Staying Close to Customers

`0:27:53`

He paid attention to incentives. He realized they would, over time, just tell him what he wants to hear. And so, therefore, he was getting- — Of course. — his ass kissed all the time, not getting useful information. So, he's like, forget this. I don't want to talk to them. — Yeah. He had a driver, and they would drive on the streets, and he just says, "Every time you see a brown truck, brown UPS truck, you pull over," and he would just talk directly to the drivers. — Awesome. — He spent all his time- — Awesome. — talking to the person- — Yeah. That's doing the work. — that's actually doing the work for the customer. — They know the most. I don't think anybody is saying, "Jeff Bezos." I know he's a partner of yours. — Yeah. — Yeah. — He owns a percentage of your company. He railed about this forever. — Right. — And he made every single executive, you'd have to spend a day or a week or a month whatever it was- — On support or whatever. — on customer support. — Yeah. We do the same thing. We haven't done that for a bit, but we used to do that,

`0:28:39`

and we should do it again, actually. We used to have this thing called Everyone on Support, where people would do it for a day, rotate through the company. Mostly so I would do it, and so David would do it, and now I do it anyway. But it's very important. When I lived in Chicago, there was a grocery store down the street called Olivia's. There still is. And I got to know the owner. And I appreciated the fact that he got to know his customers personally, because they'd walk in the store, and he would say hello, right? That's how I got to know him. I don't, unfortunately, have that opportunity. We have hundreds of thousands of people who use our products, and it actually frustrates me that I don't know all of our customers. On the street, I could walk past 75 of our customers on a given day, and I wouldn't know that.

`0:29:25`

He would know because he would know who they are, and he knew their family, the whole thing. So, I've always tried as best I can to get as close to... I can't get as close to our customers. We have too many of them, in that sense. But whenever you sign up for Basecamp, the first thing you see is a letter from me with my email address, with my signature and my email address, and I want my customers to email me. I don't want to hide from anybody. There's no AI. There's no assistant. There's no levels between at all. Just write me, and people do all the time. And we have in our books as well, we have our email address in our books. I want to get as close as possible to the people who use the things that we make, not just to make them happy, because I want to make myself happy, too. We are the first customer of our products. But to understand what they're doing with them, to understand the language they use, how they describe them, who they are, I want to know these things.

`0:30:11`

Because somehow it permeates me, and I get to feel what it's like to be them, and get to understand what it's like for them to use the lever that we've made for them to move something. And there's no other way to do that for me than to just share my email address, because I don't get to meet people in person, like this guy who runs a grocery store. But I love businesses like that, people who... I love the dry cleaner who's been there for 40 years. I love the local grocery store. I just love businesses. Those, to me, are so much more interesting than the billion-dollar whatever. — Why? — That's a great question. I feel like they're more real. I like real things for whatever that means. Define it however you'd like, but a billion-dollar business or a 10-billion-dollar business,

`0:31:00`

it doesn't feel like a real thing to me. It feels like a concept. Meanwhile, the dry cleaner down the street, I can drop off my shirt, I get it cleaned, they bring it up, I pick it up from the person who owns the place. This is her living. This is what they do. There's something for me that I connect with, something that's real that I feel like I can hold in my head, I can understand. I keep coming back to this... Well, not keep, but I have already in this interview once. This idea of surface area and a business as an object. I want to be able to see the whole thing and understand the whole thing. A massive entity with tens of thousands of people and billions of dollars and whatever, I don't understand it, and that's maybe my own shortcoming or whatever. I don't really care. Again, I don't need to understand that. It's not my thing.

`0:31:45`

But I just prefer smaller businesses. Our customers are small business owners, and I don't care about enterprise customers. I don't want them. I like small, medium-sized businesses. They're more like me. I understand who they are. I understand what they do. I like that kind of stuff. — So, a business that can't be beyond a single person's comprehension, like you can understand... Dry cleaner's very... You gave this great story, I don't remember if it was in one of your books or not. There was like this... You have a love of craftsmanship that I get from your writing. — Sure. — And, yeah, there's a pizza place where it's like he will only sell- — Oh, yeah. Yeah. — is it the fresh dough? And he has no... — It's a sandwich place. — Okay, sandwich. Can you tell this? — When they ran out of bread... I don't know if they're in business anymore. — They're in Chicago. — Okay. — Vinnie's, I think, was the name of the place on Chicago Avenue, if anyone wants to look it up.

`0:32:31`

Sandwich place, subs, Italian joint, whatever. You go in, and they're open as long as they have bread. And they just sell out, and they're closed. That's it. They're done. — They're not making... — They could sell more. — That's anti-optimization. Yeah. — Yeah. They could, I'm sure, get more sacks of bread from the... It actually comes in a sack. Like the big baguettes or whatever. And they just run out, they're done, and maybe usually it's 2:30 or something. There's no hours on the door. They close when they close, when they're done for the day. There's something to me very poetic and beautiful about that, and again, enough. It comes back to this idea of there's enough in that. They're done for the day. It's enough. They sold enough. — But he does that because... — They could sell more, but then where do you stop? But this is the thing... — But it's the quality, though, right? Because then... — I mean, you're right.

`0:33:17`

It is the quality, too, but they could get more quality bread also. Okay, so where do you stop? Like, where does this end? Well, we could stay open till 6:30. I mean, 7:00, probably. We could do 7:30. Someone's still at the door, we could do 8:00. You could see how this doesn't end, and how a business like that could consume everything, and then you begin to not like it, because there's nothing else in your life but that. Then you're so attached to it. You can see how this could expand to that degree. I just think this idea of like, well, you're done at 2:30 is healthy. I think the business lasts longer because of that. I think if you think about... Like, you don't probably get bored of a business like that. There's something about that versus this idea of a business that you have to maximize and fully fill all your time, all your energy, everything, all the...

`0:34:06`

I can understand the appeal there for a while, but I also think there's something very just simply beautiful about enough. Now, I don't own that business. They might wish they had a lot more revenue and sold a lot more sandwiches. So, I also want to recognize the fact that I'm looking at this from the outside. I'm an objective observer. I don't know the realities of that business, but I'm just observing what I think is a beautiful thing, which is a business that's been around for a long time, family-owned, does enough business for them to support themselves and their employees, make great food for their customers. Isn't that what this is about? — Are you proud of how long that you've been able to stay in business? — I'm not proud of it. I didn't mean that in a negative way. It's like pride is not a...