The speed at which a product is developed doesn't inherently make the product better or worse. The number of commits doesn't make the product better or worse. The number of people or agents working on it doesn't make it better or worse. The number of hours you’re pouring i...
A bespoke software revolution? I don't buy it.It'll exist. It already exists. Small consultants and big consulting firms have made custom software for years. It almost always sucks. It’s bloated, confusing, and because the client pays, it’s built in all the wrong ways.Who’...
A few weeks ago I sat down with David Senra (of the outstanding Founders podcast) to record an interview for his new podcast. It just came out yesterday.We talked for about two-and-a-half hours and hit on all sorts of topics including:
Build Products for Yourself
Low Cos...
The original Cuisinart was peak interface/appliance design.
Two perfect paddle buttons.
One for ON that catches and stays down for continual operation.
And one for PULSE/OFF that does exactly what it says. It doesn't stay down, it returns to reset when you let go. Hold it down as long as you want to pulse. Let go and it stops. Or just push it down to disengage ON, and turn it off.
The description may sound a bit convoluted because of the dual purpose PULSE/OFF button, but when you use it it's absolutely obvious. And couldn't be better.
Big flat toggle buttons under satisfying tension. Clear affordances. You push them down, not in. One click catches, one doesn't. You can use them with bare hands, oven mitts, fingers coated in slippery whatever. Doesn't matter. Plenty of surface area.
Outstanding design. It's all been downhill from there.
AI workflows are technically impressive, but there’s a deeper reason people are really amped about AI agents. This isn’t just new tech, it’s new psychology.
Until now, very few people have known what it feels like to delegate to total competency.
If you manage great people, or lead great teams, you know how it feels to put someone in charge who will get it done, get it done right, and get it done without drama. That kind of delegation — that depth of trust — is pure joy.
Delegating to competency lets you forget about it completely. That’s real leverage.
And now anyone can experience that. What was rare is now widely distributed. Everyone can feel it. And it feels fucking great. That’s a big reason why the excitement is real, and fully justified.
My folks are in town visiting us for a couple months so we rented them a house nearby.It’s new construction. No one has lived in it yet. It’s amped up with state of the art systems. You know, the ones with touchscreens of various sizes, IoT appliances, and interfaces that ...
Have you noticed that every issue and idea tracking tool you loved slowly morphed into boring, sluggish, corporate bloatware?Trello put on 40 pounds of cruft. Jira started charging by the migraine. Asana tried to become everything to everyone. GitHub Issues slipped into a ...
There are plenty of opportunities to invite people to your product ahead of the formal launch. Alpha, beta, etc.My preference is only right at the end. Typically a week or two before we go live. When the product is in the very last throes of beta, barely beta. Essentially ...
The Concept2 RowErg is one of the highest quality products I've ever used.Had one for years now, feels like it'll last another 100.Simple construction, durable materials, low maintenance. Comically easy to assemble. Tips up for storage, leaving a tiny footprint.The PM5 dis...
New products don’t need to be revolutionary, life-changing, or disruptive breakthroughs to succeed.
Entire categories can roll downhill, gathering complexity as they go. Each product one-upping the next until more becomes too much. The cycle feeds itself, never satiated. Competitors locked in a loop of mutual destruction through perpetual over-improvement.
When that happens, the door cracks open for something new.
The newcomer doesn’t have to meet the others where they are. It just has to feel right — like someone opened the curtains and let the sun back in. The type of product that lets people exhale and say, “finally!”
Not groundbreaking. Just grounded. Standing where everyone else forgot to.
In some cases, design is what something looks like.In other cases, design is how something works.But the most interesting designs to me are when design changes your behavior. Even the smallest details can change how someone interacts with something.Take the power reserve i...
A young entrepreneur in his mid-20s just emailed me asking for some advice.
He just sold a business and ended up with a couple million in liquid cash. He wanted to know if he should invest it, use it to build a new company, or do something else with it.
My advice wasn't what he was expecting.
I just said don't lose it. Do nothing with it. Put it in the bank. Something safe, earning a little, but not too much that it's at risk.
Money doesn't need to work. It can rest. Leave it be. You're 26 — you can get back to work.
A couple million liquid cash is a huge haul. Maintain! Don't lose. Always have that. And add more to that safe pile as you go. That's yours now. Keep it that way.
At its best, marketing is a transfer of enthusiasm.When you're truly pumped about what you're doing, when you're truly driven by the vision, when you absolutely must make something that you need and want, your enthusiasm leaves a mark. It's a brand. Not the noun, but the v...
One of the great privileges of owning an independent company is that you get to try all sorts of stuff no one else would ever give you permission to do.
And you get to greenlight other people's oddball ideas too. You can — and should — provide cover for weird attempts, strange ideas, and "I mean this will probably never work but..." stuff. Often!
If you are in this position, and you aren't helping unusual things happen, you're missing out on one of life's true pleasures.
Public companies worth billions can't do the kinds of things you can. Businesses that need to justify every move can't do the things you can.
Very few get to do this, and you can. So please make the universe happy and see if that weird, unusual, not-like-everyone-else idea catches fire.
From time to time we get criticized for making "yet another to-do list" product. Or a chat product. Or a messaging product. Or something we've kinda sorta already made before, just in a different form, combination, or approach. "How about something else? How about somethin...
There was a tiny fly right by the drain, and I was about to wash my hands.
Turning on the water would have sent it right down the hole. A quick end, or an eventual struggled drowning, hard to know. But that would be that, there was no getting out.
Somehow, for a moment, I slipped into contemplation. I could just turn on the water, I could rescue it, I could use a different sink. Had I not even seen the fly, the water would already been on, its invisible fate secured.
But in that moment of maybe, the fly launched and flew away.
Since it didn't know what I was about to do, and what that would do to it, it had absolutely no idea how lucky it was.
And then I wondered. How often am I in that same position? No idea how lucky I am.
"Years of experience" has been a gold standard hiring requirement since forever.
It's a terrible one.
Someone can do something for years and have nothing to show for it.
Seek people with "Years of evidence" instead.
People with deep examples of work. Piles of stuff they've made. An overflowing collection of output they're proud to share.
If someone's brand new in their formal career, they might have little traditional experience, but if someone's been loving this kind of work for a long time, there's a good chance they already have a collection of hobby projects or other literal examples of their work they can't wait to show off.
Titles, tenure, and paths don’t matter. The work does. Always look at the work. It's the truth.
When you encounter a simpler system, a simpler idea, or a simpler implementation, you have an opportunity.
You can say "it's not enough, it doesn't have, it wouldn't work". That’s the common reflexive response.
Or you can reflect. “What is it about how we work that prevents us from using such a simple, succinct system?” “How did we get so twisted, so tangled, so dependent on so much that we can’t seem to get anywhere otherwise?”
Depending on more can often mean being able to do less.
Whenever I write about our focus on cover letters during the hiring process, I'll inevitably receive the "cover letters are still a thing?" or "people still read cover letters?" response from a cadre of characters.Here's one from yesterday:https://x.com/amfonte/status/1924...
I don’t think much about legacy. Yours, mine, anyone’s really.Do the best you can right now. For now. Not for later. If it’s useful later, great. But that’s only because it starts out useful now.Legacy isn’t an artist who was ignored all their life until they died. That’s ...
When we make something new, people often ask "why don't you just add that to Basecamp?"There are a number of reasons, depending on what it is. But, broadly, making something brand new gives you latitude (and attitude) to explore new tech and design approaches.
It's the op...
Whenever I talk about working in real-time, making decisions as you go, figuring things out now rather than before, I get a question like this...
"If you don't have a backlog, or deep sets of prioritized, ranked items, how do you decide what to do next?"
My answer:  ...
Business isn’t something you learn in books. Or posts. Or threads.
You can’t read your way to the right hire.
You can't consume enough content to produce a product.
You have to do.
You learn business by doing business. Hiring by hiring. Products by building them.
We k...
One of the great lessons of nature: Randomness is the most beautiful thing.
Every forest, every field, every place untouched by humans is full of randomness. Nothing lines up, a million different shapes, sprouting seeds burst where the winds — or birds — randomly drop the...
In the end, judgment comes first. And that means hiring is a gut decision.As much science as people want to try to pour into the hiring process, art always floats to the top.This is especially true when hiring at the executive level. The people who make the final calls — t...
I'm republishing this for a friend who doesn't have a reliable place to publish this online.It's a letter she wrote and sent to a number of newspapers. Her family was a victim of the recent Franklin wildfire, and unlike other recent fires, the Franklin fire wasn't included...
Be curious about what's new, sure. That's expected.
But it's more interesting to be curious about what's old. What stood the test of time? What worked before and still works now? What survived through all the jabs that you assumed would knock it out, but didn't?
That's ...
Not too long ago, we dedicated a 6-week cycle to improving Basecamp's onboarding flows.The aim was to increase conversion from trial to paid by smoothing out the initial experience of getting going, doing a better job of quick-teaching the basics, and making a few things a...
Precision. Certainty. Specificity. Everyone wants to know exactly what and exactly when, and they want a statistic attached to corroborate it.But numbers are rarely answers — just as projects are rarely math problems.Where are we in this process exactly?How far along in th...
Make it happen!You hear it a lot. And it's generally good advice, of course. At least the 'happen' part.You definitely want things to happen. But often times, it's the 'make' part that gets confused for progress.You can push a ball uphill, but should you? Not only does it ...
