The philosophy behind Once

`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.