The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 44 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
DHH: 37signals offered six months severance to employees rejecting politics ban
“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.”
DHH: Taking VC funding would have destroyed 37signals without Bezos's backing
“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…”
Fried: Companies Should Settle Into Orbit Rather Than Pursuing Endless Growth
“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…”
DHH: 2004 Basecamp version still generates millions in annual profit
“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.”
DHH: Twenty out of sixty employees resigned after 2021 workplace politics ban
“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”
DHH: AI Acceleration Likely to Cause Even Lean Teams to Overbuild
“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…”
Fried: A Company's Only True Competition Is Its Own Operating Costs
“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 …”
Fried: 37signals Intentionally Leaves Money on the Table by Skipping A/B Testing
“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…”
Fried: Moving 37signals Off the Cloud Will Save Roughly $10 Million
“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.”
Fried: Business Post-Mortems Are Useless Because Outcomes Cannot Be Truly Explained
“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…”
Fried: Minimal Costs and Small Teams Eliminate the Need for Mass Scale
“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.”
Fried: 37signals Left AWS and the Cloud to Run Physical Data Centers
“We just recently left the cloud, left AWS, and we're running our own stuff now in data centers.”
DHH: 37signals relied for two decades on out-teaching rather than outspending
“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…”
Fried: Many Founders Build Businesses to Meet External Expectations, Not Self-Knowledge
“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…”
Fried: Equal Pricing Protects Software Businesses From Dangerous Customer Concentration Risk
“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…”
Fried: Heavy Corporate Structures Create Distance From Customers and Products
“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…”
Fried: 37signals Caps All Project Planning Horizons at Just Six Weeks
“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…”
Fried: 37signals Sets Zero Sales, Revenue, or User Growth Targets
“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.”
Fried: I Lack the Stamina and Hunger to Build Another Software Startup
“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 …”
Fried: 37signals Intentionally Avoids Enterprise Customers to Focus Exclusively on SMBs
“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.”
Fried: Roughly 20 of 62 Employees at 37signals Received Six-Figure Cash Bonuses
“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…”
Fried: 37signals Relies Exclusively on Gut Intuition Over User Testing and Focus Groups
“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.”
Fried: Founders Should Build Products for Themselves to Guarantee an Audience
“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…”
Fried: Paying Attention to Competitors Forces Fear-Driven Feature Parity and Copying
“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. …”
DHH: 37signals promises to maintain legacy software products indefinitely
“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.”
DHH: 37signals has no board or investors directing founders
“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.”
DHH: Founders should prioritize cost control over uncontrollable revenue growth
“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…”
DHH: 37signals still pays Jeff Bezos quarterly dividends on his early investment
“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.”
Fried: 37signals Distributes 10% of Profits Based on Employee Longevity, Not Title
“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…”
Fried: Businesses Are Just Thin Envelopes Designed to Hold a Product
“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…”
Fried: Personally Answered Around 200 Customer Emails in a Single Day
“Yesterday, I answered like, 200 emails from my customers.”
Fried: 37signals Explicitly Refuses to IPO, Raise VC, or Sell to PE
“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 …”
Fried: 37signals Does Not Use Email Internally, Communicating Strictly via Basecamp
“I don't, we don't use email inside our company. We use Basecamp. But for the outside world, we use email.”
Fried: 37signals Product Teams Are Only One Programmer and One Designer
“Any team we have making something is usually two people, like two people working on a feature, one programmer, one designer.”
Fried: Tying Identity to Entrepreneurship Breeds Deep Disappointment After an Exit
“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…”
Fried: Employee Performance Reviews Reduce to One Question: 'Would I Rehire?'
“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.”
Fried: Making Small, Disposable Decisions Makes a Business Antifragile
“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…”
Fried: Basecamp Hard-Caps Its Maximum Subscription Price at Just $299 Monthly
“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 …”
DHH: First version of Basecamp took only 380 hours to build
“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…”
DHH: 37signals maintained four products with just seven people in 2007
“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.”
DHH: Rework Manuscript Was Cut in Half from 50,000 Words to 25,000
“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…”