Are you building the business you want?
How Jason Fried of 37signals ignores everyone else and builds his own way.
Hi, it’s Melissa, and welcome (back) to “your founder next door”, a weekly publication with stories and tidbits of my human journey bootstrapping eWebinar to $5m ARR. No BS, just straight-up truth bombs on what it’s like to build a company without an abundance of resources or friends in high places.
I was listening to an interview by David Senra with Jason Fried the other day, and I came away questioning why I care so much about what other people think or what other companies are doing. Shouldn’t I know better than that already?
If you don’t know Jason, he is the co-founder of 37signals, the company behind Basecamp and HEY. He and his business partner, David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), have been profitable for 27 years straight. No VC. No board. No exit they’re chasing. Just two people building a software company the way they want to build it.
I already knew their philosophies from reading REWORK, a book that challenges the conventional way of building businesses. But every now and then getting a refresher is like hitting the reset button.
What this interview reminded me of is something I already knew: there is no right way to build a company.
I sometimes forget that. We’re drowning in playbooks and frameworks and advice and newsletters (I see the irony) from people who may or may not have ever done the thing they’re teaching. We start to believe there’s one correct path, and that everyone ahead of us is on it, and that we’re falling behind.
Jason doesn’t operate like that. He doesn’t look at other people’s software. He’s not inspired by his competitors. He doesn’t study their products. Not because he’s arrogant, but because he knows he solves problems his own way, and that the people who like his way will find him.
He’d rather look at the sun, go for a walk, or look at the ocean. He says he gets enough of the software world by being in it. He doesn’t want to soak in everyone else’s stuff too.
When you’re constantly watching what everyone else is doing, that becomes the only way you think it can be done. You stop being able to see alternatives. Then you start building out of fear. They launched that, so I need that too. They have this feature, so I’m going to build it too. You end up following everyone, and your product becomes less of what you wanted it to be.
He builds from abundance, not scarcity. He doesn’t believe there’s a fixed number of customers and everyone’s fighting over the same pie. He believes if he builds something he loves, enough of the right people will love it too.
💡 Here’s the thing. He said enough is better than growth.
Isn’t that a beautiful idea?
We live in a world where nothing is ever enough. You grow 20%, you want 40%. You hit 40%, you want 80%. Going zero to $10m in your lifetime used to be a dream. Then it had to be achieved in 5 years. Now with AI, 1 year. Anything less than that and the startup world looks at you like you failed. The worst is we look at ourselves in the mirror and think we failed. How did we get here?
Jason caps how much any single customer can pay him. With Basecamp, nobody can pay more than $299 a month, no matter how big they are. He turns down the whales on purpose. He doesn’t want a handful of customers so big that he has to drop everything to serve them. He wants a static base of customers who are all roughly equal, where losing any one of them doesn’t threaten the whole thing. That’s what he considers a great business. I agree.
I know what he’s talking about. At my last startup, Spacio, one account was 15% of our revenue, and so whatever they wanted, we dropped everything. That is not a good way to live, and it’s not good business. It’s a big part of why we built eWebinar to be self-serve, starting at $99, sold entirely through the internet. No calls. No meetings. No single account that owns us. A business designed around the life I actually wanted to live.
The strategy of your business is a choice. The size of it is a choice. Who you answer to is a choice.
Jason said he wouldn’t trade his business for anyone else’s. He already has the business he wants. Not because his is the biggest or the most valuable, but because it’s his. He built the company he wants to work at. Every decision he’s ever made was in service of the life he wanted, not to beat someone or to win a game someone else invented.
Imagine waking up not racing toward some bigger outcome, because you’re already living the life you dreamed of. That’s inspirational.
I’ve said before that the only way to have the life you want is to design it. Which means the only way to have the company you want is to design it. You can’t design either one if you’re too busy following someone else’s footsteps.
Don’t be afraid to build the company you want, the way you want to build it. Don’t be afraid of your competitors. Don’t be afraid of losing the customers you never wanted to serve in the first place. Don’t be afraid of being yourself.
The people who like what you’re building will find you. The only opinions that matter are yours and your customers’.
Know what enough looks like for you. And when you get there, let it be enough.
What’s more powerful than peace?
Till next time,
— Melissa, your founder next door ✌️
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Knowing what “enough” looks like is probably harder than growing.
There’s always someone nearby making more money and looking exhausted in a nicer car, office, or home.