9 Things I’ve Learned — Jason Fried founder of Basecamp at Big Omaha

Anuj Raman
5 min readAug 28, 2020

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My takeaways & personal notes from Jason Fried’s talk about what he has learned building a company committed to making the best web-based tools possible with the least number of features necessary.

1. Bootstrapping

The biggest difference between a bootstrap company and a funded company has to do with the mindset around making or spending money.

On Day 1 —

  • Bootstrap company has to make money. If you don’t make money you’ll not stay in business.
  • Funded company has to spend money

It has to do with mindset of making money or spending money.

If you are used to spending money, you’ll not be good at making it.

This is very common with funded companies, they are very good at spending money and when the money runs out, they don’t know how to make it.

A bootstrap company is (hopefully & eventually!) good at making money.

This is the right kind of thing you should focus on as a small business owner.

2. Price forces you to be good.

Giving something away for free is easy. Charging for something and getting people to pay you for it means you need to be good.

Giving something for free also brings you loose feedback from the customers using it for free, since they have no skin in the game.

Always get advice & feedback from someone that you pay to or someone that pays you because they are going to be honest with you.

It’s the difference between asking a friend for advice versus asking your therapist for advice.

Are we $20 good enough? Are we $50 good enough? Are we $100 good?

Whatever you do, charge for it.

3. Useful > Innovative

Innovation is overrated, usefulness is underrated.

If you are not building something useful, innovation won’t mean anything.

Ask yourself not if this is cool, innovate, rather if it is useful.

Innovative & cool wears off, useful never does.

Whenever Jason and team builds a product they constantly ask themselves:-

  • Is this useful?
  • Is this something that’s going to change somebody’s behavior?
  • Is someone going to do something better because of this thing?

I don’t know if people will be posting on Facebook wall in 10 years, but I’m convinced they will be using post it notes in 10 years. They are useful.

New & cool isn’t bad as long as it’s tied to useful.

4. Focus on what won’t change

A lot of people are focused on what’s new, what’s next, do I have to be doing x, should I use y technology or not.

What matters are the things that will not change over the next 10 years.

And if you invest in those things, you’ll thrive now and 10 years from now because your competitors are probably not focused on these things.

Example: At Basecamp, speed is very important. Apps need to work fast and product needs to quickly and reliably. Basecamp’s customers 10 years from now would still want the product to be fast, quick & reliable.

Figure out what things in your business will not change in the next 10 years and focus on those, they may not be sexy but they will absolutely pay off in the long term.

5. Do It Yourself (hiring advice)

You have to do the job first before you can hire someone to do it.
If not you, then maybe someone else internally should do it.

You can try to spend your way out of the problems or you can try to learn you way out of a problem. And if you do it the later way you’ll have a deep understanding of the problem and the solution.

Example: Jason did customer service for 2–3 years, answered all the emails before he hired a customer service rep to do that job for him. Since he had total understanding of the nature of the job, he understood who to hire, what questions to ask and whether they are the right candidate or not.

Most common objection founders throw after hearing this is “we can’t grow fast then, we haven’t done a lot of things and it’s just of couple of us”

Jason suggests then to grow slowly. Because that constraint of not hiring forces you to learn stuff. You should know just about everything that’s going on in your business.

6. Say you are sorry

Companies and politicians are very bad at apologies.

What they typically say is “we apologize for any inconvenience we may have caused you” and that’s not a real apology.

When you say “I’m sorry, here’s what happened, here’s how we are going to fix this, here’s how it won’t happen again”

It shows that you really mean it and with this kind of apology you will end up with a much more trusting customer base.

One of the great measures of figuring out if you are a great business or not is by if your customers trust & believe your apologies.

If people don’t believe your apologies, you’ve got a lot of stuff wrong.

If you are the owner, you should take full responsibilities for your apologies. People are very forgiving with that.

7. Draw a line in the sand

Do you know what HP stands for (don’t answer Hewlett Packard!)

What about Dell? What does it stand for?

Do you know anything about what these companies mean? What are they about? What would they say “no” to?

When you stand for something, when they know what you believe in and will more likely to be drawn to your company.

Famous example of Apple: Here’s to the crazy ones

8. Features, Specs & tech doesn’t drive people to buy.

They might drive the geeks, but it doesn’t drive the public.

People are trying to get a job done. And all they want to know is whether your product will help them get the job done with ease and bring them the desired results.

Most companies don’t speak their buyer’s language and end up losing them because it makes no sense to the buyer

When you are trying to sell something, listen to what they are trying to say and trying to get done.

9. Less is more

Jason has built less is more in Basecamp’s culture. They have features less than everybody else, they work less than other people, they want people to do less work.

But the things that they do, they do them really really well.

Do less stuff and you’ll get more stuff done.

Instead of finishing half of everything, finish it full.

“We’ve never once as a company regretted doing less, we’ve always regretted doing more. No is such a liberating thing”

Focus on less, but do those less things exceptionally well.

When you got 10 ideas, try and do 5.

When you think need more people, maybe you need less people to do the same task.

Remember: Less is always an option.

Click here to watch the full 36 minute talk.

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