37signals

“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…”

“10% of our profits go to our employees every year and it's based on seniority or actually, that's the wrong, it's based on longevity, not seniority. It's kind of, you know, The two aren't the same thing, however long you've been here. So every, every, every mo…”

“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…”

“There's this two sides of business. Basically there's the envelope and there's the letter. The envelope is the outside, the shell, the business, the vehicle that holds the letter and the letter is the product or products. I'm a product guy. I love product. Tha…”

“Well, like, a business is very simple. You gotta make more than you spend. That's a business, basically. Like, I mean, you can keep borrowing money, and then you can, you know, borrow more than you spend, and eventually you got to make more than you spend. So …”

“We're definitely leaving money on the table. I'm sure of it. Like, we don't optimize our pricing. I'm not testing pricing, not constantly. We're not A-B testing constantly. I'm certain there's some formula that we're not following that could lead to more growt…”

“We have 62 people at 37 signals, and we've gotten as high as, I think, 80 at some point, and then we're about 63, or 62 right now, which is feels really good.”

“We don't have a board.”

“David wrote this great article about like getting off the cloud. It's going to save us something like ten million bucks and whatever it is.”

“The reason I don't like the postmortems in business, and I know a lot of businesses do this, they do, they launch something, they spend all this time and energy looking back on it, trying to figure out why it did what it did, and my general sense is you'll hav…”

“Keep your costs low, keep your company as small as you possibly can and make great stuff. And then you don't have to find as many people just like you, but the ones you find really love what you do. And that's like, that's enough.”

“The more massive an object, the more energy it takes to change its direction, right? This is just like, this is getting back to basic physics. A thick, when I think of this stuff, and sometimes these metaphors don't perfectly line up, but in my head, I think o…”

“Yesterday, I answered like, 200 emails from my customers.”

“We can go IPO. I don't want to. We could raise money. I don't want to. We could raise more money. I don't want to. We could sell to PE. I don't want to. Like we could quit. I don't want to. Like these are all options that we have and keep going for as long as …”

“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…”

“I don't, we don't use email inside our company. We use Basecamp. But for the outside world, we use email.”

“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.”

“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 …”

“Our customers are small business owners, and I just, I don't care about enterprise customers. I don't want them. I like small, medium-sized businesses. They're more like me.”

“You gotta get off the ground, and you gotta break free of gravity, but then there's a point where you actually just want to sit in orbit and sort of maintain. You want to be within a certain range and fluctuate a little bit up, a little bit down, but be in thi…”

“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…”

“Any team we have making something is usually two people, like two people working on a feature, one programmer, one designer.”

“I don't do the design on the line. I work with our designer to do a lot of that, but he's sort of the visual person there. But I do all the writing.”

“If you identify as an entrepreneur and you sell your business, like if your identity is tied up into entrepreneurship, like you have to go start another business because you have to, there's continuity there that you have to be that person again. And then if y…”

“We just recently left the cloud, left AWS, and we're running our own stuff now in data centers.”

“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.”

“So the question we ask after the first year with any new employee is, knowing what I know now, would I hire them again? And that answers pretty much every question.”

“Make things small, tiny little units that you can throw them away. It doesn't matter. It's like, what you basically want then is enough good things, enough good units in a year. Right? Not like one great year, one great plan, but enough good little things, bec…”

“So with Basecamp, for example, nobody can pay us more than two 99 a month. Okay. It doesn't matter how many users you have. So you could be a big enterprise, and two nine a month is the most you can possibly. Our prices go way, way low, but that's the most we …”

“Make stuff for yourself. There's probably other people out there like you who want what you want, and make it available to sell. So you are the customer, you are the audience, it's you, and then there'll be other people just like you. We're not all that unique…”

“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. …”

“And this is one of the promises we've made to the customers we have. We're going to keep it until the end of the internet. That's our moniker for this. Either that, or as long as we're in business. Whatever comes first.”

“The version we launched in 2004, we stopped selling in 2010. 16 years ago. We still have customers on it. As an individual business, it's still making millions of dollars.”

“And especially in the early days of Basecamp, for example, we built the entire first version on me having 10 hours per week, not per day, per week. To build it. That is an enormous constraint on how you could do anything because you can waste 10 hours really q…”

“We're not going to outspend them on a marketing campaign. That was never going to happen, but we could outteach them. We could have better insights, and we could share them, and people could resonate with that and then reciprocate by buying our products, at le…”

“If you can't see yourself at a company where we're not going to discuss fucking Palestine during work hours with your random coworkers, we will pay you up to six months salary to go somewhere else.”

“We're a small company, 60 people so at the time, 20 took the offer. 20 left. Like, that's almost a third of the company that decided to leave in that moment”

“Jason and I have structured our entire business around that concept of pure independence. We don't have any investors who get to tell us what to do. We don't have a board to tell us what to do.”

“So this is why I'm quite skeptical about all this new AI acceleration we're having is even us. I think it's quite likely that we could use it wrong to build too much software to get too far away from less software, learnable software that still has to fit in t…”

“It's very difficult to convince customers to part with their money. I try very hard to do so. We as a business try very hard to be, everyone tries to do that. And it's outside of your control to a large degree. What I can control is my inputs. I can put out th…”

“By, I think, 2007, we had four major projects or products. We were launching one a year while we were also running Basecamp, while we were seven people at the company.”

“In fact, when we wrote Rework, the initial manuscript that we submitted was, I think, 50,000 words. That was what the publisher got to see, right? And they were very excited. Great. This fits. This is like just the size of the book. And then Jason and I went t…”

“We could not have gotten Jeff's offer, and six months later, some VC would have given us a massive check that sounded super impressive, and it would have destroyed the business, and then we would have sold our independence, and we would have been fucking miser…”

“Like we've given him his money back many, many, many times over, and he still owns the plot. And every quarter or so we send him another check. Here's your dividends. And we keep on doing that.”