The philosophy behind Once

`1:26:36`

Yeah, sure. The first product we're going to be launching is basically an old product that we made way, way, way back when. So years and years and years ago, 2006, we launched a product called Campfire, which was- Oh, of course.... a group chat tool. How could you not remember Campfire? Well, some people are- Are younger.... 22 and they don't know, understandably so. But if you've been around, maybe you remember Campfire, which was a group chat tool, which is I think eight years before Slack came out or something like that. So it was really early and it was really hard to get people to even understand what this thing was, and a lot of people didn't get it. And then Slack came out, of course, and steamrolled it and really, really executed beautifully and did a great job. But chat has become a commodity.

`1:27:22`

There are a million ways to chat with people now, and in the business realm, they're all still quite expensive and they're all month to month to month. You got Slack, you got Teams, and you've got a few others and it's like, you know what... And there are some open-source alternatives, by the way, that are free or cheap. But we want to put something back out there. So we're going to relaunch Campfire under the Once brand. You'll pay for it once, you'll install on your own servers, and you'll run it. And it'll do 90% of the things that you want to do every day and these other chat tools and do them very, very well and very, very simply and very, very easily. And we think it's going to be really interesting. And by the way, the other thing we're thinking about with these Once products, which is interesting,

`1:28:07`

just get to this alternative point of view, is that these don't necessarily need to replace things. They can be in addition to. You might still run Slack at your company but you want to back up for when Slack goes down, or you want a special air-gapped chat for your executive team that cannot be leaked by another company where you're hosting data or having other people involved that might have access to it by accident. You can run things, you can have different tools doing similar things but for different groups in different contexts. Now, you probably wouldn't want to pay month to month to month to month to month for a backup system when something almost never goes down, but if you only have to pay for it once, it might be really... that's a good thing to have. That's an insurance policy to pay for it once and we just have it in our back pocket.

`1:28:53`

The other thing we're doing with Once product is that you get the code. And so if you're a product team and you're curious to see how this product was built, and we've gone to great lengths to make it exceptionally well-built for this purpose, this is a book, essentially, of how to build this kind of thing really, really, really well on the CSS on the HTML and the Ruby on Rails side, for example. So you'll get all the code and you can look at it and you can modify it, you can play with it and you can tweak it. You can't resell it. There's a certain licensing but it's yours. And so if you want to change the layout, go ahead. If you want to add some features, go ahead. If you want to mess around, go ahead, it's yours. And that's another thing that's really novel. You don't get that in subscription software. So there's a lot of things going on that we're trying.

`1:29:39`

There's some other really cool stuff. I'll tell you, one more quick thing about it is that we're trying to make this first prompt especially have as few words as possible, maybe 30 words. So we're picking tools that are... or picking categories that people already know how to use, and so we're trying to keep as many words out of this as possible so it's instantly essentially available for the entire world. It doesn't have to be localized. It's just like, it's universal software. We're trying to think about it this way. And when we do have a word, we're going to have a panel that shows that translation in a bunch of different languages. So it's not like you install this pack or that pack, it's like, you can hit this because different people in the world work in different countries. So we have people in different countries that work for us. I don't want to just have the Indian version because people in India might also have people

`1:30:27`

that work in Brazil and they need the Portuguese version. So you can see all the different languages for certain words when we use them, which is a really novel thing. We're kind of playing, this is the whole thing like, these tools give us a chance to play and explore new realms and new ideas that we couldn't do with SaaS. This is one of the things I'm getting back to the first question you asked me, I think, or maybe it wasn't the first, but this is why I'm excited again. There's some novelty again, there's some new explorations again. We're able to do things that we couldn't do in other places. So there's an excitement that's building around this creative exploration again, and that's really firing us up. It's clear how you're excited about this. You're saying how you thought you'd be happy just building Basecamp for the rest of your life, and clearly, there's a pull here, I'm going to try something totally new and different. Also, the domain is awesome, Once.com, right?

`1:31:13`

Yeah, that was fun. And we're still going to do Basecamp in here. So we're still doing SaaS. I still believe in SaaS. This is not going to replace SaaS but there should be an alternative. People should be able to buy what they need versus rent what they need. I think this is going to be an interesting experiment because this is how we started with software and then SaaS came and everyone loved this idea of, I don't have to worry about anything. I'm just going to pay you monthly and you take care of maintenance and hosting all that stuff and keep updating me with better features. So I think it'll be interesting to see if we've missed something leaving that world. One clarifying question, for updates, do you buy yearly, like a new Campfire every year, or how does that work if there's updates? So the plan is, is that let's say you buy Campfire 1.0, this is the way software used

`1:31:59`

to work. It's the same approach, which is like, you'll get all the 1.X updates for free. And you'll be able to decide if you want to update yours or not. So we'll say, hey, 1.1 is out and here are the new things and you get to decide if you want to download that and update yours or not. So you can stick with 1.0 if you want or you can skip a version, whatever you want to do. If when we get to version 2.0, there'd probably be... you'd probably have to buy it again, but we'd probably have a discounted upgrade rate. But that's like, you also totally optional. I don't know if we'll ever even get there. We might not need to. Have no clue. But we're leaving that door open that if there's a radically new version that we had to sink another six or eight months into or something, it feels right to say you'll need to upgrade.

`1:32:44`

Maybe you get half off because you're a previous customer or something like that. So we don't know but that's the plan. I think it's also important for people to remember your target is not to replace Slack at big tech companies, like your market is the Fortune 5 million as you described. First of all, we don't have a sales team, so it's self-service, it'll always be. If some big huge company says... they look at their bill, their Slack bill and they're going, we're paying 1.2 million a year for this? Wait, wait a second, I can pay less than 1,000 bucks once for this. Maybe that's worth having, or maybe even if we don't use it, it's absolutely worth buying because maybe we will use it, or maybe we can experiment with it in this place. One of the things we're trying to do here is find a price point and it's going to be under 1,000 bucks.

`1:33:30`

I won't tell you exactly where, but we're trying to find a price point where it's kind of becomes a no-brainer, like, you know what? We should buy this, we should have, this should be in our toolkit, and we should use this in certain parts of our business even if we don't replace this other thing, although we still might because we might find that as this group or these two groups or three groups that are using this are making exactly the same progress, why are we spending all this money elsewhere? So it's a bit of a Trojan horse, potentially. I don't know what's going to happen. No idea, but it's going to be pretty interesting. The other thing that's really cool about it, this is the tiniest market in the world, but because it doesn't go out to the internet, you can run it in truly air-gapped research facilities. There was a time way back in the day where the White House got in touch with us. This is when Obama was running and wanted to use Basecamp.

`1:34:18`

But they're like, we need to install it because we can't obviously host this stuff on your servers. I know, I totally get it. We can't do that, unfortunately. Sorry. But they have security needs that are just far beyond what most things allow, but this is the kind of thing where they can actually be completely detached from the public internet and run this kind of software, which is really interesting. Again, tiny market, not what we're building it for, but it's a cool byproduct or side effect, I should say, of running things this way. And then did you share when this might come out? I know you don't promise dates but is there something you want to share there or is it- Well, unfortunately, we promised. We said by the end of this year, that's why I was getting to that. But we said by the end of 2023, and we're almost there, here we are in December, so

`1:35:04`

mid-December, we're going to start to roll this out to the first batch of customers. It's probably not going to be available publicly to everyone in the world yet, but that'll come soon after. But the first batch of customers are going to get it and we'll slow-roll it out, figure out what we missed, what we need to tighten up and tweak. It's not really a beta as much as it's just a limited release, which is the smart way to do this, and then we'll open the doors very, very soon after that. Jason, you're breaking your own rule of not saying by end of the year. Apparently, I learned earlier that that's never works. Yeah, it's funny, we definitely said that and we said that six months ago and here we are, end of the year. It's happening. So maybe sometimes it works out. Yep. Before we get to our very exciting lighting round, is there anything else that you wanted