why aren't all 7 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
What-if
DHH: Basecamp would never have created Ruby on Rails with venture funding
“If we had raised, I don't know, twenty million dollars and hired a hundred people, we would just use the same shit as everyone else, and we would never have come up with Ruby on Rails.”
Assertion Contradicted
DHH: Basecamp had SaaS project management to itself for a decade
“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…”
Insight
DHH: Severe operational constraints trigger creativity and technical optimizations
“All of those constraints apply themselves to our situation and then just produces an explosion of creativity because that's what very often happens. When you are deprived in all the right ways, you will find out Oh, there's a better way to do this. You will fi…”
Disclosure
Fried: Basecamp caps monthly pricing at $299 for unlimited users
“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…”
Insight
Wilkinson: Neglected SaaS side projects are prime acquisition targets
“When you see a business where they're just not, they're myopic on something, they're not doing the best practices. And often it's because they have other priorities. I mean, The base camp guys had a hundred million dollar ARR SaaS business. The last thing they…”
Assertion Partly supported
Wilkinson: Tiny scaled We Work Remotely from $400K to $4M EBITDA
“We bought a business about almost 10 years ago called weworkremotely.com. And it's very simple. It's a job board... We buy the business. We pay three or four times earnings or something, which was, you know, a fair price given what it was doing. We immediately…”
Disclosure
DHH: 37signals has never disclosed full revenue or profits
“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.”