphs and stuff about how much is left.
But that's not right. Projects aren't that way.
There is no such thing as a project that's 68% complete.
It doesn't exist in the world. That's a lie.
And if there's like eight of 10 to-dos done, it doesn't mean there's 20% left.
It could be 90% left. There just happens to be two things left.
But are those things knowns? Are they unknowns? Are they hard? Are they easy?
I mean, projects don't work on a linear scale.
So we invented this thing called Hill Charts, which is all about separating things visually
between the knowns and the unknowns and then moving things over a hill.
Actually, like a physical hill. It's not physical. It's a line. It's a hill.
And the point is that there are certain parts of a project that feel uphill
and there are certain parts of a project that feel downhill.
Uphill things are things you don't know.
You don't know where the top is. You're still exploring. You're trying to figure it out.
But there's a point where you get to the top and you're like,
okay, we finally got this figured out now, this scope of work, this idea, whatever it is.
And now it's downhill from here. That's what people say.
It's downhill from here, which means it's all now about the execution.
We've figured out the problem.
And when you plot things on a hill versus a line,
all sorts of new ideas come into focus and all sorts of new questions are asked.
And projects run way, way better.
And the only reason we were able to come up with this is because we spent a lot of time
thinking about this and going deep on this problem
and finding ourselves consistently frustrated with percentages of projects being done.
There's no such thing.
So the point is that we didn't get to this idea until three versions in and 12 versions...
Sorry, 15 years later after starting Basecamp.
About 14 years. We introduced Hillcharts last year in Basecamp 3.
That's 14 years in on the Basecamp product that we finally figured this out.
And I think it's one of the most important things we've done.
And it just took a long time to get there.
We had to go through a bunch of other things to get there.
And we never would have gotten there had we just kind of just hit the surface.
And you hit the surface and you do what everyone else does.
And there's percentages and line colors.
It's like green and red and how much is done.
And it's like a progress indicator line.
That just is a fucking lie.
Yet it's everywhere.
And we couldn't deal with it anymore.
So we came up with the old thing.
But anyway, the point is it took us a long time to get there
because we had to keep going deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper
and see the problem from different dimensions and different directions and different sides
to finally come up with the idea.
And the idea actually came from us working on a project for Basecamp
where we just felt like we kept saying like we just couldn't get this over the hill.
This is before we had the hill charts, before we had the name, before we had the idea.
But we just kept feeling like we just kept pushing this thing uphill
and we couldn't get over the hill.
And then all the things felt easy.
It's like a downhill.
It's like sledding downhill.
And there's something here.
There's an idea here.
And we spent like a year thinking about that idea
and exploring it until we finally came up with the right implementation of it.
Anyway, those to me are some of the most satisfying parts of product development
is being stumped and finally working your way through a problem
and then seeing something that's very clear and straightforward
once you get through all the murkiness.
But you need to really dive deep, I think, to get there.
Yeah.
It takes time.
You guys have said that the biggest market is the simplest
and that there are a lot more people who just want the simple thing
without the bells and whistles,
even if a handful of your customers are constantly asking you
to build this feature or that feature.
I think that's a pretty compelling idea,
especially to an indie hacker who's working a full-time job or something
building their projects on the side
because they don't have a ton of time to put in all these bells and whistles.
But on the flip side, the problem is that there's so many people
building simple products, especially today.
And I think you guys have probably experienced this a little bit.
For example, with Todalist, which was a very simple to-do list app
that you guys built back in 2005, there wasn't a lot of competition.
There are thousands and thousands of simple Todalist applications.
If you're a founder and you want to start something today
and you want to keep it simple, how do you stand out?
How do you give customers a reason to use your simple solution
over all the other simple solutions?
Well, I think one way to think about it is that there's a lot of customers out there.
If you think you have to dominate the industry,
then that's going to be pretty hard.
But if you feel like you can make something great for 10,000 people
who want to pay you X amount of dollars per month,
maybe you can have a nice little business there, even 5,000 people.
Can you find 5,000 people who like the thing that you've done?
That's kind of the way I would start to think about this.
Also, there's always novel and interesting variations on themes.
I think one thing is to be careful not to just make something different and new
because it's different and new but not really useful.
But at the end of the day, if you're entering an extremely crowded
and competitive area, you should be aware of that and recognize the situation
and go, maybe this isn't...
It depends what you want.
If you want to build this big, huge business or whatever,
that's probably not the place to be.
If you want to do something for a specific industry, for example.
For example, a simple to-do list thing could be different for architects
and it could be for accountants.
I'm just making stuff up here off the cuff.
These are probably bad ideas.
But the point is that you can get attached to an industry
and do something really well and really simple for that niche.
I'm a big believer in little niche products, things that are often overlooked.
A general purpose to-do app, look, there's a billion of them.
But if you are a repair person, for example,
we had to get our clothes dryer repaired recently.
They had this custom piece of software that was used to track
what was wrong with it and write up notes in it and it's kind of a CRM-y kind of thing,
but totally tailored to that specific industry.
I happened to see it because the guy had his phone out.
It looked like shit and it was confusing.
The guy couldn't figure it out and it was slow.
There's an opportunity there to be really good at that.
You're probably not going to have a lot of competition necessarily.
It might be hard to get those customers because you have to reach out to
who's repairing appliances at home.
Maybe there's not enough of those people.
But the point is that you can slice and dice this in a variety of different ways.
But to be a general purpose, simple to-do list,
probably not the right thing to get into these days.
Just because you want to get into it doesn't mean it's the right time.
I think you need to pay attention to the market as well.
But also, it does have to do with your appetite too.
Like I said at the beginning there,
maybe you can make 5,000 people extremely happy in a very specific way
by speaking a very specific language to them,
promoting the product in a very different way.
It's not even just about the functionality.
It's about how you tell the story.
It's about the words you use and the emotion you can connect with.
If your examples are like shopping lists,
milk, paper towels, oranges,
you can do that a million different ways.
But if you talk about it in a different way,
perhaps you can connect with people in a way that your competitors are not connecting.
That might be a way to do it.
I don't know.
I'm just sort of talking off the cuff.
But those are some things I would think about.
Yeah, those are good ideas.
And I think it kind of goes back to what we were talking about earlier, focusing.
If you are trying to build like a thousand different things for your to-do list app,
you're probably not going to think about your example screenshot
and what kind of tasks go in it.
Because you have too many other things to do,
so you're just going to put like a shopping list on there.
But if you're keeping it simple,
and you're really just like optimizing every part of it to be as good as it can be,
then I think you have more bandwidth to do some of the things
that you're suggesting and figure out how to apply it to a particular niche
and like what kinds of tasks that might speak to them, etc.
So just one more reason to focus and do actually a deep, good job at what you're doing
rather than just sort of skipping along the surface and being shallow.
I think so.
I'm looking at your homepage right now.
And at the very bottom of it, you've got a chart,
a little graph that shows the number of accounts
that have signed up for Basecamp over the years.
And 2004, it says 45.
And then just two years later, 2006, it says 100,974.
That's crazy.
How did you get so many people to sign up for Basecamp
in the first couple of years?
Well, I mean, part of it's timing, right?
A big part of it's luck.
And another part of it is that Basecamp is a collaborative tool.
Therefore, you probably don't use it by yourself.
You probably invite other people.
And those people probably work somewhere else.
Or they work with you, of course, but then they leave
and they go get another job and they bring Basecamp with them.
Or you invite a client.
Basecamp is the best way still to work with clients
and keep everything in one place.
And you can decide what client can see and what they can't see.
And your team can work there and your client can work there
and everyone's together.
But then the client is exposed to Basecamp.
And then they're like, shit, I could use this for my own projects internally.
So they sign up.
So it kind of spreads virally in that way.
I also think it's a matter of timing.
And also, we built up an audience prior to releasing Basecamp.
We've been blogging since 99 and sharing and writing.
And so we had a large audience and kind of a fan base
that we were able to release Basecamp to.
Our audience was primarily like us, which were web designers at the time
and design firms and that sort of thing.
And so every single one of them could use Basecamp.
It was built for them because it was built for us.
And they are us and we are them.
And so therefore, it was a bullseye in terms of the audience.
And so it spread that way.
And it was new and novel and interesting and very simple and straightforward.
And I think we did a really nice job explaining it and all those things together.
And again, like I said, a big dose of luck and timing is fortuitous
and all this stuff happened.
And it kind of took off quickly.
And I think it was a product of its time, though, too.
Like I said, if we launched it today from scratch,
came out of nowhere with a new thing called Basecamp that does what it does,
I think it would do well.
But I don't think it would do as well as it did in the early days as quickly
just because there's more options on the market
and there's more things going on and people are a little bit different today
than they were then.
So there's partly that.
But we didn't advertise and we still don't.
It just kind of took off.
And a lot of this stuff is you just don't know how things happen.
Sometimes we all want to make sense of the world and go,
oh, we did it.
This happened because of this and the other thing.
We invested heavily in marketing.
It's like, I don't know.
I don't know why all this stuff worked.
We just did our best to put it out there.
People liked it.
They shared it.
I mean, we know that it led to referrals and all that stuff.
We can tell.
But we didn't have a grand plan to grow fast or grow slow.
We just put it out there and see what happened.
And it took off.
Well, it's continued to take off.
Your graph continues to go up and to the right.
You're at over 3 million accounts signed up in 2019.
But like we were talking about earlier,
you've also released other products at 37signals.
And not all of them did as well as Basecamp.
In fact, I think Basecamp was by far the outlier.
It's kind of cool that you've been in this position
where you've had...
You've run almost kind of a controlled experiment.
You've had the same team,
but you've worked on a bunch of different products.
Different ideas, different timing, different market.
What are some of the things you learn
when you look at the differences
between why some of these products that you've launched
have found more success than others?
I'll continue from the last answer,
which was part of it is I don't know.
Truthfully, I have some theories.
So Backpack was the second thing we...
Well, actually, Rightboard was the second thing we did.
Backpack, that was a free thing.
Backpack was a pay product.
And that was a consumer-focused product.
So it was like $5 a month or $9 a month.
It was like a personal version of Basecamp in a sense.
It's funny, there's a bunch of products coming out today
that are just like Backpack was in 2005,
which is like keep to-dos on one page
along with notes and files and photos
and all these single-page organizational things,
which is really good for personal use,
but terrible actually for teams.
Things grow really quickly, really fast,
and then it's very difficult to manage everything
on a single page.
But Backpack was really good at that.
And it took off and did well for a while,
but in terms of revenue, since it was a $5 a month
or $9 a month product,
it's just hard to sustain a business on $5 a month.
And people are very price-sensitive
at that end as well.
And so I remember we raised prices by like $1 once
or something, and there was outrage.
Like there was outrage.
It's just what happens at the low end.
I get it.
And especially today,
like today people expect things to be like 99 cents
or free or whatever.
So that one, the idea was fantastic.
And as you're seeing like now,
the idea is spreading again.
But as a business, it wasn't a good,
it didn't have a good business model.
So that happened.
Then we released Campfire in 2006,
which was the first, well, I shouldn't say the first,
but like the prototypical group chat product.
And that never did anywhere nearly as well as even backpack
because it was I think way ahead of its time.
Obviously like Slack and these other products
have clearly nailed that category.
But in 2006, like people didn't really know
what to do with that.
They weren't really ready for that.
People weren't prepared for that.
And we didn't do a good job marketing it perhaps as well,
but that never really took off.
But we eventually built that into Basecamp 3.
So Campfire is built into Basecamp 3.
So there's chat and Basecamp and instant messaging as well.
So that probably kind of folded into Basecamp.
Highrise is our base there second biggest hit ever.
And it was a huge hit and still is all things considered.
That was I think a big hit because like Basecamp,
it was tailored towards businesses, so priced accordingly
and also had a very clear purpose.
Campfire, this idea of like real time chat
and companies chatting and stuff like,
it was sort of a missed, there was no real direction there
in terms of like, what do I use this for?
Backpack was very personal.
So that kind of was an easier thing to think through,
but people didn't really want to pay for personal stuff.
But Highrise was CRM,
which is basically customer relationship management,
which is not really what we ever called it.
The example was, it was built for us.
So we were starting to talk to more people in the press
and our lawyers and accountants and other people
and whatever and partnerships and stuff.
And we were having all these conversations.
We couldn't keep track of who we were talking to
and who said what when and who to follow up with next
and all that stuff.
Just couldn't figure it all out.
And so it's stuck in emails or stuck in this sheet
or in that sheet or wherever you have all this stuff.
And it's like, if I went out of town,
David had no idea what was going on.
If he needed to talk to the lawyer,
well, he didn't know what I said to the lawyer.
So just stuff was everywhere.
And this remains a big problem for a lot of people.
Highrise was designed to make it really easy
to keep track of who you talk to,
what they said, what you said, and what to do next.
And it's a very clear problem.
And it's a problem a lot of sales people have.
It's a problem a lot of business owners have.
It's a problem a lot of biz dev people have
and people who are doing partnership deals
and that sort of thing.
So proprietorships who are wearing a lot of hats
and talking to a lot of people.
So it resonated and it was priced accordingly
and it's done very, very well.
I mean, it's a multi-million dollar profitable business
and it's been great.
But nothing ever hit like Basecamp hit.
And part of this is like the reason we've done
three major versions of Basecamp
and we're about to start our next soon
is that I'm perfectly comfortable calling ourselves
a one-hit wonder at this moment.
Now, I think this next thing we're going to be doing
or we're doing now could be another big hit like Basecamp,
but we'll see.
We'll see what happens.
But I don't think there's anything wrong with saying
like we hit it big once and we're doubling down
and tripling down and quadrupling down on it
because I think you're lucky to have any hit in your life.
And if you get one, like some people think,
well, I can keep getting more and more and more.
And we're like, well, we've tried a bunch of things
and nothing's quite hit like Basecamp.
So we'll still try some stuff,
but let's keep focusing on Basecamp
and making that better and better and better and better
because clearly we've done,
we've built something that resonates
and continues to resonate and resonate stronger and stronger.
So that's sort of been the process for us.
But again, I don't, these are all theories.
I don't know exactly why something worked and didn't,
but looking back on it now
with the experience that we have,
sort of some evidence that we have,
those are kind of the reasons why I think some of these things
hit and didn't.
And then also, like I said, we've done other things.
We built a job board, which became something called
WeWork Remotely, which we then sold to another company,
I think it was two years ago.
That was a huge hit.
That was one of the most profitable things we've ever done.
We built, it was a job board.
We built it in three days
and it ultimately did $40,000 a month in revenue.
Wow.
Probably the most profitable, successful thing we've ever done
based on the amount of hours put into it.
No question.
But at some point we just decided
we don't want to run a job board anymore,
so we ended up selling it.
So we've done other things that have been big hits,
but they didn't hold our interest.
And I think that's another big part of this is that
we're not just here,
and this is maybe coming back to one of the earlier questions
you had, like someone saying you shouldn't do this,
which is, it's ridiculous to sell off
or essentially give up on something that is so profitable.
But for us, it just, we came down to like,
what do we want to spend our time on?
What kind of problems are we excited about?
We weren't really that excited about job boards.
So we felt like it'd be better in someone else's hands.
And so even though it was wildly successful in a sense,
it just wasn't for us anymore.
And so we passed it on.
And I think that's totally cool to do.
A lot of what you're talking about
just has to do with the uncertainty of business,
the uncertainty of learning things in a complex world
with a lot of moving parts and variables.
And you talk about this in your book,
rework a little bit,
how the conventional wisdom is that failure is good.
You learn from failure.
But I'm kind of of the same opinion that you are,
which is that, well,
there's millions of ways to fail at something.
And so who are you to say that the lessons you learned
from a particular failure or even the right lessons
are even going to lead you to the path of success?
Whereas if you do something that works,
even if you don't fully understand
the mechanisms behind why it works,
you can still be pretty sure that it works,
and you can repeat it,
and you can build on top of it,
which makes me think about what you were talking about,
this basecamp being sort of a one-hit wonder.
Now that you're going into launching a totally new product,
how do you think about what you're going to do
to basically follow strategies that might work
or avoid pitfalls that you might have fallen into in the past, et cetera,
given all this uncertainty?
One of the things that I think worked really well for us,
we launched basecamp originally.
Was that in the months leading up to it?
We teased it not in a abstract way,
but in a very, very concrete way,
where we took one major feature at a time
and wrote at length like why we built it the way we built it.
So you didn't really know what the whole product was going to be
as we were showing it off,
but we got to see individual features,
and you could eventually piece it together.
And I think it caught a lot of people's eyes
because we were able to go deep,
getting back to the deep thing, go deep on a problem
and really explain it in a way where people go,
yes, that's my problem too.
And these guys clearly understand
what it's like to have this problem,
therefore I trust their solution.
So I think that in the months leading up to the release of this thing,
we will probably begin talking about the reasons
why we're building this thing,
maybe one feature or one problem at a time
or however you want to put it, and go really deep on it.
And I think that that's something we'll repeat.
We've talked a lot about pricing
and we're actually probably going to change the way we price this
compared to other things we've done in the past.
So that's sort of a new thing
that we're not really taking any lessons with us necessarily
from base camp success into this.
We're going to see how this other idea goes,
that's how the pricing model goes.
But I think ultimately people,
connecting with people on their level,
being very clear about why we're doing what we're doing,
how we're doing what we're doing, how we've approached it,
and what our conclusions have been about these problems.
And speaking to them that way,
versus speaking in a very marketing speaky way
or a very abstract end-to-end solution kind of way
where people just don't have any idea what you're talking about,
we're going to be very specific.
And I think these problems are going to be problems
people can relate to,
problems that they don't even necessarily realize they have.
But once they see them put this way,
they'll go, I absolutely have that problem.
I just didn't know it was a problem.
Totally is a problem.
I've just taken it for granted.
I've just hacked my way through these problems
and put up with them.
But shit, if I don't have to put up with this anymore,
now that I know there's another way,
I'm interested in that.
So that's kind of how we're hopefully going to be
explaining this thing that we're making.
And then another thing I think we learned early on
was that it's probably a good idea to sort of
slowly launch things to build some scarcity
into the launch model a little bit
and also kind of fix some things as you go.
Maybe for the first month or two,
prior to releasing it to everybody.
We did that with, I mean, a lot of people do that now,
but we did that early on with Backpack.
That was the first thing where we did,
we called this golden ticket thing
where you could sort of apply to.
A lot of people are doing that now,
but I think we'll go back to that.
That was really handy on a number of levels.
And I think one other thing I would say
is that we want to be very compatible
with the outside world at large.
So one of the real secret successes of Basecamp
is how well it's integrated into email.
But it's not even like integrated in an integration sense.
It just works with email.
So you invite someone to a Basecamp project.
They're like, I don't want to fucking use this thing.
It's like, you don't have to.
Just reply to the emails you get
and it goes straight into Basecamp.
You don't even need to log in or set up an account ever.
So you can reply to things.
You can write things and all that stuff
can go through Basecamp or go through email
and lands right in Basecamp where everyone else can see it.
So working with email is a very important thing to us all in.
It's the widest common denominator.
Pretty much everybody who has a job has email.
And people who don't have jobs have email.
It's just a great universal way to get in touch with people.
So making sure that whatever we're building works
with standard email protocols is really important to us.
It's been, I think, a huge part of Basecamp's success.
And I'm still frankly shocked that more products
don't work well with email.
I think people are making a grave mistake
by thinking email is dead.
It is not dead.
It's alive and well.
And I think only getting stronger and stronger.
It's not going anywhere.
Yeah, it's not going anywhere.
Nor should it.
It's fantastic.
Email is amazing.
And it has a lot of advantages over real-time communication.
Email is a lot more asynchronous and has loads of advantages.
I think people are beginning to realize that again
now that people have sort of gone overboard in real time
and they're realizing, shit, this is like an open office space.
It's like, I thought this was a good idea, but I don't know now.
I'm constantly being bombarded by notifications.
I'm being forced to focus on a dozen real-time conversations
all day long.
I have one eye on this chat thing all day long.
It's like, what am I doing with my time?
How have I become...
Why is work now a ticker tape?
Why isn't work now a 24-hour news station?
This is not healthy in order.
Is it good?
So I think people are beginning to shift back
or will begin to shift back towards slowing things down a little bit.
And I think email fits in very nicely there.
You mentioned earlier that you're the worst person
to ask for advice for starting new things
because you've been running Basecamp for 20 years.
But here you are, Jason, starting a totally new thing
and you've been working on it for some months now.
So I don't know if it's true that you're the worst person to ask for advice here.
I'm the worst person to ask about starting a new business from scratch, let's say,
but not launching a new product.
I do that frequently enough to have some hopefully useful advice.
But I talked to a lot of founders who were early stage
to launching new businesses, which are also new products.
And the two problems that come up the most, number one, is growth.
They don't know how to grow. They don't know how to get their first users.
They don't know how to get their customers.
It's very hard for them to go to zero to one.
And number two is what I would describe as just an overall feeling of,
I'm doing it wrong.
How do I know that I'm making the best decisions as a founder?
I want to ask you about both of these things.
Let's start with number two.
When you first launched Basecamp, it was a very different world.
Today, there are many hundreds of books written
about how to validate your product idea
and how to build a successful business from scratch.
There's tons of blog posts. There's just so much information out there.
So many case studies. So many people have shared their stories
and things that they've learned.
Back when you launched Basecamp, that didn't exist.
How much of this are you ingesting
as someone who's launching new products
versus how much are you learning from the things you listed earlier,
your own experiences?
I don't pay much attention to industry news at all
or read a whole lot of blogs about anything actually.
I find that there's so much information out there
that's all contradictory, you just wouldn't know what to do with it.
I think you're better off closing your eyes,
shutting your ears, going to an island,
and doing your own thing, essentially.
The best way to validate your product is to put a price on it
and release it to the market and see if people are willing to pay for it.
That's the best way.
I don't think that there's any other way.
I don't think asking people what they would pay for something,
would you buy this if it was 49 versus 29?
Whatever they tell you doesn't matter.
The only thing that matters is when it's available, what would they pay for it?
Will they actually buy it or not?
I don't think you can ask people if things are good or not.
I don't think throwing something out there for free for a long, long time,
then charging for it is valuable.
Again, these are just my opinions, my points of view.
I know that people have had different experiences,
but I think the best thing to do is just heads down,
do what you think is the best thing,
and you believe in something that you can stand behind,
something that you're doing because you understand why you're doing it,
versus doing it because you read it on a blog post,
you don't totally understand it, but it sounded good,
so that's what we're going to do.
You just have to make sure that all the way down to the bottom
that there's support, there's foundation that you've poured,
that you understand, and then go for it.
Look, I don't think anyone knows what the hell they're doing, frankly,
really, truly, me included, all of us included.
We don't know what we're doing.
We just do something, and sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't.
Certainly, some people have maybe better judgment than others,
and some people have more experience than others,
but everybody is making it up as they go.
The rules are always changing.
The context is always different.
Who knows? Who really knows?
Who is to say that that person who wrote that blog post
knows anything more than you know?
There's very little evidence that they do in most cases.
Like, I'm the founder of this, and we've done that.
Yeah, whatever. Who really knows what that means?
Just because you haven't done that doesn't mean
that you don't know anything more than they do,
or that you know more. You don't really know.
I think one of the most liberating things
is to look out there at the world and go,
hey, nobody knows what they're doing, really.
The other thing is that most companies
are held together with duct tape,
that very, very few things are what they seem,
in terms of how smooth and elegant and everything things are.
Like, I wish we were like them.
Maybe you don't wish you were like them
if you really knew what it was like,
what being them was like, that sort of thing.
That's to me the most freeing thought,
which is like, eh, who knows anyway?
Nobody really knows.
Everyone's making up as they go, and you should too.
It's not to say that you should be ignorant,
although I do think there's a lot of value in it,
to be honest, but I think you should be aware,
but I don't think you should be so deeply steeped
that it gets all the way, that everyone else's advice
goes all the way to your core.
You know, it's kind of like, I don't know,
this is a weird analogy probably,
but you look at good barbecue,
and there's like a smoke ring around just the outside
of whatever you're barbecuing.
The smoke doesn't go all the way to the center of the meat.
It's just on the outside.
Like, that's good.
That's enough.
Like, that's enough.
Versus like, the thought is sometimes people steep themselves
in so much information, they want it to go all,
permeate all the way through their body,
and then I finally understand,
now that I'm filled up with information.
I think it's good to have a little bit of surface information,
have a little sense, and be kissed by some of that.
But ultimately, you've got to figure out,
at the core of you, what you want to do
and how you want to do it and be true to yourself.
Otherwise, you don't know where to go after the first step or two
when someone else is just going to say,
well, I only knew the first step or two,
and that's all the advice I have.
And now you're like, well, what do I do next?
I don't know.
So no one really knows anyway.
That's why you've got to lean on yourself.
That's my take at least.
I feel that way when people ask me for advice
about various things that I do with indie actors.
Like, oh, how do you prepare for a podcast episode?
How do you pitch a guest to come on?
How do you do your interviews on the website?
I probably did all the wrong things,
and I would love to know how you do it
so I can improve how I'm doing it.
But it's so easy just to, I don't know,
to take the veneer of success and over-apply that
and assume that people know everything that's going on.
Yeah.
And also, even to your point, and we all do it.
I've said it too.
I'm probably doing it wrong.
Everyone always says that.
I'm doing it wrong.
It's like, well, if it's working for you, it's not wrong.
And what does working for you mean?
Well, do you enjoy doing it?
Do you feel satisfied doing it?
Are you happy doing it?
Do you feel rested?
Do you feel like you could do this this way for 10 years?
Like, those are the kinds of questions.
Not like, how do I measure up to, you know, like,
am I doing it wrong?
Does that mean, like, I'm leaving money on the table?
Well, certainly, probably.
Like, so what?
Like, we leave lots of money on the table.
That doesn't mean we're doing it wrong.
It means that we're doing it right if we enjoy doing it,
if it's sustainable.
If it's the kind of stuff we want to do more of,
like, that's what doing it right means.
So however you prepare for a podcast,
like, if you've been doing this for a while,
you enjoy doing this, clearly,
I think you're very good at this.
Like, your questions are really insightful
and you're really good on mic.
Like, you're doing it right.
Like, could you be doing it better?
I don't know.
What does that even mean?
If it's better, like, for the results,
but worse for you, then probably not better.
So I think we should all just kind of figure out our own way
that works for us, and that's the right way for us.
Right is relative.
It's not absolute.
You're probably on to something with this not reading blogs thing
because I think maybe just a side effect of reading so much,
so much information that's coming out from so many people
and a lot of it good that you sort of have this underlying feeling
of like, I'm doing it wrong.
When you see such a vast world of other ways to do it,
and maybe the best way to get rid of that feeling
is to just shut some other things out
and just do what you're saying.
Be happy with your own results and look at yourself.
Yeah, we have a thing in our latest book,
it doesn't have to be crazy at work.
We have an essay called Jomo,
which is basically the joy of missing out.
I think missing out is great.
I have no interest in being on top of everything,
especially news, especially industry news,
especially industry trends.
I mean, this is one of the reasons why almost everything looks the same.
It's because everyone's following each other.
I think, like, to me, what's sort of interesting
is, like, the Galapagos Islands are way more interesting
than the Hawaiian Islands, you know?
The Galapagos Islands, like, everything evolved on its own there.
That's really interesting.
And the solutions are different
and very interesting and very contextual
to that particular environment.
That's cool.
And I think more companies would be better off
if they just sort of worried about their own environment
and their own customers and themselves,
versus, like, how do they do it
and how am I supposed to do it because I read this,
they do it this way.
Again, it's not about not being influenced at all,
but I think there's something bad about being overly influenced.
Again, if you just don't know the reasons
why you're doing something,
but you've just sort of heard it over and over and over
and you keep doing it,
I think you have a really hard time falling back
on any fundamentals if you don't have them
and there's someone else's.
So I think it's important to build your own
and just do it your own way.
Yeah, I think the same thing about Japan.
It's just a weird place.
There's so many weird things, like, bizarre stuff
coming out of Japan that you don't see anywhere else.
It's almost like an alien civilization.
Every time I see it, it just reminds me of how
how much everybody else is just copying each other
and how much more diversity and variation
there could be in media and ideas and products and culture,
but there isn't because people just sort of,
we just copy.
I'm glad you brought that up.
That was, I've only been to Japan once,
but that was sort of my takeaway as well,
aside from it being an amazing place for a number of reasons,
but it was the first place I'd ever been
in a first world country where it was distinctly different.
I've been to Europe, many countries in Europe,
and yeah, it's different than the U.S. in a number of ways,
but somehow it feels like still there's a line
between the two cultures,
but Japan just feels different.
It feels totally different.
It was refreshing because you kind of feel like,
well, the world is sort of kind of one way,
and I know I've been totally overgeneralizing here.
There's a million things to see in the world
that I haven't seen and whatever,
but people who've been to Japan probably feel this way too.
It's like there's just something different about that place,
and they sort of evolved on their own pace,
at their own scale, their own way,
and they have different cultural values,
and they're represented in all these different ways,
and you realize like, wow, this is a very...
I mean, they have plenty of downsides too.
They've got all sorts of issues around workaholism,
and women typically don't have the same opportunities as men,
and there's a whole bunch of other issues there,
clearly big alcoholism issues and whatnot,
but there's a number of things that are so distinctly different
that you're almost like,
I couldn't imagine a different way to do this,
but wow, they've imagined a different way to do this,
and guess what?
It works really, really, really well.
It's refreshing, so I think it's important to see
that there are different ways of doing things,
and of course, their context is different too.
They have a society that's pretty homogenous.
They don't really allow outsiders in,
which is another issue, perhaps.
I mean, maybe it's not an issue for them,
but from our point of view,
it would seem perhaps to be not as appealing,
but these are different cultures,
and they do things different ways,
and it's just very interesting to see,
and so I think that is a valuable experience.
I'm kind of glad that they have this isolation thing going on,
because it's, like you said, there's lots of different things,
so we couldn't even imagine going a certain way,
and maybe you need someone to be isolated
and someone to sort of follow their own path
without taking inspiration from the outside
for them to imagine these things that we can't imagine,
and hopefully more companies will operate that way as well in the future.
I agree.
For one example, I was in, I think it was Kyoto,
and there was a tree branch,
and the tree branch was going over the street,
and it was an old tree.
They actually put a crutch underneath the branch to hold it up,
and the crutch went down into the middle of the street,
and in the US, they'd cut that branch right off.
They'd be like, you can't put something in the middle of the street,
but in Japanese cultures, nature was more important.
That tree's been here longer than the street has been,
and there's a value in this tree,
and this should be here, and we'll just walk around it,
or we'll go around it with our cars or our bikes,
and it'll be fine, and everything will be fine,
but it's more important that we respect this amazing living thing.
In the US, you would just never see that.
Never.
It would be like an outrage
to take a little bit of space up in the street with something.
There's already outrage in many cities around bike lanes.
Bike lanes are taking up too much room.
There's less parking.
To care about a tree, a tree's welfare over us,
the people, the chosen ones,
that's that kind of thing that's like, wow.
That just comes from an entirely different place,
and we have trees here.
We have streets here,
but there's no way we would treat them the same way,
and I just thought that was so emblematic
of a culture that develops and has different values.
There's a lot more companies.
Unfortunately, I think that the US's worst export to me
is like the Silicon Valley-style company,
and that's making its way around the world right now,
and I think it's a terrible export,
and I think there's a lot of,
not just externally, but internally,
there's a lot of companies that are just trying to run that way,
and everyone's trying to sort of be the same way,
and they have the same tool sets, and they work the same way,
and I think it's unfortunate.
We talk a lot about diversity, right?
It should be diversity in companies as well,
not just the people in the companies, of course,
but the companies themselves should work differently,
should act differently, should try to be themselves,
and I think we'll have a much healthier overall business ecosystem
when companies are diverse too.
It's this weird intersection where I think as a founder,
like I was saying, the number two problem that people tell me they have
is this soul-crushing uncertainty.
Am I doing the right things?
And that leads them to copying what others were doing
in comfort, in that Peter levels did it this way,
Jason Fried did it that way, maybe I should do the same,
and then at least I'm no worse than those guys.
But I think it also creates a huge opportunity
for people who are willing to sort of branch out
and think their own thoughts,
because we were talking about sort of differentiating
when you make a simple product.
Well, if you're creative, right, if you sort of go into a hole,
you live on an island, and you build what you think is right,
there's a really good chance it's not going to look like
what other people have done,
and that gives you kind of an edge in the market.
So I really hope that people take that message to heart,
and that this conversation makes me want to build something new
just to see how different and unique I can make it
and sort of question some of the conventions
that have been around for such a long time.
Yeah, and don't show anybody.
Like, this is the other thing.
I think people are showing things to people too frequently
during the building process.
And I know that, like, there's...
You want to see if you're on the right track
and all that stuff, but I think there's a real advantage
just being quiet and going away and doing your thing
and then dropping it on the world and going,
here's the thing. I don't know.
I think there's something to that, and I'd love to see more people do that.
I think there's another thing that I've been noticing is that
I feel like far too many people are looking for mentors.
Like, they're looking for that one person
who is going to tell them what to do,
teach them how to do it, you know?
It's like that one person doesn't have any idea what to do, okay?
They have an opinion just like you do.
Yeah, maybe their opinion is a little bit more experienced,
but it's only experienced in the context in which it was developed.
It's not experienced in your situation, at your time right now.
So I would put just less weight and value in other people's point of view,
to be honest, and just figure out your own way and go
and, like, don't spend any energy worrying if you've got it figured out
or if you're doing the wrong thing,
because the chances are equal, I think, on both sides,
whether or not you're doing the right thing or the wrong thing,
because who knows? Who really knows?
To hear that that's the second thing that people bring up to you,
like the second most crushing thing,
it's unfortunate to me because that's a self-induced sort of concern.
It's not like a real thing, actually.
A real thing would be like, and I get this,
like, I don't know how to get the product to market.
That's like a real thing.
That's a hard thing that almost every company goes through.
Like, that's a legitimate thing we can talk about,
but this idea that, like,
I don't know if I'm doing it right or wrong or whatever,
like, there is no right or wrong.
The only thing that tells you if it's right or wrong is the market itself,
which comes back to that first point,
which is like, how do you get the thing on the market
so people can even see it and have a chance to play with it
and have a chance to evaluate it and pay for it?
That's the only thing that really tells you whether or not it's good or not.
Well, listen, I would love to keep talking for hours.
I've kept you for an hour or 15 minutes.
Let's do another time. Yeah, do another one.
Let's do another one. I'd love to have you on.
Let me leave you with one more question.
Most people listening to this are early-stage founders
or people who soon will be early-stage founders.
What are some habits that you think they should develop from the start
to help them build a more successful and more enjoyable company later on?
Get at least eight hours of sleep every night,
work about eight-hour days,
and figure out how to reduce the distractions in your day.
These are habits that are really important to form now
because you don't intentionally form habits.
You form habits by doing something over and over and over and over.
And so if you're starting out now
and you're working 15-hour days
and you're getting six hours or five hours of sleep a night
and whatever, you're going to keep doing it that way.
And at some point, it's not going to work for you anymore.
It's going to exhaust you and burn you out,
and it's unfortunate because that means
you're going to have to stop doing what you're doing.
You're no longer in control of the things that you wanted to do.
So I would say just form really good work hygiene, essentially.
Good sleep, good rest, plenty of time away from work.
Don't work on the weekends.
Eight hours is plenty of time to do great work
and begin to develop those habits
because those are the things that are going to pay off over time,
and they also force constraints on you,
which are really valuable things also to get used to.
And they force you to be more creative,
and they force you, I think, to have a sharper knife
in terms of the cuts you make and the edits you make.
I think that that's really an important quality
and an important skill to focus on.
Those are the things, again, like everything else I was saying,
just pay more attention to your own gut than anyone else's.
Not that your gut's better, it's just that it's yours,
and you're going to have to rely on it your whole life anyway,
no matter what you read and who's available or whatever.
You have to rely on yourself as a founder to make decisions.
So get used to relying on yourself.
I'd practice that as much as you can as well.
So if you're listening to this and you're a founder
and it's 2 a.m., go to sleep, turn it on.
Please, I mean, I would also recommend reading really quick
Why We Sleep, which is an incredibly important book.
I would say one of the most important books you'll ever read in your life,
Why We Sleep, it's called, from Matthew, gosh,
I forgot his last name right now.
But you'll find it online.
Just look up Why We Sleep.
I'm embarrassed I've totally forgot his last name.
Sleep is so important, especially for creative minds
and for creators and for anybody who has to make decisions.
It's like the best, like everyone's looking for hacks and, you know,
there's no hack to sleep well, to sleep well,
and you'll perform better flat out, period.
So anyway, read it and you'll probably live longer.
Read it and it's a great book to check out.
Just one click, order it on Amazon,
Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, PhD.
Walker, that's it, yes.
Jason, thanks so much for talking with Dations.
Thanks so much for coming on the show.
I'll have to have you on again.
Have a great day.
I'd love to. Thanks again for having me on.
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