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,