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Kind: captions Language: en I got four words for you self-funded cash cow that is what today’s guest Jason freed has built his company 37 signals is awesome you’ve probably heard of it I heard of it because I read his book this is rework I read this thing like a decade ago I still have so many of these Pages folded because they’re just it’s full of gold uh but the best part is he’s not just an author right he actually is an entrepreneur he runs his own company he’s done it for like 25 years now and these guys they say next to nothing about their numbers the only thing they’ve ever said is we make tens of millions a year in profit um but I do think this is actually kind of a juggernaut this is a juggernaut of a business Jason Lin a great investor once said that the two greatest self-funded cash flow companies he’s ever seen are Craigslist and 37 signals and the best part is they do it by kind of like kicking the traditional Playbook to the to the curb they set no goals they work four days a week in the Summers they spend next to nothing on marketing and so I wanted to ask Jason three questions the first is how did you build this low stress cash flow company right you are the cash flow King how did you do it that’s the first part then we asked him what was it like being face Toof face with Jeff basos negotiating a deal he got to know Jeff Bezos 20 years ago I wanted to know what is it like to be in the room with him and lastly he’s got this skill where he’s able to generate massive interest in his products pre-launch and I wanted to steal that superpower how do you do this before you’ve even launched a product he uses these founder letters to blow up his products and so we talked about it we got him to sort of explain bit by bit how he does those how he writes those those things all right no more teasing enjoy this episode with Jason [Music] free we were doing research uh before this podcast and I’ve looked into a bunch I’m inspired by you is it weird that we know that you spent something like 30 million dollars on homes in the past like two years you know you you started like a tech company not looking to get into this and now like your home purchases are on the blogs it’s embarrassing and frankly I I tried to hide them you try to do all the things like double LLC and the whole thing I I like architecture I like houses I like land it’s just that’s like really the thing I really found myself liking a lot and unfortunately it’s very hard to just how do they find it how do they know because they’re like Jason freed bought this house and me and Sam we’re supposed to be prepping for this pot and we spend like 20 minutes clicking through these photos being like this house is sick how do they actually it um I don’t know my guess is so like technically it’s it’s it’s hidden in a sense but I think that all they got to do is probably ask like you know a real estate agent and you know you you kind of have ndas but you know someone knows some or like the electrician or the cable company someone hangs out and finds out or they look in the mailbox and see that you know there’s a million ways unfortunately well what’s cool about you and what I honestly admire we started off talking about how big the business is but the reality is what I admire is some guys are into to beautiful eyes some guys are into butts me and Sam on this podcast we’re we are into people who play their Define their own game and then play it and that’s the one thing I think you do really really well and you’ve gone viral many times by putting out there some of your philosophies on how you approach business what I want to do is I want to kind of read you a quote I want you to react to it I want you to explain and unpack a little bit for each one of these and we can go fast so the first one is your anti- long-term planning you don’t you don’t do long-term plans and here’s the quote I lik you go long-term planning is a fantasy I don’t plan long-term because I want to do what I think not what I thought that’s right explain that one yeah long-term planning is is is what you thought and like doing figuring out as you go is what you think and I don’t like the idea of having a thought 6 months ago or eight months ago or 12 months ago and feeling like I have to follow that whim because I happen to have it and happen to write it wrote it down I don’t I don’t get that um I know a lot of people think there’s a lot of certainty or comfort in like setting out a plan and like you know but really it’s that plan is then just based on a moment in time and and then people are like well you can adjust well if you’re going to adjust Just Adjust just just don’t even do the first plan um so my feeling is uh just make it up as you go frankly we we think about things six months or sorry six weeks at a time and uh and go from there and adjust all the time and that’s fine we’ve always done it that way and I feel most comfortable frankly just paying attention to reality in the moment and making calls along along the way you also wrote that uh you’ve never had a goal so you said um you had this whole blog post that you don’t like goals I I think you might have be you maybe were quoting another person but you said um the reason that most of us aren’t happy most of the time is that we set goals not for the person we’re going to be when we reach them but we set our goals for the person we are when we set them and I don’t think you explicitly said that the company doesn’t set goals but you sort of implied it is that the case yeah by the way that quote is from a fellow named Jim kudal who is a good friend of ours and runs field notes which a lot of people know you know goal our only goal is to be profitable on a given year we’ve been profitable every year for 25 years that’s the only thing we look at is we want to make sure that we make more money than we spend otherwise we don’t really set goals or have expectations other than just to do our best work I’m not a fan of thinking that you’re going to do better work if you set a goal I think you should do your best work all the time as best you can and again let the chips fall where they may you know the way I think about this that I think helps people understand this more is if you want to go out for a run and run a six minut Mile and you got to run a 6 minute mile and you end up running a 604 you’re you like didn’t hit the goal and you’re maybe upset like I almost got it whatever now some people might say you’re going to work harder next time but what if the goal was 605 instead like it’s 5 Seconds difference and you would have beat it and you would have felt differently it’s like five seconds does that matter like to me the right question is like was it worth it did I enjoy the Run did I have a good time do I feel good now do I want to do that again am I injured no great did I get some fresh air yes like if you ask different questions then you’re not so obsessed with like this this point this this goal line that you set up that is really arbitrary and made up to begin with so I’ve never believed in goals I just kind of do the best I can and and see where it goes so I like I I I want to agree with you uh because I I prefer I think I would be happier if that were the case but there is like some logistical push back of like well you guys launched hey.com a few years ago and you um you have to plan uh like how much to Al at towards that project otherwise potentially you could be unprofitable so how do you justify like looking at like well this needs to this needs to hit this metric or let’s ask the question slightly differently I come to work you’re the CEO you’re like no plans no goals I’m like all right so then and what are we doing here how do we do it what is the answer well this is going to sound strange but we don’t think that way we look at the big pile and go like at the end of the year do we have more money than we spent and is it because of this product or that product or this endeavor or that endeavor or this cost savings or that expense like I don’t really care frankly like to me it’s just one big pile it’s a range it’s a feeling like we feel we actually it’s more of an aesthetic for us David and I talk about the aesthetic of running a high margin business it feels right to do it that way I don’t want to run a business where I’m nervous all the time and you’re nervous when you’re looking at one or two points here and there and like we’re barely breaking even like I don’t want to be in that kind of company right so we keep our costs low we have a huge customer base over 100,000 people pay us on a monthly basis for a variety of different products and um given the fact that our costs are low and our revenue is high and we have a very diverse customer base things are things can be sloppy in a good way I feel like it’s a comforting way it’s not like a reckless way we are careful about costs we think about costs a lot actually but we don’t worry too much about points you know that’s just not how we how we look at things and so this approach where you’re like we I let me let me give you what I see from the outside you tell me which parts of this are are me fantasizing versus reality so the way I view you guys is you kind of think about what needs to exist in the world so for example you’re like there needs to be email that doesn’t stress you out or software that you pay for once and not every single month for the rest of your life that and every additional employee you have it costs more and more and more right like it’s sort of like first there’s a point of view on what needs to change in the world or the way you want things to be or what what you wish existed then you’re like probably some second check which is like can we build it are we the right team to build this do we have a an approach that we think might work and then you budget this like six week Sprint where you’re like let’s try to make a version of that that we like and then we’ll iterate from there and we’re willing to tolerate like six weeks of attempt at this to get to the next Milestone of belief like we’ll give it you know a leap of faith to six weeks and then after that we re-evaluate and and decide what what to do from there is that correct what parts of that are incorrect partially U so we will spend a lot more time than six weeks on exploring an initial idea so for example when we’re going to make a brand new product we might spend six months wandering around an idea and seeing where it ends up and then at some point where again I don’t know it’s just a feeling like we spent enough time on this we’re feeling good about this this is feeling better and better and better as we go let’s do this then you commit to doing it then you do it six weeks at a time or you get into something and you wander for a while and you go H I’m just bored or like I don’t know where else to go or this isn’t really this doesn’t seem interesting and you stop uh and you just give up frankly you just give up which is something I think more people ought to do all right everyone a quick break to tell you about HubSpot and this one’s easy because I’m going to show you an example of how I’m doing this at my company when I say I I mean not my team I mean I’m the one who actually made this so I’ve got this company called Hampton you can check it out join hampton.com it’s a community for Founders and one of the ways that we’ve grown is we’ve created these surveys where we’ll ask our members certain questions that a lot of people a lot of times people are afraid to ask so things like what their net worth is how their assets are allocated all these like interesting questions and then we’ll put it in a survey and I went and made a landing page so you can check it out at join hampton.com wealth you can actually see the landing page that I made and the hard part with this is with Hampton we are appealing to a sort of a a higher-end customer sort of like like a Louis Vuitton or Ferrari so I needed the landing page to look a very particular way HubSpot has templates that’s what we use we just change the colors a little bit to match our brand very easy they have this drag and drop version of their Landing Page Builder and it’s super simple I’m not Technical and I’m the one who actually made it and once it’s made I then shared it on social media and we had thousands of people see it and thousands of people who gave us their information and I can then see over the next handful of weeks this is how much revenue came in from this wealth survey that I did this is where the revenue came from so it came from Twitter it came from LinkedIn whatever it came from I can actually go and look at it and I can say oh well that worked that didn’t work do more of that do less of that and if you’re interested in making landing pages like this I highly suggest it look I’m actually doing it but you can check it out go to the link in the description of YouTube and get started all right now back to MFM Sam do you do this wandering thing too like I’ve seen your process I feel like it’s kind of similar yeah I it’s you know I don’t want to sound uh like I’m sniffing my own farts but it’s a little bit of an art where like it’s I I feel like an artist a little bit where I I’m exploring a concept and then I it takes six months for some inspiration like I I I feel inspiration and then I have to wander to like like kind of hone in on the painting and the concept A little bit and it’s sort of like one of those things where you take a lot of showers and like you get different ideas or you go for a walk and you get a different idea for like six months until it’s like all right I think I’ve honed in this concept let’s move forward is that what you do yeah yeah that’s that’s really a big part of it it does feel like an art and not to again not to get stuffy about it like I’m not an artist I not but like we just we we we explore and we leave room to explore and the margins allow us to explore and being profitable allows us to explore not having uh investors allows us to explore not having a board allows us to like all these things allow us this Independence allows us to do the things we want to do the way we want to do them but at some point you know you you also don’t want to be um you know Reckless with with money and time and people at some point go this is just isn’t going anywhere let’s stop or so so we really do take our internal sort of motivation temperature a lot of it is wrapped on motivation like are we like pumped about this ises this feel good if so let’s keep doing this and then and then you finally kind of come into something so for example with hay briefly hey didn’t start out as an email service it started out actually as a rethink of highrise which is our CRM product which stopped developing years ago we still offered to existing customers but we don’t sell it anymore but we had this thought like what if we explore that again so we began to explore that and through that exploration we realized what we were doing was building this sort of email system that we wanted for all of our emails not just like business communication emails but like all of them and so we go ah you know that’s interesting this is actually like an email thing I remember bringing this idea to David I had been exploring it with one of my designers for a while and he’s like yeah that that is interesting like let’s see where this goes and so we started kind of hooking it up so we we did the UI first this is what we always do and showed them a bunch of UI and we started making it work like there’s there’s something here and you feel this pull of something here there’s a certain gravity to these ideas and it pulls you towards it and you keep going for a while and then at some point though you got to get serious and that’s when you begin to you know break this into six week chunks essentially of work or monthly chunks depending on it but you got to have some end to these things so you can get on to the next feature and the next feature and the next feature otherwise you’ll spend too much time trying to perfect just one thing yet a product has to do a lot more than just that so you kind of have to you got to time box these things in a sense well uh you said two things that I liked one you said one of your superpowers is focus uh sorry I was saying this about you um and what what you said was no is just saying no to one thing yes is saying no to a lot of things and I really love that no is just saying no to one thing but yes is saying no to like kind of the the whole future set of things because you’ve now taken up your mind chare and your talent your hands with with the thing you said yes to yeah no no is a very precise you know Precision instrument um because you get to evaluate a thing and say no to it and you have the whole spectrum of everything else that’s possible available to you at that point so uh I I think no is a great tool it’s very specific uh yes is a blunt force instrument that kind of dam damages a lot of things essentially now it might be worth it because that thing you choose to do might be the thing that you needed to do but it does force you to say no to a bunch of other opportunities and the longer you spend on that yes the more NOS you are throwing off and you don’t even realize it so I do think it’s very important to figure out what you’re doing and then you know why you’re doing it and then commit to doing it and then get it done in a reasonable period of time partially because you don’t know if it’s going to be any good or not I mean you might have a feeling but the Market’s going to tell you for sure so you want to get out of the market as soon as you can ultimately and then you’ll find out and then you can iterate from there so that’s kind of our general approach to things and we don’t make new products that often like we used to make them a lot like when we first launched we had Bas camp in 2004 backpack 2005 campfire 2006 high-rise 2000 we were making a new product every year and then we did a bunch of other things job boards and a whole bunch of other things now we you know we’ll make a new product once every handful of years but yeah in general we don’t say yes that often and when we do we we try to get it right so you mened the job board there’s an interesting story here so Andrew Wilkinson bought the job board you guys created we work remotely because you guys were really far ahead of trend on remote work and so you had we work remotely as a remote work job board you sold it to Andrew Wilkinson friend of the Pod he’s probably the most frequented guest on our podcast and that I want to ask you about this because for him it’s like he loves the story because it’s a great buy he bought it for really cheap and then now I don’t know what that thing does but let’s I think it’s something like 5 million a year profit comes off the job board I think it’s four it’s in his annual report you can kind of dial it down Okay so let’s say four let’s say four million of year profit and I wanted to ask you like for you guys is that a ah we wish we had kept it bad sale because it’s now a lot more profitable or is it no that was the right thing to do because it cleared us up to do other things how do you think about that that transaction well it’s easy to look back on it and make a different decision now the reason we sold that at the time was because we were selling off a bunch of stuff or consolidating to kind of go all in on on one thing on base camp essentially it’s kind of around that time we’ve since decided to make more things than just base camp so we’re kind of in a multi-product world again uh I think they got a very good deal let’s just say um and the thing that I will say bugs me about our decision about that is that that was the easiest money not the sale but the the product was the easiest money we built the job board in two weeks and it was generating at the time for us like 30 grand a month something like that with no work like literally clo next to nothing to do it was all you know self-service automated maybe there’s a customer service question here and there but like essentially nothing and uh I wish we still had that we could still launch another one like nothing says we couldn’t do it again we still work remotely. we still work remotely I think we do something different I have some ideas on that we might do something like that at some point I don’t really know but I would say it was a very good buy but now now I’m an investor in his company so I own a little tiny piece of that anyway on the other side you uh Jason what I think is cool is if I remember correctly you guys I think you started almost as an agency and then kind of like became a software company because you saw recurring problems and and you built that and I think it’s been something like 25 years and you’ve I don’t think that there’s any uh great resource out there that says your guys’ Revenue but it we it’s definitely tens of Millions who knows if it’s even north of 100 million but it’s a very big business you do Marketing in the sense of you have these really cool books uh rework is awesome and you’re a public figure and you blog a lot but if I’m listening to this from the outside I would think well it works because Jason and David were early and they kept at it for 25 years and that’s the reasons why they have such fat margins not just because they’re smart but it’s because they were early in in the game what would you say to that I think you’re right by the way as far as numbers we the only thing we’ve ever shared is that we generate tens of millions in annual profits because I don’t really care about Revenue numbers you can go broke generating as much revenu as you can imagine do you measure profit on a gap basis or do you do like uh uh non-gap where you just look at cash flow no it’s Gap okay it’s like net profit legit after everything right so we’re we we really we’re proud of that you know we’re really proud of that and we work hard at that um but I do think timing and luck uh have a lot to do with it and market conditions like could we launch this again today no we couldn’t um that’s fine too like who cares it doesn’t really matter right people ask that old time could you do it again no probably not who cares why why would I need to I don’t have to don’t have to like you you know you this is why this is one of the reasons why we’ve kept this business going for so long I don’t think lightning strikes that often um we’ve got a couple really really big hits we’ve done it the way we wanted to do it um we’ve got a lot of momentum we’re well known we’ve we’ve built this business our own way I would hate to give this up like selling this would be sad like i’ I’d lose something you could say well look at all the money I’d lose more than I’d make now that’s not to say that that couldn’t happen at some point down the road of course like a business is either going to die or be handed off or sold like it’s not going to last forever and ever and that could change next year I don’t even know right who knows but this is the whole we don’t plan I don’t really know what’s going to happen but right now it feel like a loss to sell the company so that’s why I’m actually frankly nervous about that I’m afraid of what I would I’m afraid of having nothing to do that I’d be good at uh I know I’m good at this I like doing this why would I want to stop you know uh is sort of how I look at it but yeah to your point I don’t I don’t take credit for being able to do this again and I think a lot of I mean you guys speak with a lot of entrepreneurs sometimes people hit it big twice sometimes um sometimes though those are more like s you know where like they’re in they’re in a a world where you can keep selling companies that don’t work as far as actually finding people who’ve started multiple businesses that have been profitable businesses and really successful businesses it’s not that common it’s really hard to do by the way that was my big fear so I sold my company and uh I had a guy sit down and talk to me and he said how many people do you know who have started too successful business and in my head I was like you man like I’m going to do it you know like I was angry I was angry and I was angry because I was afraid in reality and after I sold I dabbled in real estate and I failed and I was like I’m human I’m not like I’m not the man I did get you know there was some skill there was also a whole lot of luck involved in my exit and um I I I also had that fear and then after about six months I was like I got to do something I can’t just do nothing I I feel like a bum but it was a lot of starting things was rooted in fear and rooted in I don’t want to be lonely so I need to create something where I can hire people and be around them I hear that I also think you know like I’m turning 50 in a few weeks like I don’t have the stamina to start another business like and wait 20 years you know like I I just don’t I don’t have that like you know when I was 25 I could do it 35 I could do it I don’t want to do it anymore I want to keep this thing going until I don’t all in I think that we really uh like doing this we’ve got some new ideas the one stuff is really kind of injected us with some new ideas we’re about to start another product which will be a SAS product so we’re going to do SAS and and non-sas products again um and we’ll see what happens again we’ll see what happens and it could be this is the thing like it could be a year from now where I changed my mind I I don’t know really don’t know but I think David and I both like I think if we one of us decided to go uh we would have to sell the business because I don’t think that uh what either one of us would stick around one of my favorite stories is the story where um Mark Zuckerberg early on I think he’s like 21 years old or something and he gets an offer to sell Facebook for a billion dollars and The Story Goes he goes into the board meeting and he’s like yeah like you know we have to we technically have to discuss this got an offer from I think Yahoo to sell for a billion dollars obviously we’re not going to take it uh onto the next matter and then uh Peter teal and others were like hey hey Mark uh hey yo you know you’re gonna have like whatever $500 million if you did that maybe we should just chat about this for a second and they were like well let’s talk through and one of the things he said was like he’s like I but I like this business he’s like if I had the money what what would I go do I would just want to build a social network uh I think that’s the coolest thing I could do right now and I like the one I’ve got why would I want to go start over and try to build a new one totally and I loved that I don’t know how much of that story is true because you know there’s a lot of like lore but that’s okay uh still cool story have you guys did you guys ever have a moment where somebody comes to and it’s it’s an offer you have to discuss and like what what went down in that conversation um we’ve never been we’ve never allowed that to happen uh no one like I I get I still get a handful of emails every week from VCS or p PE firms like and I just say no like I have a I have a default just no so we don’t even have conversations um we did take some money from Jeff Bezos though back in uh 2006 six or seven six I think it was like a secondary thing so he he bought some shares from me and from David so that money went into our pockets and never went into the business no money’s ever gone into the business except customer revenues and we did that to take a little bit of risk off the table because in 2006 Bas Camp was 2 years old the product and we’re like this could be a fluke I don’t know what the hell is going to happen in this industry who knows when we could get wiped out tomorrow you know could we put a few million bucks in the bank each and just like take some of that risk off the table and and also give us some confidence to just go for it at that point because if it all went to hell we have something to show for it personally so we did that um Jeff uh Jeff found us because um a couple of his companies that he was invested in had used Bas camp um he saw me speak at a conference in San Diego in 2005 called ech I don’t know if that conference is still around anymore he was speaking I was speaking I think he liked what I had to say the way I was we were very different as we still are now but way back then way different in terms of like our point of view and the things we were saying and he likes those kind of companies what does that mean you more were you more harsh or or more what I was a young punk we’ll call it punk rock you were more pun punk rock more punk rock I love that they answer to this question is kind of actually that Jeff was a fan Jeff was a fan so he reached out that’s he was I mean Jeff was a fan like let’s just you know it’s anyway he was a fan he’s a fan of of of of you know people think differently about H to run a business as he thinks differently about how to run a business so so we just kind of chatted you know we we went to Seattle met him I didn’t really I knew this was like an investment opportunity for him because he wouldn’t just come he wouldn’t say come out and say hello but I didn’t go into it wanting to do that um but after a couple meetings we really liked him uh he’s very likable uh and and um we had a lot of admiration for him obviously for what he’s done and what he built at the time and who he was and how he did it and his whole story and the whole thing obviously I mean bezos’s Amazon amazing thing right So eventually we worked out some deal which was ridiculous was a ridiculous ridiculous deal and I can’t go into the specifics but um we barely had any Revenue at the time the valuation was stupid um he knew it was stupid he’s like put together something I need or like we don’t know he’s like put together something I need something so we put together something we share with him and we all had to laugh about it because it was ridiculous but like it had to be something where we could make something happen and um we’re like look we don’t want you to have any control we don’t want a board of directors um they had one provision which said something like in five or seven years they had some right to do something like um encourage us to do something that we might not have wanted to do like sell or go public or something but they didn’t have the power to I think push it through anyway it was just a suggestions Clause maybe that’s what they call it I don’t know it was very weak though it was a weak he didn’t want like he’s like I want you guys to do what you want to do he’s like I like long-term thinkers I’m like we’re in this forever we’re not in this to sell the business the whole thing he liked that so what what’s he like you go there to Seattle take us into the meeting when none of us will ever get to do that right especially Bezos back then by the way have you guys heard this story really quick uh it was the founder of root uh or it’s w t there’s this famous article oh wo yes where they go out to eat Jeff Bezos wants to buy this guy’s company and they go out to eat and Jeff Bezos is sitting they go to breakfast and Jeff Bezos orders potatoes with bacon and occup OC ocupas and he and the guy’s like why’d you order that that’s like a weird breakfast order and he goes you’re the octopus that I’m having for breakfast Bezos said when I look at the menu you’re the thing I don’t understand the thing I’ve never had and I must have breakfast ocupas and it was like the article tries to paint him as a weirdo but it doesn’t exactly give full context and so at least now we have someone here who’s also been in that in that situation that seems very Jeff um Jeff is probably the most optimistic person I’ve ever met and that was very clear from the start and I’d never been around someone who had that much optimism that was I mean clearly intelligent very intelligent but so but that made it with optimism is really powerful optimism about what about you about the world about his company what was he optim what do you remember he just comes in it’s it’s an aura of like can do this just positivity you know you’ve seen him he smiles a lot he laughs big you know he’s just he has a he has an enthusiasm about him that is um I would say like formed into an optimism that is unshakable and unbreakable is it like a like why not like for example I’ve met people I think what you’re describing and I went around them they like explain their new idea and they’re like it’s going to be this this and this and a lot of people default to like well you can’t do that but these people default to well why not this all makes sense like I’m G to do this and then I think this will happen and this why won’t that happen I think if you post something really unusual to Jeff he would just start laughing in a way like wow that is interesting like it’s all interesting to him that was my take and I remember we were showing him campfire which is our first chat group chat tool this way way you know back before slack and there wasn’t really something out there like this there was IRC but there was nothing really simple and we put it up on the screen I started talking to him about it because it wasn’t out yet and like 15 seconds in he just got the whole damn thing he just got it like he got it in a way where he got it more than we got it um and he for people are always curious like okay well you’re not going to sell the business how does he make any money on the investment well we’re in LLC so he’s a member he has units and every year he gets distributions and he’s made his money back many times over and he still owns you know his shares and we haven’t had to sell the business it’s been a great investment for him not like a massive exit but like it pays for a lot of things I’m sure it’s it’s real cash Jeff good news your net worth has gone up by 0.001% this year you can thank us for that what’s cool is like we don’t matter but when you talk to him it’s not that way yeah of he is genuinely curious and interested in what you have to say and I I’ve always respected that about him I love that description and by the way I’ve heard almost the same verbatim thing cuz Amazon bought twitch and I’ve asked em you know the CEO of twitch I was like what’s Jeff like because that was his for a while it was Andy jasse and then it was he would go meet with Jeff once a year when they would present the plan and he said the same things he was like when you’re in the room with him it’s like there’s nothing else that exists in the world like he’s fully engaged fully paying attention fully present and he’s like uh he’s having a good time he’s not like super super serious about everything he’s laughing and he’s curious and he asks questions and he mostly listens but then when he asks a question he almost always like has I like struck the heart of the issue and you’re like how did you he’s like dude I’ve worked on I run this business Em’s like I founded this business for 15 years ago I run it every single day you think about this for like one hour a year but in that hour you kind of put your finger on the right thing that fast that is impressive Sean I want to ask him you have on here about this this Elon quote so you talked about reading bezos’s book uh bezos’s book you actually had an interesting take on reading elon’s biography that I thought was intriguing I I I just think it’s I admire you Jason so it’s cool to see like who you admire and what your opinion is on different people who I may or may not admire by the way I think it’s not like this person but maybe an aspect of that person or a one way that that person does something not like this person’s good and other people are bad and all things they do are good or whatever right we’re all a lot of different things we are all a lot of different things can I read you the quote you had tweeted this out I thought this was pretty fascinating you said I’m inspired by the business side of elon’s biography there is one word that’s overused and I think inacurate in the book Reckless what seems like risky actually to me strikes me as risk reduction and then you said the following you said compared to traditional Corporate America Corporate America takes the riskier route it’s fear marginal decision-making complexity and I love this line you go mediocrity slathered in marketing and then you said uh mistakes come in all shapes and sizes but the ones that come from slow decisions committees that dilute responsibility sloppy cost controls and requiring pseudo certainty making a move those are the worst ones and Elon doesn’t make those but his critics often do his mistakes are real and and they have consequences but they’re rooted in Forward Motion I’m glad there’s someone who is out there unafraid of making those kinds of mistakes and showing us all what H what is possible when you pierce the membrane that holds most things back that’s that’s pretty good uh What made you feel that way I would say reading the book made me made me feel that way now of course it’s a story well it’s you know a biography but like it’s story there’s a perspective on it a point of view um a lot of the examples in the book are about um simplifying are about cutting out waste getting to the root of things figuring out like what really matters um not getting caught up in what other people think it should be uh and also not being caught up in things you can’t do and it was that impression and there’s a there’s a multitude of examples there’s one one of my favorite examples I might be miscoding this slightly but there’s this example of of uh there’s a rocket you know SpaceX rocket ready to go launch and they find like a crack in the in the skirt that surrounds one of the engines and I think again I’m gonna get this some of the details wrong but like if NASA had found that um there’s like a three Monon launch is scrapped multi-month delay rebuild the whole engine kind of that sort of thing so so there’s there’s a crack in in the skirt and and Elon hears about it they they stop the launch or something and Elon hears about it and uh he goes what’s the problem he goes there’s a cra in the skirt he goes um let’s get rid of the crack can we get rid of the crack and they go well if you get rid of the crack you’re going to lose some propulsion he goes okay how much propulsion are we going to lose they’re like this much he because we can lose that there’s enough margin here so let’s cut the crack out and go and that’s what they did and the launch was successful and it’s like the kind of question that nobody else would even think to ask like well what is the problem it’s a crack it’s not the engine it’s a crack let’s get rid of the crack can we get rid of the crack yes but how this way well that’s going to do this okay well what does that mean okay sure let’s do it so that might seem Reckless I think it was position or pitched almost as reckless in the book to me that’s like Common Sense fundamental smart problem solving and you think about all the other risks it saves and all the other things it prevents and the time that goes by and all the other things that can happen during that time they can go wrong I just see that as Brilliance um not as as as as recklessness so that’s my take on it so I know that you guys are on your website you’re uh you have a landing page for this product that I believe you descri I forget how you described it but it’s something like it’s a non-recurring software product because it’s like you want to take back users need to take back control of like their their wallets and not pay a company every single month they just could pay one time so that seems like that excites you and I want to hear more about that and you also alluded to you have like a few more products you want to launch what ideas and businesses are exciting to you at the moment sure so uh what you’re talking about is this thing called once which is more of an umbrella brand so once.com nc.com and it’s a one pager and people can read it the the fundamental idea behind once is that we think that people should be able to buy products again right now pretty much all software is a service it’s a rental you’re renting Serv you’re renting software in perpetuity and if you stop paying you lose it all like okay some Services make makes sense that are services but they’re also I think a large collection of products old school products so you’d buy and you’d own and it’s yours and you don’t have to keep paying for it we want to bring that back that’s how it used to be we think there’s some real advantages to that in certain areas in certain product categories and we think companies should have the option to spend money once and not a lot a few hundred bucks and own the thing and not only own the thing but get the code too so you can modify it and screw around with it as much as you want this is not something that has been happening for many many many many years we think it’s time to bring it back so we launched the first prodct which is campfire bringing back our old chat tool that sort of died on the vine to some degree although there’s still some customers using the original version but we don’t sell it anymore and uh campfire is installable software we built a whole new tech stack around this to allow people to we we you buy it on Shopify store it’s 299 bucks you buy it we send you an email with a single line that you paste into a terminal of a server so it’s there’s a little bit of technical knowledge required but like barely any I’m not technical I can do it I’ve done it on digital ocean I bought a a shared server and ran this one command and now you have a chat server running that you own it’s 299 bucks once unlimited users and it’s basically 90% of what like slack would do it’s the core stuff chatting DMS ad mentions sharing files it doesn’t have threads it doesn’t have video chat doesn’t it but it has the fundamentals of what this nugget of this idea is and the principle around this is that in any industry um generics eventually come in for for example there’s a lot of chat tools that exist in software today in in in in in the industry so they’re basically Commodities but they’re still priced like luxuries it’s it’s companies are running are spending tens of thousands of dollars a month on slack it’s our teams it’s obscene absolutely I SP I spend that it’s obscene yeah you’re um okay you get it right it’s a lot of money it’s a lot of money for basically chatting with your co-workers for the most part right um and it’s just like there should be a generic option essentially this is what happens in in all Industries when there’s a commodity or there’s a lot of product Commodities something becomes a commodity that becomes a generic at a much lower price we’re doing something at a high quality in a low price and changing the model around so anyway campfire is the first one working on a second one right now which I can’t talk about yet but it’s related to writing and uh maybe we’ll do another one or two and then see how the model looks in a year from now like are we early how’s it working so far it’s been working really really well with campfire we’ve sold hundreds of thousands of of dollars worth of campfire and in a few months um so we’re very happy with the start but we have to see if it sustains and how it goes and we’re going to add some more products to that category and see how that goes can we talk about this strategy you have where before you launch something you put up a page a big blue page with a founder letter yes and the founder letter is basically saying kind of what you just did which is uh things used to be a certain way they’ve changed it’s kind of obscene you know I get why they changed but now it’s gotten a little ridiculous don’t you think we’re going to change that we’re going to bring it back we think it we think life should be this way Common Sense logic don’t you agree and uh yeah we’re going to do it if you want to see if you want to be a part of that do this and actually this morning I saw something on Twitter that was kind of intering some guy announced his Venture round it was like we raised $16 million I’m like oh that’s interesting what is this and it’s this something called quilt and I go click this thing quilt and I’m like go to the website and it’s um it says some like blah blah blah AI jargon with an email sign with a signup form no dis no no tell me don’t tell me what it is don’t tell me why I should want it don’t tell me what it could do for me don’t tell me why you built this and what was your motivation just we raised a bunch of money give us your email and you’re on the list and we need to grow this list basically and I thought I can’t believe more people don’t copy what you do it’s so like this that’s how that’s how this podcast came to be Sean by the way we were talking about copywriting and we’re like man Jason’s the best at this yeah and you did this for hay and um I used to teach this thing called Power writing and I would teach them I would say one of the landing page variants that nobody’s T nobody’s doing is founder letter um there’s actually a company called Runway that did an amazing job of this I don’t know if you ever saw runway.com but uh this guy siki who’s a Serial founder was like the landing page was a long scrolling thing but it was basically just of dialogue and he’s like being a CEO is hard for a bunch of different reasons but one of the Annoying reasons that feels like it shouldn’t have been hard was that I kind of had no no grasp of the numbers of my business and that felt I felt stupid and I felt insecure about that and it was important but I just frankly didn’t know how to do it I didn’t know how to use these tools I wasn’t really ever taught it why don’t I know how many weeks of run why I have left why don’t I know this why don’t I know that and so I decided like I’m going to build a tool that’s a finance tool but it’s for Founders and he it as a letter and it was awesome and he got a bunch of people to sign up for it I think more people should be using this tactic and the reason why I think they don’t to be honest is because there is no reason to be building their product there is no intrinsic why there is no strong point of view that would get people behind it their product is either derivative or sort of mediocre or it’s just Trend following and so if they tried to write the letter there wouldn’t be much to say it’s not the writing that’s the hard part it’s the having a point of view that resonates with people that’s the hard part it’s the point of view so this is my favorite thing to do in the business business period and unfortunately I don’t get to do it that often because we don’t launch new things but I love writing a brief letter um and I I sweat every word and I just love it this is my like Bezos moment where I just smile and laugh while I’m while I’m doing this thing I just love finding the right Rhythm and the right rhyme and the right pattern and the right message and the right way to say it it’s super fun I don’t know why more people don’t do it but to your point I think there is something about like you have to have a point of view first of all and the thing is is that you can do with any product like any a novel product a commodity product you just have to like understand the angle that you’re taking although I don’t even I don’t like the term angles because it seems like it’s almost manipulative but what stick you need a stick yeah yeah you don’t like that I don’t know you need some flavor what do you want call he not going to like stick I understand I appre ex you’re right like that’s the category shtick also has these like negative connotations like it’s sort of like this game and manipulative thing maybe you don’t mean it that way and you probably don’t just like a flavor you just need Style Style I like Flavor I like style about it I like I like the point of view I to me it it cuts it it has a it has an edge that’s the kind of thing and I think first of all it’s very hard to do this not I’m not giving myself like credit like I can do a hard thing but it is hard to do this well I’ve always been inspired by people like you know Buffett and Bezos who write these amazing shareholder letters who are able to communicate very clearly um and and can do it in long form writing now this isn’t that long form it’s a it’s a page but I want to get excited about that I I want to read something and I want to be pulled through it and by the end feel like it wasn’t too long and just it said exactly what I needed to say and I’m left with some mystery so one of the things I like to do is you’ll see the first sentence on once is something like um something happened to business software now that is planting a question in people’s heads but it’s not a question I’m not asking a question I’m making a statement and now they’re like what do you mean right and now they’re bought in because they ask themselves the question like oh yeah what did so what do you mean something happened now they want to find out what happened and then I kind of go through it and that and all the way I’m thinking about how do I find resonance like how are are they nodding their heads when I’m nodding my head when I’m writing this thing like how do we get to that place we like yeah yeah yeah and you build up this yeah of course yeah you’re yeah uhhuh yeah and they’re like y why am I spending this much money on this thing like I should own this by now I think there’s a line like you should own this by now like bet Sam you’ve spent I don’t know how much you’ve spent on SL like you should own it by now come on right and and and it’s you know nothing against you right it’s like everyone who does this it’s like wow I mean how much money have I spent on this thing and I’m still spending the old the the metaphor that the SAS companies used initially was like just pay a couple bucks a month no big deal right pay as you go only pay for what you need but the problem is it’s it’s the renter and you reframed it as R right oh yes but you can get evicted yes but you don’t even own this thing yes but they can raise the hike up the rents anytime they want right and so reframing it as cool yeah but you’re you’re a renter and they’re the landlord and all your data is owned by them not you right he calls it the church the church of recurring Revenue Church of recurring Revenue so it’s done very well for a lot of followers and and and people who attend the Church of recuit but the thing is like some things make sense like this like a magazine or newspaper like this is kind of old school right but you pay subscription but you’d get something new literally every week day month whatever it was software I know it’s improving but it’s improving around the marginal edges you already have 90% of it on day one when you bought the damn thing and so you’re paying over and over and over and over for essentially the same thing and at some point if you’re paying a lot you should be like wow I should own this by now this is crazy um so I want to kind of make that point and get people excited and leave people with some mystery so there’s it’s not like the stal thing where there’s like we’re doing an AI thing you enter your email it’s like here’s a story it’s all legit but I’m still not going to tell you exactly what it is and uh then we kind of you know eventually deliver the product the simple test by the way is let’s say you did buy slack or whatever insert what your favorite product for one year and then they did all these overthe a updates and they they you know they added this they added that they tweaked this they fix this butt if they had just charged you for it one year and then you could buy V2 you know slack 2.0 or the 2024 version would you buy the upgrade like you know we used to buy Windows 95 and then you would you would hear you’re like oh man I heard whatever the next one Vista or whatever it is it’s got all this new stuff okay maybe it’s worth upgrading uh but like the reality is almost none of us would buy those UPG buy the next Edition because the upgrades are so marginal right they’re not like uh gamechanging but you’re char charge for it as you go as if those are such gamechanging updates yeah and like again some products like we have a few products like this hay sass tool base camp ass sass tool so we’re in that world too I totally get it um that said we don’t charge any of our customers more than $299 a month period flat so with base camp you can have 6,000 users it’s just 299 flat unlimited users at that point so we don’t offer the same thing where people could be spending 50 60 Grand or 10 grand or five grand or three grand a month with us like you can only spend $299 a month Max with Bas Camp so I don’t feel as guilty frankly selling something like that you know compared to company asking companies to spend tens of thousands I get it’s good for Revenue I get all that but man I wouldn’t feel comfortable or confident I I would feel like I’m ripping people off frankly so how do you deal with the counterargument which is you guys were first with with campfire before slack slack comes out kicks your butt becomes a 20 something billion dollar company exits and blah blah blah how do you deal with that well first off slack is it was an excellent product it still is an excellent product but at the time it was way better than campfire so we sort of let campfire kind of Wither um we we you know kind of didn’t Pioneer the idea I IRC was before us and there was Chat thing but like we kind of pioneered this version of it to some degree and we sort of let it sit and didn’t really make it much better slack came around and made a much better version of that idea so full credit to them for that I think another problem we had was that we were really early with campfire I remember when we launched campfire in 2006 I don’t know when slack launched I think it was like six years later or something like that I couldn’t get anyone to buy campfire people are like why in the would you use a chat tool like what like we’re all in the same office like just talk to people or whatever like I don’t even get it well we we we used to use like Gmail chat and then for a while hip hip chat which I hate hip chat yeah that was another one yep yeah but if for while Gmail you were on the edge though because a lot of people didn’t even like chat was like now everyone can’t imagine working with a it but like it was not a thing that companies used individuals Ed it a lot but companies it’s just this persistent chat room was just not a thing so because we were early on it we kind of didn’t think there was a future in it because it was selling okay but not that well and so we just didn’t pour more energy into it then Along Came slack I remember actually it’s interesting steuart Butterfield um sent me an email before they launched slack we were friends and he said hey just want let you know we’re launching this thing it’s competitive with campfire to some degree um we’re buddies I just want to like let you know you know like that’s cool I remember looking at it the first time and like my stomach dropped I’m like oh we’re dead or this thing is dead because it’s good and the thing that impressed me the most about it was the onboarding experience I think that in my opinion there’s two things of course the the bot integration stuff was really Innovative but the on boarding experience was so good where you basically talk to the chat and create your user account and stuff those it just took in my opinion those two things the chat itself isn’t Better or Worse chat is chat essentially onboarding and and and Bots were the thing and we didn’t have them and they crushed us so yeah that’s how I’d answer that question dude you’re um you’re cool to me because you’re like it all right so for the listener go to basecamp.com go to hey.com and once.com your landing page is like we’re internet dorks all three of us like we’re we’re talking about like crm’s like we’re talking about like something that’s not inherently like a punk rock thing but you have like a punk rock Vibe about you like if you look at your landing pages they’re all like kind of cool and they’re fun to read and you make non- cool things kind of cool it’s it’s yeah for me there’s a degree of like mining for novelty and recognizing like what’s interesting and what isn’t how people can look at something go oh man I never thought of that but of course like that’s what I’m always looking for I wrote this this post recently about towel bars and hooks I don’t know if either of you saw it but riveting R riveting concept you ready for this I’m not ready but I’m sure it’s great what is it so we’re doing a bathroom Innovation and and the designer the architect like do you guys want hooks in your bathroom or towel bars and for me the choice was like it was so obvious it’s like hooks hooks hooks I’m team hooks too in my house right and it’s like why well for I’ll give you a bunch of reasons first of all you can’t screw up a hook you can’t mount it wrong first of all um you can’t use it wrong um you can put other things besides towels on it um it doesn’t take up any space uh if you need to add a second one there’s room for that um and sometimes it’s nice to have like a two hooks a few inches apart and you can kind of spread a towel so it dries a little bit better um there’s just all these reasons and for me I’m always looking for the hooks in product design like what are the little things that just are so simple and straightforward and everyone knows how to use them and you can’t get it wrong you can’t use them wrong and actually you can use them in a bunch of different ways that weren’t intended and it still works compared to a towel bar it’s like the only thing you can use a towel bar for is to hang a towel or your nine-year-old will do a pull-up on it and tear It Off the Wall that’s the other thing you can do with a with a towel bar and and it takes a lot of space and like if you don’t put the towel on just right it slides off like you can use it wrong so easily it’s easier to use it wrong than it is use it right so that’s why I like Hooks and so I’m always looking for these analoges in other areas I don’t look at other software other software doesn’t really inspire me like a hook will inspire me a piece of architecture a a space land a tree Furniture Design print design I don’t know objects that’s the kind of stuff that I I look for motivation and inspiration in I think there’s a lot of really good ideas in there so that’s that’s where this stuff comes from and I’m like oh this is a hook and this is a hook and this is a hook and and anyway that’s kind of how I think about it one of my favorite things I did in my in the research for this because I’m always looking for in the research it’s like what what are the Big Ideas what are the important ideas but they’re not necessarily new to me and then what are the new ideas and one of the new ideas I thought you put out there was really great super nerd but we’re that’s where we are right now we’re in the nerd Zone which is really the place we should be all the time uh but you said when prototyping always try the wackier quirkier stuff first uh the deeper you go into a project the more conservative tends to get stranger ideas are more at home earlier in the process I love this this is so true I never heard anybody say this it’s something that if you embrace it you can actually you know Sam’s old company I think their only company culture thing was Let your freak flag fly it’s like that’s what you want to do in product design there’s also kind of good life advice too which is the weirder quirkier things are actually it’s easier to get away with them and do them when you’re in your early 20s versus when you’re 37 right like you tend to get more conservative it’s product development it’s life advice I thought that was brilliant thank you I I we really take this to heart and um the reason why is like for example I’ll take the calendar example again if you’re building a calendar and you think that there’s all these table Stakes features that you like you need to be on par first with Google Calendar like if you’re like you want people are going to buy this like if they’re going to use Google Calendar they’re going to expect Google Calendar Fidelity and functionality and then maybe we add a couple other things like no one’s going to buy your thing because Google Calendar is Google Calendar like why just make that other thing with a couple other things so we always start with the Novelties the things that don’t exist anywhere else that’s what makes your product differentiated that’s what makes it worth considering like to say like we made Google Calendar a a little bit better like not worth it but we made something totally different that it’s not just different because it’s different but we actually think there’s some Novelties here that matter that make sense that are radically different in good ways that’s what we pile on early and to the other point of that quote is that if you just wait till the end to try to add those Novelties you’ll never have enough time you’re always running out of time at the end and you’re never going to try new things you’re not going to have the tolerance or the the the uh the patience to to wander so then you end up leaving those things out and then you never get around to them because once you launch to the public the public then demands even more normal stuff know what the public doesn’t demand unusual things the public demands normal stuff it’s on you to find the unusual things the things they didn’t consider but once they see they go of course where’s this been my whole life that’s the kind of stuff base camp is packed with these things and hay is packed with these things and hey calendar is packed with these things and those who use those tools understand that those who don’t don’t know but they are packed with things you’re like oh my God where’s this been my whole life that’s amazing um by what do you do you guys pull out uh profits every years out of the LLC I like that you don’t reinvest it you basically get the benefit are you like a boring kind of like index funds and bonds guy like Sam is more on the conservative kind of uh side I’m more like that 820 index bonds life baby yeah I’m like the two sexiest words in the English language are like exotic instrument it’s like oh we got an exotic instrument for you I’m like tell me more and then I regret it later what do you what do you do sex what what’s an exotic what’s an exotic instrument it’s the thing that you’re uh you know lose money your shitty wealth advisor gives you to lose money it’s called an exotic instrument code I mean our exotic instrument is our own business that’s where most of our risk is tied up so so I’m more on on Sam’s tip here which is to be very conservative with with um Investments outside my business so primarily index funds I do invest in a few individual companies that I really know and really like and have liked for a long time I might even know the CEO I might have a good sense of who this company is and what they do I’m not jumping on the meme stocks that kind of thing right um I’ve an advisor I I’ve done some like other kinds of investing around like um some some PE deals and some stuff like that but primarily I’m pretty much straightforward index funds like play the the US economy longterm essentially and some maybe some other companies or countries economies but primarily us that’s my main thing I I also like so I do that and then I also like to spend money on things that I I enjoy and that my family enjoys um and but I’m not a I’m not a um I don’t what I don’t like to do is ever put myself at risk I don’t like to put my business at I’ll take risks but I don’t take risks that put me at risk that is not an interesting risk for me it seems like you value being able to sleep well at night it’s like I just want to be able to to sleep easy and not do anything that’s going to jeopardize that right like people ask in business all you you know what keeps you up at night and and typically the answer for most people is like some the competition am I going to be able to make payroll for me like what keeps me up at night when I am up at night because of work it’s excitement like I can’t wait to start working tomorrow on this thing that we’re working on it’s it’s not it’s not like because our our Mar it’s not like our margins are rais are thin and might not be able to make payroll or I’m focused on the competition hyperfocused so like they launched something new and oh my God what are we gonna do like that one slack moment I did have was was one of those moments that was years ago um I I just want to sleep well I don’t I stop work at five I don’t talk about work with my family at all we just don’t it’s just not a thing it’s a separate thing that I do during the day and I get excited about sometimes at night because I’m just excited about ideas um um but it’s also recognition David and I both practice this idea of like negative visualization basically like look we’ve been at this 25 years we’ve done exceptionally well we’ve been incredibly fortunate if this thing all Flames out in two years because of something we we did wrong a major Market shift competitive shift whatever it is you know what like that’s okay too it’s will be painful to some degree but like it’s okay if we if we have a 27-year run gez I mean what more can you ask for now people lose their jobs and it would suck I’m very certain many almost everyone who works here can get another job somewhere else very quickly um we would help people all those things I mean I don’t want this to happen but if it did we’d be okay this is not my identity this is not my life this is not something that needs to exist forever um I don’t want to feel that level of obligation to it as much as I have a lot of responsibility and feel obligated to our customers and to our employees and to the ideas that we have it’s not the whole world that’s just an important thing for me Sean and I are in similar positions uh where we have profitable businesses and a question that I’m trying to figure out is what percentage of the profit profits to pull out um versus reinvest do you have a framework for deciding like that percentage especially earlier on right maybe in year 27 the answer is different than in year three or two yeah so I can only tell you what we’ve done which is again a little bit unusual we pull out everything at the end of the year now first of all we’re an LLC so we’re tax on everything at a personal level so if I leave money in the business I’m still paying personal income tax on that money it doesn’t really make sense to do that so we have a recurring you know recurring Revenue model we have very predictable Revenue so we basically have a little bit of overlap you know we take some money out in quarterly distributions and there’s some money left over in January and we kind of wait till April to take it all out so there’s some overlap and they Opera in cash right when we were when I first started the business in 1999 we were an agency and we our first client it was it was uh four of us three Partners one sort of employee we each put 10 grand in so we had 30 grand uh to start the business um and then our first customer was was HP HP was like giving everyone business way back then HP was like the hot company to get a gig with because they paid a lot and I think the gig was a few hundred grand to do some website design for them this is 99 where people are paying numbers like that and um from that point on we were profitable because we only had a few people we didn’t take big salaries and that was that we were able to pull out all the money every year because actually we started out as a C Corp for like a couple years and then we switched to an LLC but regardless we pull out all the money um at the end of the year essentially uh and because we had ongoing client work that would sort of span the gap of the calendar year so we just always had money coming in and our costs were so low that we weren’t ever starving you know so it just it just was a situation where we always had high margins and that’s how I’ve always run the business so I I know it’s an unusual setup um but I do think it doesn’t have to be quite as unusual I think what ends up happening is companies hire too many people their payrolls are they have too many people on payroll they spend too much money on customer acquisition and their costs are really high so their margins are very low if there’s margins at all and then it’s very hard it’s much it just becomes a much harder business to run now again like there’s a lot of luck involved with this we happen to find a way somehow to have very very healthy margins over two decades part of that though is again the cost side of it which is just not considered enough do you run any paid ads no not right now we we have explored that we we played with it so here’s the thing like last year we’re like we’re g to spend five million bucks for the first time ever on like ads we started getting into it in a few months like we spent a bunch of money we’re like this is just it just it’s vanity money because like this isn’t doing anything for us now someone might say who’s listening go you got to give it more than three months and 6 months and eight months you got to do this for five years before you show returns and you got to try a bunch of campaigns we just don’t have the tolerance to spend that kind of money on something that isn’t very clearly going to return for us also our price points are so low our customer acquisition costs are tricky because a lot of our competitors they’re selling things for thousands and thousands a month we’re selling things for base camp is 15 bucks per user per month um or 299 unlimited like there’s not a lot of play here um to really invest a lot and spend a lot to to acquire a customer so it just doesn’t work for us so we don’t do anything not even branded keywords we occasionally do that if someone’s like using our our brand we kind of want to knock them out but essentially we just don’t it’s all through our own channels you know that we’ve developed over the years and there’s no question in my mind that there is a Formula that we don’t know that we could figure out at some point perhaps to grow the company in a big way somehow through through marketing advertising targeted whatevers we just don’t have the the TA the tolerance for it frankly I just don’t think that we’re interested enough in that kind of growth and the answer is always like why grow that much like if you’re trying to sell the company at some point like growth rates really matter but like for us sustainability matters profits matter margins matter I don’t want to eat into those for some future whatever it doesn’t really matter again like if we were to sell the business in a couple years and we got a 10x multiple or 5x multiple but could have had a 15x I don’t don’t it doesn’t matter to me it doesn’t matter to me to spend all that money trying to search for that I’d rather just take the money out and put it into Investments that I can basically gu not guarantee but like have a really good sense of return on and and just do our thing our own way dude you’re the man I think that if I had to make like a mount Rush mod uh a mount Rush M of this podcast like you know I think Sean opened it up by saying we love people who carve their own path and I don’t care if that person is an entrepreneur or an artist or or a mother like just someone who like just says this is the way I want the world to be and I’m going to live that way um I admire that greatly and the way that you write the way that you think you’re you’re kind of on my Mount Rushmore I really admire you and I’m incredibly I know we both are incredibly thankful that you uh spent some time with us you’re the man it’s very kind I I I love the show by the way I listen to it it’s great um and uh I really appreciate being here thanks for uh the time and the questions and happy to do it again anytime um I could go for hours with you guys if you ever want you have a uh you have uh an open invitation whenever you want to whenever you want well I’m not going to invite myself on I did this time actually kind of sort of so I will not do that again if you ever want to talk again I’m available let me know thanks for doing it Jason we appreciate you that’s the Pod thank you