Jason Fried Quotes
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Customers buy Basecamp without ever having to interact with us. If they do have a question, we handle everything via email. We've been in the business of automation. We've never really valued full service.
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If yesterday was a good day's work, chances are you'll stay on a roll. And if you can stay on a roll, everything else will probably take care of itself - including not working from the moment you get up in the morning until you nod off to sleep.
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I live in Chicago but own some property up in Wisconsin.
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I'd love to see more businesses take this approach - intentionally rightsizing themselves. Hit a number that feels good and say, 'Let's stick around here.'
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Your company is a product. Who are its customers? Your employees, who use it to do their jobs.
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That's the great irony of allowing passionate people to work from home. A manager's natural instinct is to worry that her workers aren't getting enough work done. But the real threat is that they will wind up working too hard. And because the manager isn't sitting across from her worker anymore, she can't look in the person's eyes and see burnout.
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Entrepreneurs love to view risk as binary. The more you put on the line, the greater the potential for reward.
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What's bad, boring, and barely read all over? Business writing.
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When you spend time with potential customers, you get to hear about their struggles firsthand. You see their eyes light up with excitement or darken with confusion. You learn things you would never find in a survey, database, or questionnaire. You learn why people buy.
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I used to think that deadlines should be ignored until the product was ready: that they were a nuisance, a hurdle in front of quality, a forced measure to get something out the door for the good of the schedule, not the customer.
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It's easy to forget, as a leader, that when employees don't get the wide view, not only does the point of their work escape them, but it can also lead to real frustration. It's hard to feel pride and ownership when you don't understand where things are going.
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It may be irrational, but if you're local, the client often feels that, if worse comes to worst, they can knock on your door. They 'know where you live.' But when you're remote, they're going to be more suspicious when phone calls go unreturned or emails keep getting 'lost.' Stay on top of communications, and you'll reap the benefits.
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Unlike a goldfish, a computer can't really do anything without you telling it exactly what you want it to do.
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I know plenty of entrepreneurs who are numbers first. They tend to be highly analytical people, and before they pull the trigger, all the numbers have to line up just right.
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Sustained exhaustion is not a rite of passage. It's a mark of stupidity.
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One of the secret benefits of using remote workers is that the work itself becomes the yardstick to judge someone's performance.
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The reality is that companies are full of things that are left unspoken. And even when they are out in the open, the CEO is almost always the last to know.
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People pulling 16-hour days on a regular basis are exhausted. They're just too tired to notice that their work has suffered because of it.
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I'm generally risk averse, and most great entrepreneurs I know are as well.
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When something is working well, it becomes too easy to let things run themselves.
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A diverse customer base helps insulate you; a few large accounts can leave you vulnerable to their whims.
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In my mind, declaring that an unfamiliar task will yield low-hanging fruit is almost always an admission that you have little insight about what you're setting out to do.
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Hiring people is like making friends. Pick good ones, and they'll enrich your life. Make bad choices, and they'll bring you down.
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As the number of people who work at Basecamp has grown, I've noticed places where we could use more features, like management, structure, and guidelines. I've also noticed places where we've overengineered ourselves and should pull back.