Make stuff for yourself. There’s probably other people out there like you who want what you want and make it available to sell.
If you want to find great colors, look at a bird. Don’t look at a book. Look at a leaf. Look at the ocean. Go to a tide pool and just look at the colors.
10% of our profits go to our employees every year… Those bonuses are real cash. No options, no RSUs, no stock, no like any of that BS.
Would I want to do this again? If the answer is yes, then it was successful.
There’s something very cool about things that have just evolved on their own that are not influenced by other things. I try to think of us as the Galápagos (加拉巴哥群島).
Be Galápagos-like: evolve independently, focus on craft, authenticity, and what doesn’t change.
David Senra: Look at the Rolex design in 1960s.
Jason Fried: Oh, yeah.
David Senra: Basically perfect, has everything I need, nothing I don’t.
Jason Fried: Yeah.
David Senra: Look at the updated version, whatever, 2010.
Jason Fried: Yeah.
David Senra: Look at all the other stuff they added.
Jason Fried: Right.
David Senra: Why are you drawn to the first?
Jason Fried: Well, I’m drawn to the first… By the way, I don’t think the new one is bad. So, it’s just that what attracts me is the purity of the first one, because that is the purest form of the idea. And I love ideas and insights. Someone had an insight to design a watch that looked like that. And then from there, everyone based their designs off of that initial thing.
Jason Fried: That gets me going. For example, you take a Rolex Cosmograph Daytona today, and you look back at the first one in 1963. To me, the one in 1963, not just because it’s older, it’s better, in my opinion, aesthetically. Because it’s the purest form of the concept, of the idea. Everything else from there has been layered on because they need to sell more, they need to come up with a new version, a new model, and this is what happens. They couldn’t still sell that first version. That’s not the way the world works. You have to keep making new stuff, right?
[…]
Jason Fried: They didn’t just add stuff to add stuff. They added stuff that literally did improve things, not just to sell new models. You could see the material changes. Meanwhile, a lot of things like watches and stuff, it’s just like, new dial colors and new stuff just to kind of sell more.
David Senra: That’s a great point. You’re adding to it, but you’re not making it better.
He champions purity: the earliest, purest execution of an idea often wins.
David Senra: Explain how you plan day by day.
Jason Fried: There is no plan. I mean, like, we have a direction. So, the way I think about this, and this is, again, another weird metaphor perhaps, but I think of our business and maybe me even like I’m a squirrel 🐿️.
Jason Fried: So, you watch a squirrel run across a field. What does it do? It knows where it wants to go, roughly, and it runs, and it scurries, and it stops, and it looks around, and then it scurries some more, and it stops, and it looks around, and it scurries some more. It doesn’t need to get exactly where it wants to go. It knows roughly where it wants to go, and it clearly doesn’t know how exactly it’s going to get there, but it knows where it’s headed, and then it course-corrects. That’s how I do it.
We typically think about six weeks in advance…. Six weeks is the most we’re willing to think ahead. And then day to day, like the six weeks is like where the squirrel is headed.
David Senra: Is the time important to you? If I could tell you, “Okay, you can make the same exact amount of money that you made in 27 years, but you made it in 15, and you’re done,” you’d take the 27?
Jason Fried: Right. I would take the 27.
David Senra: Because…
Jason Fried: The money is a side effect of all of this.
David Senra: I know.
Jason Fried: So, all the money does, like Patrick, who you interviewed, O’Shaughnessy, right?
David Senra: Yeah.
Jason Fried: I love what he said about work. It’s I think something like, “I work so I could work more,” or something like that, right?
David Senra: “The reward for good work is more work.”
Jason Fried: There you go.
David Senra: It’s to keep going.
⚖️ Enough is enough
David Senra: When I think of you, I think one of your maxims that you repeat the most, is that idea. I hear you say, “So what?” all the time.
Jason Fried: Yeah, so what?
David Senra: Explain more about that.
Jason Fried: Well, you’d have to ask a question, and I would be like, “So what? I don’t know.”
David Senra: It’s like…
Jason Fried: Like, why grow? For example, we’re definitely leaving money on the table. I’m sure of it. 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 growth, more revenue, more whatever, more whatever, and my answer is “So what?”
Jason Fried: I’m very comfortable with where we are. We’ve got a great business, high margins, very predictable. We make new stuff all the time. We enjoy ourselves. We have a great time. Like, I don’t want to f*** that up.
Jason Fried: I think people f*** it up all the time. You get to the right size, and for whatever reason, you can’t be content there. And you push a little bit too much, too hard, and you lost what was great about what you were doing. And so, this whole thing about there’s money on the table, and maybe there is, and maybe there isn’t, maybe there’s a way to optimize, maybe there isn’t. It doesn’t interest me, so it’s “so what” to that. I don’t really care.
Jason Fried: 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.
David Senra: You just used the word thin shell to describe the envelope. Why do you want a thin shell?
Jason Fried: I want it to be a thin shell.
David Senra: What does that mean?
Jason Fried: Well, I would say this, 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. When I think of this stuff, and sometimes these metaphors don’t perfectly line up, but in my head, I think of a thick business. It’s hard to change, it’s heavy, it’s massive. There’s too much distance between it and the customers and it and the product. There’s space, right? If you just imagine something very thick, this is the thing that matters, and you’ve got to go through all this and compress all this down to get to the thing that matters.
Jason Fried: I don’t like that. I think the thing that matters should be big, and the rest of it should be as thin as possible, and so that’s what we’ve tried to build at 37signals. It’s a very thin business with a thick set of products that are good and solid and real and generate real profits and are real businesses, and then the rest of it is just enough to hold it all together. That’s my vision for business.
Jason Fried: And it’s mainly just to show people that you don’t have to go big. It doesn’t have to be a big, thick, heavy, busy company. It can be very thin and then focus on the product and get to a place where you can find out people like you, get to this place where enough is enough, and then maintain.
The envelope should be as thin as possible so the product remains central.
Thin envelope = agility, fewer layers, and more optionality. No VC, small team, direct customer contact. Build durable, focused products instead of financial shells.
Focus on the letter.
Stay in the game
What I can’t control is how much it costs me to run my business, how much I sell my product for. And as long as I make more than I spend, I get to stay in business.
Another way to think about this for me, I always go back to these sort of weird metaphors, is, there’s the hockey stick (曲棍球曲線), chart, right? That is unappealing to me. I like more of a metaphor where it’s more like a rocket into orbit. You’ve got to get off the ground, and you’ve got to 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 this comfortable place where you’re just orbiting. You’re not breaking a force anymore. You’re not pushing super hard. You’re maintaining and maintaining a level of quality, maintaining a level of enjoyment, and just orbiting now. And I think that that’s a really wonderful place for businesses to be. But I wouldn’t encourage you to trying to get to orbit in year two. You’ve got to be on the ride up to break free of all the forces that are holding you back. But then you should also find a place where you can settle in an orbit, versus people who I think are just busy constantly trying to grow, grow, grow, and get as big as they possibly can, and I always say, “Why?” I’m like, so what if you’re massive and you’re twice as massive? So what? Why? Why? What’s that all about? And they may have an answer for you. I don’t know what the answer would be, other than just growing for growth’s sake. But I’m a big fan of getting somewhere and then holding.
創業如發射火箭，起飛時你需要巨大能量才能脫離地心引力；一旦進入軌道，目標不再是加速，而是「留在軌道上」。
I don’t want to run a very tight margin business where I can’t make mistakes. I believe in cushy margins. So we can screw up and it won’t matter that much.
David Senra: For a business, time carries most of the weight, as another maxim. I got that from Munger because, when you read “Poor Charlie’s Almanack,” his thing is that you should master… There’s only a handful of big ideas in all these different disciplines, so, you know, biology, physics, economics.
David Senra: He’s like, “And if you just master the big ideas,” he says, “those few handful of big ideas carry most of the freight.”
David Senra: And I was like, “Oh, so time carries most of the weight. You just have to survive, which goes back to your blubber, having a margin of safety.
Jason Fried: Blubber (cushioning profits) and small units.
Jason Fried: That’s a big part of it, too. So, with Basecamp, for example, nobody can pay us more than $299 a month.
Jason Fried: It doesn’t matter how many users you have. So, you could be a big enterprise, and $299 a month is the most you can possibly pay. Now, many of our competitors will be, like, “Hey, you want to pay us 50 grand a month? You got 2000 seats, we’ll take it.” I don’t want their money, because what I want is a static group of customers.
Jason Fried: If you think about static, like an old TV, like the dots, they’re all equal-sized. You should be able to pick out 10 random customers and lose. I don’t want to lose customers, but if you could pick out 10 random customers and lose them, I think you have a good business.
Jason Fried: 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 units, which are individual customers, and if you take one out, it’s not like Jenga (疊疊樂), where the whole thing’s going to fall. It doesn’t matter in a sense, because everyone’s essentially equal, no matter how big you are.
Jason Fried: And then we can develop software for the customer base as a whole, and not for a handful of customers that pay us a lot more than everybody else. The enterprise game, is getting as many seats as you can, and landing these whales, and I just don’t find that interesting. I also don’t find it durable. Durability is about a lot of small things. And if someone wants to chip away at some of those, it doesn’t matter because there’s a lot more left. That’s kind of what we were aiming for with durability.
Fried structures revenue as many equal small units - no whales paying vastly more. That avoids dependence on any single customer and makes the company durable.