37signals

“We built the job board in two weeks and it was generating at the time for us something like 30 grand a month, something like that with no work, like literally close next to nothing to do.”

“We don't charge any of our customers more than 299 dollars a month period flat. So with Basecamp, you can have 6000 users at just two 99 flat unlimited users at that point. So we don't offer the same thing where people could be spending 50, 60 grand or 10 gran…”

“The only thing we've ever shared is that we generate tens of millions in annual profits because I don't really care about revenue numbers.”

“Well, we're an LLC, so he's a member, he has units, and every year he gets distributions, and he's made his money back many times over, and he still owns, you know, his shares, and we haven't had to sell the business. It's been a great investment for him.”

“We did take some money from Jeff Bezos, though, back in 2006, six or seven or six, I think. It was like a secondary thing. So he bought some shares from me and from David. So that money went into our pockets and never went into the business. No money has ever …”

“Over a 100,000 people pay us on a monthly basis for a variety of different products.”

“We pull out everything at the end of the year. Now, first of all, we're an LLC. So we're taxed on everything at a personal level. So if I leave money in the business, I'm still paying personal income tax on that money. It doesn't really make sense to do that.”

“Our only goal is to be profitable on a given year. We've been profitable every year for 25 years.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

“Last year, we're like, we're gonna spend five million bucks for the first time ever on like ads. We started getting into it in a few months. So we spent a bunch of money and we're like, this is just, it just, It's vanity money because like this isn't doing any…”

“No is a very precise, you know, precision instrument because you get to evaluate a thing and say no to it. And they have the whole spectrum of everything else that's possible available to you at that point. So I think no is a great tool. It's very specific. Ye…”

“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'…”

“Could we launch this again today? No, we couldn't.”

“We're not, like, we're friends, but we don't see each other very often. We live in the same town, and we don't see each other. I see them once every, I don't know, couple months. We're very good partners and we're friendly, but we just don't, we don't hang out…”

“Basically all of our, you know, essentially the vast majority of our net worth is tied into our business, and we know what our distributions are and all that stuff, but yeah, we don't, I mean, we don't talk about that ever”

“Cool wears off, but useful never does.”

“Like this year, we're going to do four products. We're going to begin. We were about to start working on two products simultaneously, which we've never done before. We've never built two things at the same time.”

“My job as a founder, what I've realized is, is it's to inject risk into the business. Most people, everyone pretty much at your company's job is to manage risk to some degree, to keep their job, to not push too hard or too far.”

“Our focus from the beginning was the more margin we have, the more freedom we have. The more freedom we have, the more we could just focus our time on what we like to do.”

“And after trying that for over a decade, Jason and I finally came to the conclusion in honesty that we never did what the numbers told us to do. What we would do was, we would do whatever the hell we wanted to do, and then if the numbers supported that, we'd g…”

“We took money out from day one, almost, not quite. Year two, at the very latest, we were pulling out profits and then we had Bezos buying secondaries from Jason and I that just set a baseline.”

“And that was really our operating paradigm since the beginning, because we never raised BC. We never had more money than anyone else. We always had to earn the money we wanted to spend first.”

“That's not actually quite what's happening now, because from what I can tell, ads on X still don't really work. We tried them a bit. Maybe they work better now. Never worked for us.”

“No, we've never disclosed the full revenues nor full profits. I think we've said tens of millions or something. I don't even know.”

“Hey is now, what are we on? Year five? Millions of dollars. It's been a great success.”

“It certainly served us well for many, many years when we had the entire project management space in SaaS to ourselves, and we were laughing all the way to the bank because clearly someone else must have realized this was a highly profitable, not even niche, bu…”

“I'd go so far as to say that ignorance is a benefit For a huge class of problems that you are cursed when you've been through the loop once. When you know too much, you cannot unseed in the same way. You will be locked into paradigms and thought patterns. And …”

“Being able to generate attention is not as transferable as to business outcomes as it used to be.”

“However much, I have tremendous respect for everything that's come out of that place. It does have a tendency to produce Uniform thinking around a whole host of big topics, and 37 Signals was born in Chicago at a time where that had zero tech community of note…”

“Because if you don't have a bunch of money to buy ads and awareness that way, you have to earn it. And the way to earn it is simply to be interesting.”