Why Basecamp hasn’t added AI, and how Jason thinks about it

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All right, Jason. Uh, last time I checked, Base Cam hasn't added a single AI feature yet. And, uh, people like Jason Lumpkin are out there saying that that's the only way to survive in SAS and if you haven't added AI to your product yet, that you're already behind. So, how come Base Camp has not added AI features? Behind what? What are you already behind? The competition, Jason. Yeah, I would just say we're we're looking at some things that seem to make sense. And you know there's there was a rush of course in the early days to just add a bunch of stuff. Um and most of that stuff was summarization stuff. Most of that stuff was writing tools, things like that. You know, and you know what I think you're going to find is that a lot of that stuff is going to come to the OS level. I mean already in Mac OS you can

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there's a writing assistant. There's things you can do across tools. You don't need to have that built into your specific tool. So I think we've we've sort of sat and waited and watched and tried to figure out what would actually be useful. And I think for us the most useful thing is really querying uh asking your base camp account questions uh things that you can find out. And so we're exploring a bunch of things around that actually. Um and uh and and um I'm not going to say when something's going to happen, but it's going to happen when it's actually useful. I think there's just again a lot of people adding things and a lot of people chasing a ghost which is like well we have to have this because or else it's like or else what you know or else what I I think it's just fine not to have the things that you don't need. Um but when you do need something I think it's useful. So we'll see what happens here. Um we're

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exploring this first in fizzy which is a new product we're working on and then at some point u some of these ideas might make it to base camp. How do you not have FOMO? Because I mean most founders are doing this because of FOMO. Does that just come with success or how do you cultivate this mindset of let's just wait and sit on it? Well, I I mean FOMO is just uh it's it's it's not something that's ever really affected me personally. We like to make things that are useful and that work really well and are our sort of that need to be there that should be there. There's a million things we could be adding to Base Camp all the time that if we don't didn't have it, we'd be losing or like you can make a long list. AI is just one of those things people would say. But there's a long list of things and people have been saying this for 20 years. What we try to find is the right mix of things that are actually truly useful

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and build really good versions of those things and make those things part of the whole mix when it makes sense. And so FOMO is just not a thing that matters. I mean there there's been, you know, I think when you've been around for a while till you've seen all these trends come and go. You've seen lots of things that you had to have or the interface had to look like this or it had to work like this or it had to have, you know, for a long time it was like widgets and like card-based UI. There's just all these things that you have to have, you know, and um what you have to have is a product that works, is a product that's useful, is a product that's fairly priced, is great customer service, is reliability. Those are things you have to have. All the other things are subjective. And so we're always just trying to find the right mix and that's what we're up to. Do you guys use AI

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internally for like design, coding, stuff like that? Yeah, some of our programmers use it uh as an assistant essentially. Um but um just because it exists doesn't mean it needs to take over or be the only thing that matters. Again, it's a mix of things that matter and uh that's what we're up to. This is a question that that that was probably the most asked question across people is if you were and I know you talked about you don't want to start another company. Um but if you were to start a new company in 2025, they take away base camp from you, they take away hay, they take away your team, they take away your wealth, and you had to start a new company in 2025. I mean, you can take it in a million directions, but what would