The success of 37signals

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Why spend a decade finding your people when you can meet them at Sidebar today? Jump the growing waitlist of thousands of leaders from top tech companies by visiting Sidebar.com/Lenny to learn more. That's Sidebar.com/ Lenny. Jason, thank you so much for being here, and welcome to the podcast. Thanks, Lenny. It's good to be here. It's really good to have you on. I have this new segment on the podcast that I call Contrarian Corner, and I have this feeling like this entire episode is going to be Contrarian Corner. I'm excited to dig into all kinds of stuff. I have so many questions I want to ask you. I thought it'd be good to just start with giving people who aren't that familiar with your story and 37signals, a sense of just how successful the business has been.

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I think people don't quite get the business you've built, and the scale you've built. So whatever you can share in terms of customers, profits, anything you are comfortable sharing, I'd love to give people... Especially things that might surprise people, just a sense of like, "Wow, this business is not what I imagined." We don't talk about things that don't really matter so much, like revenues don't really matter 'cause you can go broke generating a lot of money. But, we talk about profits. Historically, let's say over the past 10 years or so, we've been profitable every year for 24 years. But let's say over the last 10 years, we've been doing double-digit million dollar profits on an annual basis, which is really nice. We have about a 100,000 plus paying customers, so that's a rough number, and we've about currently 75 or so employees. So, a relatively small business in terms of the number of people who work here, big customer

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base, big profits, and that's how we like to keep it, and that's something that we've always focused on, versus a lot of these other metrics that I hear a lot, and usually there's acronyms attached to them, and of don't even know what they are, and I don't really care about them so much. We just want to make more money than we spend, have good healthy margins which allow us to experiment, and play, and not be afraid to do things that may not work, and just enjoy ourselves. So that's what we've been doing for almost 25 years. Next year will be our 25th year in business. Just following the same thread, the bet that companies are making, obviously going down the venture route, they're going to lose money for a long time so that they can make much, much more money in the future. So the idea there is, grow as fast as possible, as big as possible, and then we'll make money. You're a big advocate of not raising venture and bootstrapping.