Latest Posts (20 found)
Jason Fried Yesterday

The next product

New products don’t need to be revolutionary, life-changing, or disruptive breakthroughs to succeed. Entire categories can roll downhill, gathering complexity as they go. Each product one-upping the next until more becomes too much. The cycle feeds itself, never satiated. Competitors locked in a loop of mutual destruction through perpetual over-improvement. When that happens, the door cracks open for something new. The newcomer doesn’t have to meet the others where they are. It just has to feel right — like someone opened the curtains and let the sun back in. The type of product that lets people exhale and say, “finally!” Not groundbreaking. Just grounded. Standing where everyone else forgot to. -Jason

business Business
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Jason Fried 1 weeks ago

When design drives behavior

In some cases, design is what something looks like. In other cases, design is how something works. But the most interesting designs to me are when design changes your behavior. Even the smallest details can change how someone interacts with something. Take the power reserve indicator on the A. Lange & Söhne Lange 1 watch. The power reserve indicator indicates how much "power" (wind) is left. It's pictured below on the right side of the dial. It starts with AUF ("up") and ends with AB ("down"). A fully wound Lange 1 (indicator up at AUF) will give you about 72 hours before the watch fully runs out of power, stops, and must be wound again. It moves down as the watch runs until you're out of power. Wind it again to fill it back up. Simple enough, right? An indicator and a scale for fully wound through unwound. Just like a car's fuel gauge. You have full through empty, with a few ticks in between to indicate 3/4 or 1/4 tank left, and typically a red zone at the end saying you really need to fill this thing up soon or you're going to be stranded. However, all is not as it seems on the Lange 1. There's something very clever going on here to change your behavior. First you'll notice five triangles between AUF and AUB. They aren't equally spaced. At first you might think it looks like each is about a quarter of the scale, and then the last two at the bottom would be like the red zone on your fuel gage. But no. The indicator follows a non-linear progression downwards. It doesn't sweep from top to bottom evenly over time. It's actually accelerated early. When fully wound, It takes just a day for the indicator to drop down two markers to the halfway point. From there, it takes a day each to hit the lower two markers. This makes it look like it's unwinding faster than it is because the indicator covers more distance in that first 24 hours. If the spacing were uniform, and the indicator was linear, the owner might not feel the need to wind it until the power reserve was nearly fully depleted. Then you might have a dead watch when you pick it up the next morning. So what's the net effect of this tiny little design detail that the owner may not even understand? Well, it looks like the watch is already half-way out of power after the first day, so it encourages the owner to wind the watch more frequently. To keep it closer to topped off, even when it's not necessary. This helps prevents the watch from running out of power, losing time, and, ultimately, stopping. A stopped watch may be right twice a day, but it's rarely at the times you want. Small detail, material behavior change. Well considered, well executed, well done. -Jason

Behavior design Design
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Jason Fried 2 weeks ago

What to do with $2M?

A young entrepreneur in his mid-20s just emailed me asking for some advice. He just sold a business and ended up with a couple million in liquid cash. He wanted to know if he should invest it, use it to build a new company, or do something else with it. My advice wasn't what he was expecting. I just said don't lose it. Do nothing with it. Put it in the bank. Something safe, earning a little, but not too much that it's at risk. Money doesn't need to work. It can rest. Leave it be. You're 26 — you can get back to work. A couple million liquid cash is a huge haul. Maintain! Don't lose. Always have that. And add more to that safe pile as you go. That's yours now. Keep it that way. -Jason

career Career business Business
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Jason Fried 1 months ago

Marketing is...

At its best, marketing is a transfer of enthusiasm. When you're truly pumped about what you're doing, when you're truly driven by the vision, when you absolutely must make something that you need and want, your enthusiasm leaves a mark. It's a brand. Not the noun, but the verb. At its worst, marketing is a transfer of everything else

marketing Marketing
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Jason Fried 1 months ago

An obligation to independence

One of the great privileges of owning an independent company is that you get to try all sorts of stuff no one else would ever give you permission to do. And you get to greenlight other people's oddball ideas too. You can — and should — provide cover for weird attempts, strange ideas, and "I mean this will probably never work but. " stuff. Often

career Career business Business
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Jason Fried 2 months ago

Knives and battleships

From time to time we get criticized for making "yet another to-do list" product. Or a chat product. Or a messaging product. Or something we've kinda sorta already made before, just in a different form, combination, or approach. "How about something else. How about something bigger. How about something completely different

career Career
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Jason Fried 2 months ago

A fly and luck

There was a tiny fly right by the drain, and I was about to wash my hands. Turning on the water would have sent it right down the hole. A quick end, or an eventual struggled drowning, hard to know. But that would be that, there was no getting out. Somehow, for a moment, I slipped into contemplation. I could just turn on the water, I could rescue it, I could use a different sink

ai AI ui UI writing Writing
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Jason Fried 4 months ago

Years of evidence

"Years of experience" has been a gold standard hiring requirement since forever. It's a terrible one. Someone can do something for years and have nothing to show for it. Seek people with "Years of evidence" instead. People with deep examples of work. Piles of stuff they've made. An overflowing collection of output they're proud to share

career Career
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Jason Fried 4 months ago

Turning back can be getting ahead

When you encounter a simpler system, a simpler idea, or a simpler implementation, you have an opportunity. You can say "it's not enough, it doesn't have, it wouldn't work". That’s the common reflexive response. Or you can reflect. “What is it about how we work that prevents us from using such a simple, succinct system

career Career programming Programming
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Jason Fried 4 months ago

Cover letters? Yes!

Whenever I write about our focus on cover letters during the hiring process, I'll inevitably receive the "cover letters are still a thing. " or "people still read cover letters. " response from a cadre of characters. Here's one from yesterday: https://x. com/amfonte/status/1924996546896036278 Yes, cover letters are a thing, and we absolutely still read them. And require them

career Career
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Jason Fried 4 months ago

On Legacy

I don’t think much about legacy. Yours, mine, anyone’s really. Do the best you can right now. For now. Not for later. If it’s useful later, great. But that’s only because it starts out useful now. Legacy isn’t an artist who was ignored all their life until they died. That’s just recognition and fame. Their work was already excellent then. Legacy. Who’s going to remember anyway

writing Writing career Career culture Culture
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Jason Fried 5 months ago

Why new when?

When we make something new, people often ask "why don't you just add that to Basecamp. " There are a number of reasons, depending on what it is. But, broadly, making something brand new gives you latitude (and attitude) to explore new tech and design approaches. It's the opposite of grafting something on to a heavier, larger system that already exists

web-development Web Development business Business design Design
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Jason Fried 6 months ago

Doing what you think, not what you thought

Whenever I talk about working in real-time, making decisions as you go, figuring things out now rather than before, I get a question like this. "If you don't have a backlog, or deep sets of prioritized, ranked items, how do you decide what to do next. " My answer:  The same way you do when your made your list. You make decisions

career Career agile Agile go Go
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Jason Fried 6 months ago

Go do business

Business isn’t something you learn in books. Or posts. Or threads. You can’t read your way to the right hire. You can't consume enough content to produce a product. You have to do. You learn business by doing business. Hiring by hiring. Products by building them. We know this is true in music. Never pick up a guitar. Go read 100 books on guitar. You'll suck just as much

business Business go Go
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Jason Fried 7 months ago

Randomly right

One of the great lessons of nature: Randomness is the most beautiful thing. Every forest, every field, every place untouched by humans is full of randomness. Nothing lines up, a million different shapes, sprouting seeds burst where the winds — or birds — randomly drop them. Stones strewn by water, ice, gravity, and wind, all acting on their own in their own ways. Things that just stop and stay

data Data data-analysis Data Analysis nature Nature
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Jason Fried 7 months ago

Hiring judgement

In the end, judgment comes first. And that means hiring is a gut decision. As much science as people want to try to pour into the hiring process, art always floats to the top. This is especially true when hiring at the executive level. The people who make the final calls — the ones who are judged on outcome, not effort — are ultimately hired based on experience and judgement

career Career
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Jason Fried 8 months ago

Governor Newsom: Please help Franklin fire victims

I'm republishing this for a friend who doesn't have a reliable place to publish this online. It's a letter she wrote and sent to a number of newspapers. Her family was a victim of the recent Franklin wildfire, and unlike other recent fires, the Franklin fire wasn't included in the Governor's emergency declaration for disaster relief

journalism Journalism writing Writing
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Jason Fried 8 months ago

What's still here?

Be curious about what's new, sure. That's expected. But it's more interesting to be curious about what's old. 
What stood the test of time. What worked before and still works now. What survived through all the jabs that you assumed would knock it out, but didn't. That's worth attention. That's worth being curious about. Those are the things that are particularly interesting

ai AI programming Programming culture Culture
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Jason Fried 8 months ago

We increased conversion ~30% and we don't know exactly how

Not too long ago, we dedicated a 6-week cycle to improving Basecamp's onboarding flows. The aim was to increase conversion from trial to paid by smoothing out the initial experience of getting going, doing a better job of quick-teaching the basics, and making a few things a little bit easier each step of the way

business Business design Design
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Jason Fried 8 months ago

Subjectivity in productivity

Precision. Certainty. Specificity. Everyone wants to know exactly what and exactly when, and they want a statistic attached to corroborate it. But numbers are rarely answers — just as projects are rarely math problems. Where are we in this process exactly. How far along in this project are we exactly. Where does everything stand absolutely. There are no equal signs after those statements

business Business
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