Jason Fried Quotes
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As businesses grow, all sorts of things that once were done on the fly - including creating new products - have a way of becoming bureaucratized.
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Deadlines are great for customers because having one means they get a product, not just a promise that someday they'll get a product.
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To say that the grocery business is cutthroat would be a major understatement.
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Lots of business owners spend their lives trying to land the whale - the single, massive, brand-name account that will fatten the top line and bestow instant credibility. But big customers make me nervous.
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Success isn't about being the biggest. It's about letting the right size find you.
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Very, very few people actually have long stretches of uninterrupted time at an office.
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Respect the work that you've never done before.
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Who you work with is even more important than who you hang out with because you spend a lot more time with your workmates than your friends.
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It feels good to be productive.
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A large user base helps shield us from things we can't control. You can spend years catering to a major corporation, for example, only to see your contact there move on.
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I've found that nurturing untapped potential is far more exhilarating than finding someone who has already peaked.
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I think what really people want is just a few things done really, really well. And if you think about ever day of your life, the things you really appreciate aren't the complicated things. They're the simple things that work just the way you expect them to.
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Bottom line: If you can't spare some time to give your employees the chance to wow you, you'll never get the best from them.
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I think that sleep and work are very closely related - not because you can work while you're sleeping and sleep while you're working. That's not really what I mean. I'm talking specifically about the fact that sleep and work are phase-based, or stage-based, events.
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I casually advise a few young companies, and I'm always surprised when I see them overthinking simple problems, adding too much structure too early, and trying to get formal too soon. Start-ups should embrace their scrappiness, not rush to toss it aside.
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If you tell your story well, it can help attract customers; it can help people understand your business better, and you are more approachable as a business and a company.
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It's like, the front door of the office is like a Cuisinart, and you walk in, and your day is shredded to bits because you have 15 minutes here, 30 minutes there, and something else happens, you're pulled off your work, then you have 20 minutes, then it's lunch, then you have something else to do.
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When we launched the first version of Basecamp in 2004, we decided to build software for small companies just like us.
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If you could taste words, most corporate websites, brochures, and sales materials would remind you of stale, soggy rice cakes: nearly calorie free, devoid of nutrition, and completely unsatisfying.
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I'm not sure a lot of companies know their story, or can explain why they exist and who they are, without just spewing just corporate speech.
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A company gets better at the things it practices.
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The risk of relying on a handful of customers is not just financial. Your product also is at risk when you're at the mercy of a few big spenders. When any one customer pays you significantly more than the others, your product inevitably ends up catering mostly to that customer's specific needs.
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I'm a designer, but I rely on programmers to bring my ideas to life. By learning to code myself, I think I can make things easier for all of us. Similarly, I want to be able to build things on my own without having to bother a programmer.
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Meetings should be great - they're opportunities for a group of people sitting together around a table to directly communicate. That should be a good thing. And it is, but only if treated as a rare delicacy.