The philosophy behind Once

`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