Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
Jason Fried challenges your thinking on fundraising, goals, growth, and more
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The reason I think it's great for entrepreneurs to start bootstrappings because they just have more practice making money and they get better and better and better at the fundamental skill you need to have ultimately turn a successful business with just to make money. Hopefully I don't come off as encouraging everyone to be like me. I'm not saying that at all. What I am saying is this is a way to be. It's an alternative to what you're often hearing in our industry, which is like go big or go home, raise a bunch of money and get huge and unicorn status and the whole thing. It's a way, just know though that basically almost nobody makes it that way. Like really almost nobody really makes it that way and there's a lot more room to make it and to build a successful business if you throw out that outlier and look at all the other places you can land as a business. Today my guest is Jason Freed. Jason is the co-founder and CEO of 37 Signals, which makes Basecamp and Hay and soon a few more products including a competitor to Slack. 37 Signals is a very different type of company, they have no investors, no board, they have no plans to go public, they never want to sell their business, they've made a profit for 24 years in a row, they have over 100,000 customers and make tens of millions of dollars in profit each year, which most VC back companies never make a dollar of. In all of this profit filters down to the founders and employees because they have no investors. Most founders by default will go down the venture out raising money from VCs and angels and for many types of companies that is necessary but it's also important to know that there is a different option available and it can be much more fulfilling and fun and even much more lucrative by bootstrapping your idea. In my conversation with Jason we get into why constraints like small teams and less cash often lead to better outcomes, why gut and instinct is under appreciated as a decision making tool, why planning long term is often a mistake, why work doesn't have to feel like war, why we should focus on playing infinite games, when it makes sense to consider raising venture capital versus bootstrapping had actually bootstrapped your startup. So much more, Jason is fascinating and he's got a lot of wisdom to share, I'm excited to be able to bring you this conversation with that and bring you Jason freed after a short word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by KODA, you've heard me talk about how KODA is the dock that brings it all together and how can help your team run smoother and be more efficient. I know this first hand because KODA does that for me, I use KODA every day to wrangle my newsletter content calendar, my interview notes for podcasts and to coordinate my sponsors. More recently I actually wrote a whole post on how KODA's product team operates and within that post they shared a dozen templates that they use internally to run their product team, including managing a roadmap, their ok-out process, getting internal feedback and essentially their whole product development process is done within KODA. If your team's work is spread out across different documents and spreadsheets and a stack of workflow tools, that's why you need KODA. KODA puts data in one centralized location, regardless of format, eliminating roadblocks that can slow your team down. KODA allows your team to operate on the same information and collaborate in one place. Take advantage of this special limited time offer, just for startups. Sign up today at KODA.IO/Lenny and get a $1,000 startup credit on your first statement, that's COVA.IO/Lenny to sign up and get a startup credit of $1,000, KODA.IO/Lenny. This episode is brought to you by Side Bar.
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