The Ledger, every show

“I just think this idea of like, well, you're done at two 30 is healthy. I think the business lasts longer because of that. I think, like, if you think about, like, you don't probably get bored of a business like that. There's something about that versus this i…”

“So at our company, we typically think about six weeks in advance and that's about it. There's some occasional projects, maybe a few over the 27 years that we've done, that we needed to think further ahead. Like we just recently left the cloud, left AWS, and we…”

“Everyone follows everybody else because when you're paying so much attention to what everyone else is doing, you tend to just, that's the way you think it has to be done or can be done. You're not open to like alternatives because you don't see them anywhere. …”

“I blame Apple. I blame Google. I blame Yahoo. I blame Microsoft for making shit email products that they just don't care about. Now, they've started to care more about them, but they didn't care about them for a long time, and everybody knows that nobody cared…”

“A lot of people don't know what they like. They like what other people like. They like what they're supposed to like. They live up to other people's expectations. They kind of run someone else's business in a sense. Not like an executive running their business…”

“Our bonuses are based on profits. We've been profitable for 27 years, and they're distributed every year, and they're meaningful. They're, I looked this up before the show about 20 out of the 62 people Last year, or twenty-twenty-four, because we haven't close…”

“We don't have revenue targets, except for like, I want to be profitable. I don't have sales targets, revenue targets, user targets. I don't have any of these things. We just do the best work we can.”

“And it's not arrogance. It's just like belief, like, oh, I can do that again. And some people can't. Most people cannot. Or if they can, they don't reach the same height.”

“I wouldn't want to try to do this again, because I don't think I could. I don't think I could. And I think it's totally fair to admit, like, I don't think I'm good enough again to do what I did before. I don't have the stamina. I don't have the drive. I don't …”

“What you don't want are a bunch of outlier companies that you cannot afford to lose. You don't want customers that you cannot afford to lose. And so by equalizing our pricing and not letting anyone pay us more than anybody else, we create a bunch of small unit…”

“I go by gut. I go by intuition, whether it's a pricing or a product decision or a feature or a new product or a name or whatever it is. We don't test things. We don't do focus groups. I don't, we occasionally AB test for fun, but not like, cause it matters.”

“How much are you thinking about how am I going to get the first 100,000 people to download this? Jason Fried: I don't think about that at all. Jason Fried: For me, it's like is the idea any good?”

“And this is not fair because there are, there's plenty of like fun software, but a lot of the, a lot of it is the software industry is too serious. It takes itself too seriously.”

“So people, I think, have this idea of short term performance in the market, feeling like I can do this forever. Just like in Vegas, you can't do that forever and you will begin to lose. And the same thing is true in the market.”

“And the main reason is why, in my opinion, is because the business world pays for that advice. It's not that it deserves the advice. It's not even that it's advice that's applicable, but that it pays for the advice. And the way I've been thinking about it is n…”

“Even if you hire a great, great CEO to replace you with CEO, like they're, they just don't have that... There's that thing that's present in a founder simply because they were there from the beginning, that they have an extra ounce of, it's not even that they'…”

“And I think it's way more than 50%. I mean, all the way back to you didn't choose your parents. You didn't choose anything, right? You didn't choose your mind.”

“We think about things six months or sorry, six weeks at a time and go from there and adjust all the time. And that's fine. We've always done it that way.”

“And you stop and you just give up. Frankly, you just give up, which is something I think more people ought to do.”

“So that might seem reckless. And I think it was positioned or pitched almost as reckless in the book. To me, that's like, Common sense, fundamental, smart problem solving. And you think about all the other risks it saves, and all the other things it prevents, …”

“The principle around this is that in any industry generics eventually come in. For example, there's a lot of chat tools that exist in software today in, in, in, in the industry. So they're basically commodities, but they're still priced like luxuries.”

“Software. I know it's improving, but it's improving around the marginal edges. You already have 90% of it on day one when you bought the damn thing. And so you're paying over and over and over and over for essentially the same thing. And at some point, if you'…”

“If you just wait till the end to try to add those novelties, you'll never have enough time. You're always running out of time at the end and you're never going to try new things. You're not going to have the tolerance or the patience to wander. So then you end…”

“It was easier for us to reject VC money because we didn't live in that world. We lived in the Midwest and that's not how people do things over there, you know? And we also didn't go to the parties and didn't go to the events and didn't like get influenced by t…”

“One of the reasons why I don't go looking at other people's work is because once I have their work in my head, it's hard to have original ideas. I actually prefer the newbie approach. Like, I don't know what the hell I'm doing. I think people who go into somet…”

“Taking cash out of a business, I think is a really healthy thing. In our industry, it seems like people are always pouring money back into the business. You know, shit can hit the fan at any time, and a lot of businesses that were worth something aren't worth …”

“So we don't do public betas. We don't pull people in, you know, we launch something. Sometimes we have a few people look at it first right before we launch to make sure we didn't miss anything really material. But like we finished the thing and launched the th…”

“Don't give things away and think that volume is going to help you. Like, you know, the pizza shop in the corner is not giving away pizzas for free.”

“Software businesses that have, you know, basically humans and Some tech, which is cheap, either in the cloud or, you know, people just need a few laptops here and there. And there's not much that you need to get going and building a software business or tech b…”

“I think a lot of tech companies act as if they are companies with huge capital expenditures, and they're not, and they put themselves in a hole. Because now they're beholden to someone else on someone else's time frame. They have to become a certain kind of co…”

“So yeah, that's an exception, but like your B to B accounting software, you know, whatever, like, no, not that that can't be a great business. It can be, but it doesn't need the same kind of approach as Airbnb or Uber.”

“I think businesses really, truly just unfold. And I'm here for that. I'm not here to predict where we're going to be in three years. I don't know, don't care, frankly. There's no real advantage to me predicting that.”

“Revenues don't really matter because you can go broke generating a lot of money.”

“I don't have different P and L's for each product in a way where we're looking at them very carefully. It's like in total, collectively, are we making more money than we spend? And that's the only thing we ultimately look at.”

“The majority of companies on this planet run like ours. They're bootstrapped. They don't have any money. No one's willing to give them a penny. And they open up a shop somewhere, they do something, they put their shingle out, and they, you know, launch a websi…”

“Basically almost nobody makes it that way. Like really almost nobody really makes it that way. And there's a lot more room to make it and to build a successful business if you throw out that outlier and look at all the other places you can land as a business.”

“I would not trade Basecamp for Monday's business any day of the week, because I love what we're doing. We're profitable. We're happy. We don't have to deal with the things they have to deal with.”

“We don't have, like, a spec. We don't create to-dos or tasks or tickets for people. They create the work that needs to get done to fulfill the idea that we've written up and designed, essentially, and they figure out how to do it.”

“So I just, we've learned to not promise anything. We can share what we're working on. If we want to, we can tell people we're doing something.”

“And that's why I don't like the word because you can't layer that back to back to back to back. You cannot sprint back to back to back to back in life. And you can't do it at work. I mean, people do it at work, but like, I don't think it actually works.”

“When companies hire executives, What are they looking for in executive? They typically go, ah, judgment and experience. They're not like they can read an Excel spreadsheet. That's not the thing that matters. Like anyone can read that, or anyone can read a char…”

“Like we don't have a multi-year plan. I don't even have a one-year plan. I don't even have a six month plan or a court. Like we think about everything we're going to do every six weeks, we rethink what we're going to do next.”

“Figure out how to do as much as they can on their own before they bring on a second person. Like, Really work and struggle through something on your own. The moment you bring on someone else, you've got another mouth to feed. It's becomes expensive. You get an…”

“The thing with the VC route, so like the idea of like having too much money, it doesn't mean you can't work efficiently and thoughtfully, but it does create a degree of sloppiness because you don't have to when you don't have to, and when I'm saying have to, y…”

“The value in bootstrapping is that it teaches entrepreneurs. It not even teaches, it forces them to have to figure out how to make money. And the more time under the curve they have making money and practicing making money, the better at it they're going to ge…”

“We were going to launch this thing called once, which is essentially a brand, an umbrella, a line, a product line of non-SaaS products, of products, not services. Things people will download, software, business software products, people will download, pay for …”

“This is, I think something entrepreneurs get wrong all the time. They compare themselves to someone else and they go, how many customers do they have? How many customers do they have? All that matters is do we have enough customers to make our own business wor…”

“I don't really care about resumes. I don't really care about a lot of that people's history. I don't care where they went to school. If they went to school, I don't care about any of those things. Let's look at the work itself.”