Jason Freed, welcome to the Andy Hackers podcast. Thank you for having me on. You probably don't need an

introduction for most of the people who listen to this podcast, but regardless, you are the founder

of Basecamp, formerly known as 37 Signals. You have over 100,000 paying customers. Is that right?

That is correct. Tens of millions of dollars and profit every year.

Basecamp was also the birthplace of Ruby on Rails,

one of the most popular programming frameworks of all time.

You've been working on the company for 20 years now,

and you're part of what I would call the original class of self-funded software businesses on the web.

And I would also wager that you've done more than pretty much anyone to inspire people to follow down the same path. At the very least, Andy hackers would not exist and not for you guys in your writing and you're speaking over the years. And that's probably true of many hundreds of thousands of other businesses too. So I'm sure you hear this all the time, Jason, but thank you. Well, my pleasure. I'm just trying to do the best we can.

It's pretty amazing that you can just get on the internet and share your thoughts, and thousands

of people who you've never heard of and who will never meet will literally make life-changing

decisions based on something that you wrote last Wednesday while you're eating a sandwich or something.

It's a little heavy, but yeah, hopefully.

It is.

And most of the time you don't even know they did that, right, unless they write you and tell you about it. But it's been a role that you played for the last 15 years. So I'm curious, what are some of the things that you've learned in that time about how to be effective, how to be persuasive when you're sharing your ideas with so many people? not to worry about being persuasive, basically.

I've never really tried to change anybody's mind. I should say maybe I used to try to do that. Maybe a better way to say is I used to try to do that, and I don't anymore. Back when we launched Basecamp in 2004, the concerns were things like, how do I know you're not looking at my data, and how do I know that I can trust software as a service and that kind of stuff, which of course, people don't

think about quite as much today. But back then they thought about that. And I remember trying

to convince people that, you know, well, it's safe and this. And like at some point, you just can't

convince anybody. And I just stopped trying instead I just communicate

try to communicate clearly and try to tell the truth as I see it and let the chips fall where

they may if you try too hard to change people's minds you're just going to end up frustrated so

that's the best advice I have if you want to be persuasive is just not to try you know a lot of

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