Basecamp

“They can come out and say, we don't use any tracking, we don't use Google Analytics, we don't track open rates, and if you have a hundred million dollar business throwing off tens of millions a year in net profit with 50 employees, you can do that too. But if …”

“Basecamp only has 55 employees because they've grown so slow over so many years, and they have so much net profit coming off that they pay all of their people no matter where they live. It's like 90th percentile of a San Francisco salary for the role, and they…”

“I think they may have long-term done some damage. I think by making it such a religious thing, like they, you know, they used to say like, well, bootstrap will never take funding. Anyone who takes funding is XYZ. They also would say like, we don't split tests.…”

“So we ended up going with the base camp motto of ShapeUp with a six-week sprint, and that's worked out really well for us so far in terms of getting into a rhythm of building out feature requests and having the engineers also feel that it's a short enough peri…”

“If you put your heads together and kind of hashed out things and got on the same page in front of a whiteboard, you'd save a lot of time over trying to do that overriding. Like the alternative is go asynchronous and just write, write a lot and provide a lot of…”

“If you let customers guide you, most of the time, they'll just have you rebuild MailChimp, or Basecamp, or HubSpot. They'll just have you replicate that, because that's what they've used, and that's what they know, and they'll just keep suggesting those featur…”

“Jason Fried and DHH are tiny seed mentors. They invested in our first fund. So I'm not throwing shade at them, but I'm saying they often give advice that fits them really well and worked for them that I think it won't work for 999 out of the next thousand star…”

“Jason Freed on the MicroConf stage said it throws off tens of millions a year in net profit, and that was six, seven, eight years ago, and you know it's probably grown since then.”

“That's why I don't like it when people use Basecamp as an example, because usually it's to justify an opinion or justify an approach to business that I just don't see working for anyone else.”

“They can do stuff like not market, like not sell, because they're in a luxurious position and good for them. You know, the luck and timing were one and two. Jason Fried told me that for their success. Unless I can replicate luck and timing, I can't. Then I nee…”

“Everyone sells, like I say this, everyone sells eventually. I never thought MailChimp would sell and they eventually sold, you know, I mean, really, I had all these examples and they've all sold except for I think Basecamp is probably the one that I think abou…”

“Basecamp throws off tens of millions of dollars a year in net profit. And for all intents, it's basically Jason Fried and DHH. Those dudes are raking an eight million, I'm sorry, 8,000,008 figures a year of net profit.”

“Everyone sells eventually except for Basecamp. That's the, that's probably the, you know, the one that, that may never sell.”

“Because we know you can build a CRUD app, we know you can build Basecamp, we know you can build Drip, we know you can build MailChimp, right? It might take you a while, These are certain things that will happen. There's no technology risk.”