Jason Fried

A few times a week I get an email from someone asking if they can pick my brain for 15 minutes. I appreciate their interest in what I might have to share, but when it’s pitched as a brain pick they’re making it hard to say yes.

I’m all for giving back, and I try to do it as often as I can, but I wanted to extend three quick points of advice to people who ask to pick people’s brains.

1. Picking someone’s brain sounds like an entirely one-sided appeal. Give me what’s in your head. That’s a hard sell — especially when you are pitching someone who’s busy and occupied with trying to focus on their own business. Whenever you ask someone for something, always ask yourself what’s in it for them? What can you do to fill their brain rather than pick their brain? So, rather than pitching it as all-take, try pitching someone some give, too. “I’d love to ask you a few questions about X, Y, Z, and at the same time share some perspective I have on A, B, an C.” Everyone has perspective, everyone has experiences that are unique to them. The more you can suggest that it’s a give and take, and that the person you want to talk to could learn something from you too, the better the chance of lining up the opportunity.

2. There’s no such thing as a 15 minute call, or coffee, or meeting with someone you don’t really know. It takes 5 minutes just to say hello and warm up. It takes another 5 minutes just to begin to get into a conversation. And then you’re left with 5 minutes — which is never really enough time to have a substantive conversation (which is the kind of conversation you really want to have). So just be honest and set the expectation clearly, because surely the other person doesn’t believe you’ll only be taking 15 minutes of their time. Suggesting it’ll only take 15 minutes either says to me you’re being disingenuous, or you aren’t sure what you really want to talk about. “I was wondering if you might have a full hour for an in-depth conversation about this product problem I’m struggling with… It’s…” makes me take you more seriously. I still may not have an hour, but I know you understand what you’re asking for.

3. Offer to come to them. When you are pitching someone, and asking for their time, you want to make it as easy as possible for them. And one of the best ways is to offer to come to them. Don’t pick a lunch spot or a coffee shop. Don’t even suggest a time (“lunch” is a time, “coffee” is a time). First suggest that you are willing to come to them or meet them wherever and whenever they prefer. That shows you’re courteous, concerned with their time (when they don’t have to go anywhere they save travel time), and it shows you are willing to make more of an effort to make the meeting happen. “If it would be easier, I’d be happy to come to you or meet you wherever is most convenient for you”.

If you follow these three simple rules, I think you’ll increase your odds of landing a meeting with someone. The odds may still be slim, but at least you’re setting yourself up to show that you 1. know what’s in it for someone else (you’re asking but you also have something to offer in return), 2. respect the true time involved to have a substantive conversation (and that that’s what you want to have), and 3, that their location and time is easier for them (and if it’s not, they’ll tell you).

Hope this helps!

For years people have asked us how we work at Basecamp. We’ve shared our business and development philosophies in Getting Real, REWORK, and REMOTE, but we’ve never lifted the veil on our unusual work methods.

What does our day-to-day look like? How do we organize and manage work? How do we communicate across the company? How do teams coordinate? How do we gather ideas, consider feedback, break work into digestible chunks, build, and deliver?

This year we’re going to launch a new live-in-person workshop series called “How We Work”. But before that, we’re going to hold a pilot workshop — a test run — on Thursday, January 28th. The pilot workshop will run for 3 hours. This will be a back and forth — showing, questions, sharing, questions. We’ll set the tone, but the audience will determine the direction.

We’ll share everything behind the scenes. We’ll show you how we use Basecamp to run Basecamp. Everything will be exposed. After this workshop you’ll have a new perspective on how people can work together, how and when to communicate this way vs that way, and how keeping everything together in one place is the secret to a few small teams making some really big things.

None of this has been shared in an interactive setting like this before. The workshop will be held in the theater in our headquarters in Chicago, IL. Only 25 seats will be available, so don’t miss out: Buy your ticket here.

We look forward to seeing you on the 28th.

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UPDATE: The event has sold out. The plan is to do these often, and eventually make this material available online for anyone to watch. Stay tuned to our Twitter feed at twitter.com/basecamp for announcements of future events.

I’m often asked about the benefits we offer at Basecamp. Potential employees are obviously curious, but most of the questions I get are from fellow business owners and entrepreneurs. Everyone’s looking to know what everyone else is doing — as are we — so I figured I might as well post our current benefit list publicly.

Note: Since the majority of our staff works remotely, and some outside the US, some of these benefits are provided in different ways. For example, the 401k is only available in the US. We’re currently working on making sure everyone, no matter where they work, have commensurate benefits (or at least as similar as possible). We’re still working on this, so hopefully I can write more about how we’ve addressed this down the road.

Keep reading “Employee benefits at Basecamp”

Attend enough startup conferences or listen to enough motivational speakers and you’ll hear one piece of advice repeated over and over again: You’ve got to love what you do! If you don’t love what you do, you might as well stay home. No less a giant than Steve Jobs famously told Stanford’s 2005 graduating class, “The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.”

I don’t buy it.

There’s nothing wrong with loving what you do, of course — I just don’t think it’s a prerequisite for starting a business or building a fulfilling career, let alone doing great work. In fact, I think it’s disingenuous for really successful people to put so much of the focus on love, just as it’s disingenuous for really rich people to say money doesn’t matter. People tend to romanticize their own motivations and histories. They value what matters to them now, and forget what really mattered to them when they started. It’s human nature, so it’s an easy thing to do.

The way I see it, many great businesses and important innovations are actually born out of frustration or even hate. Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp, the co-founders of Uber, didn’t start their ride-sharing service because they loved transportation or logistics. They started it because they were pissed off that they couldn’t get a cab. Kalanick may love running Uber today, but he really hated not having a way to get home. A random brainstorming session one night in Paris turned that frustration into the seed of a multibillion-dollar company.

I talk to other entrepreneurs all the time, and many of their companies sprang into existence for similar reasons — because the founder wanted something that didn’t exist or scoped out an opportunity to do something better than it had been done before. Love for their subject matter may or may not play a role in their stories, but hate for the existing options, along with strong opinions about how things could work, does and is a much better predictor of success.

My own career is no exception. Back in the mid-’90s, I was looking for a simple tool to keep track of my music collection, and all of the available programs seemed bloated and unnecessarily complex. Those are two things I hate, so I set out to make my own tool and eventually released it under the name Audiofile. I didn’t love music collecting. I didn’t even love software development. (I was just learning it at the time.) And I didn’t have any aspirations to run a software business — I just saw a need, and I filled it. Nothing wrong with that. A similar situation led me to start my current company, Basecamp.

Truth be told, even today I don’t always love what I do. The paperwork, the reporting, the day-to-day minutiae that come along with responsibility for a large and growing company — none of those things make me swoon. Yet I’d still rather be running Basecamp than doing anything else. I think I’m good at it, every day I get to do challenging, creative work, and I continue to find making better project-management tools a worthy and rewarding cause. It’s also a real pleasure to work with such amazing people as I do every day of the week.

If I were giving a motivational speech, I’d say that, if you want to be successful and make a real contribution to the world, you have to be intrinsically motivated by the work you do, and you have to feel good about spending your days on it. Love might grow — and it’s a wonderful thing if it does — but you don’t need it up front. You can succeed just by wanting something to exist that doesn’t already.

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This piece was originally printed in the February 2014 issue of Inc Magazine. You can check out my monthly Inc column at Inc.com or on newsstands.

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And be sure to check out the all-new Basecamp 3 — something I absolutely loved building.

Happy 2016! We hope you had a great New Year’s Eve with family and friends. While it’s officially time to leave 2015 behind us, here’s a batch of Basecamp 3 updates from December:

• Adminland, the most boringly powerful section of Basecamp, gets an update! Top two requests fulfilled: Now you add new people to the account straight from here (without having to add them to a specific Basecamp first) and bulk change which Basecamp’s someone can see.
• We’ve added annual billing options to every Basecamp paid package. Prior to this annual was only available for the Basecamp Big (enterprise) package. Annual billing is great for those who have to expense Basecamp — a single bill once a year is so much simpler than a bill every month!
• Improved sorting of the My Assignments menu to group to-do lists by Basecamp. This is more predictable than the old random-order version, and eliminates a situation where the same Basecamp could be listed multiple times in different spots.

• You can now turn off the Clientside in a given Basecamp, without having to archive or delete the Basecamp. This way if you were just kicking the tires of the Clientside feature in a given Basecamp, you can keep using Basecamp with your team without having to involve a client.
• The Android app now features multi-account support. As more and more people set up additional Basecamp 3 accounts, it’s now a whole lot easier to quickly flip between accounts without ever having to sign out.

• Major improvements to sign-up and sign-in flows. We’re continuing to refine and improve these. There’s no reason they should ever be the slightest bit confusing. Sorry about that!
• Account owners can now add themselves to any Basecamp in their account. Before people could create Basecamps without the account owner knowing.
• Better handling of time zones on signup.
• Improved compatibility with keyboard control (tabbing through fields) and screen readers. We still have more improvements to make here, but this is a great batch of initial improvements.
• We now include the title of the first to-do list on the To-dos card. Previously, we suppressed the list title until a second list was added to the set. This was confusing because customers were adding lists but not seeing the titles, leading them to think the title had been removed for some reason.
• The schedule for sending the “David H. started chatting in All Basecamp” notifications has been changed. Before, we’d send one notification every 12 hours. This meant that busy Campfire chat rooms that never stopped being active just ran on this funny schedule of saying “David H. started chatting” every 12 hours, even though that room might have been active for a long time. Now we’ll only send the notification if a Campfire chat room has been quiet for at least 6 hours. If a chat room is busy 24/7, we won’t send any special notifications. The purpose is to draw attention to a fresh round of discussion after an extended silence.
• Live filtering of the Campfire menu so you can jump to any Campfire quickly.

• Fixed a bug where users who were removed from a Basecamp still received to-do completion notifications if they were the creator, assigned, or subscribed. Now if you’re not part of the Basecamp you won’t get any notifications from Basecamp.
• …and a variety of other fixes, tweaks, and improvements!

We’ve got some great Basecamp 3 stuff cooking for 2016. Just yesterday we started working on a variety of new projects — many of which we hope to have ready for you within the next 6 weeks or so!

Thanks again for using Basecamp 3! Loving everyone’s feedback so far! Keep it coming!

And if you haven’t tried Basecamp 3 yet, January is the perfect time. In fact, January happens to be our busiest month for signups. The start new year is the right time to get your work organized, get your team on the same page, and make some wonderful progress together!

First the idea hits.

Then I think about it some more and it takes a direction.

As I work through the direction, I’ll see another direction. Usually relatively similar, but different enough that it demands its own exploration.

As I dig in into the problem, more layers and possibilities reveal themselves. Sometimes they point in entirely different directions. Some seem like big possibilities, others seem smaller.

As I keep exploring, some more options emerge. Some independent of the ones I’ve already explored, but others branch off from an existing exploration.

As I keep sketching and thinking and mocking and working through variations and conditions in my head, on paper, or in code, a few strong possibilities take the lead. I begin to follow those.

One primary direction becomes the most obvious, but there are still variations on that idea.

As I dig into the variations, I realize they aren’t direct descendants of that primary direction. Instead they’re closely related offshoots, but smaller. They usually fade away.

And finally the solution becomes clear.

Then I check my thinking by going through the process again.

Where it goes from here depends on what it is, but hopefully at the end I’ve enjoyed figuring something out.

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Take a look at the culmination of a lot of ideas: The all-new Basecamp 3.

1. You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch what you’re doing, and you try to get the most for your money.
2. You can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I’m not so careful about the content of the present, but I’m very careful about the cost.
3. I can spend somebody else’s money on myself. And if I spend somebody else’s money on myself, then I’m sure going to have a good lunch!
4. I can spend somebody else’s money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get.

Working with people is messy — the more people, the messier it gets. There’s no way around that. And while you may know your own mess, finding something in someone else’s is quite a challenge.

So we wanted to make sure Basecamp 3 made it easy to find what you’re looking for, no matter what fragments of information you may have handy. We’ve got every angle covered — sometimes from multiple angles!

Let me play out a few real-world scenarios below and show you how Basecamp 3 makes it easy to find what you’re looking for — especially when you don’t know exactly what it is.

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“I know Jamie said something about that yesterday, but I don’t remember exactly how he said it or exactly where he said it.”

Ever happen to you? You know someone said something somewhere, but you can’t remember exactly what it was or where they said it? Unless you can rifle through your memory for a keyword, A standard keyword search isn’t very helpful here.

In Basecamp 3, just head into the “Find…” section, leave the keyword field blank, and just select “Comments” and then “Jamie Dihiansan” and hit “Go”. You’ll then get results showing everything Jamie commented on across every Basecamp you both have access to.

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“Someone told me Ann’s been doing some amazing QA work lately. I’d love to see what she’s been up to.”

I this case I’m not specifically looking for any one piece of content, or even anything specific — I’m just looking to find out where Ann’s been pitching in. It’s more about discovery than it is a traditional search.

So I’d jump into the Reports menu and select “What has someone been up to…”

Then type Ann…

And then I get the “Here’s what Ann Goliak has been up to” report that shows everything she’s done on Basecamp in reverse chronological order. Comments she’s made, to-dos she’s added or completed, files/images she’s shared, deadlines she’s posted, etc. If she’s done it, it’s on this report. And now I know what Ann’s been up to!

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“Where are those sketches Ryan posted?”

You know Ryan Singer’s been working on some concept lately, and he mentioned he shared some sketches in Basecamp. You don’t remember where or when exactly, only that they were sketches. Easy!

Head into the “I’m looking for an image or file…” search on the Find screen.

Then just type in Ryan Singer. Now, I could have also selected “PDFs”, or “Video” or “All files” from the “Images” menu, but since I knew they were sketches, and I wanted to filter everything else out, I just selected Images.

And now I see all the images Ryan has shared — no matter where they were shared (in a Campfire chat, in a message, in a document, attached to a to-do, attached to an event, it doesn’t matter). And there they are!

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“I have no idea who shared it, or where they shared it, or what they called it, but I know someone put that PDF I need up on Basecamp.”

This one happens all the time. You know it’s in Basecamp, you know it’s a PDF, you don’t know what it’s called, you aren’t even sure of what words to look for, you only know it was a PDF and you need it now! Easy!

From the same “I’m looking for an image or file…” search in the previous example, just select “PDF” and leave everything else as it is. Then hit Go.

You’ll get back a list of every PDF uploaded to Basecamp, most recent first. If you knew more info like who shared it, or which Basecamp it was in, or even a keyword, you could have entered that too to get more specific. But in a lot of cases you don’t know the specifics, you just know the generalities. Basecamp 3 has your covered.

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I don’t know what I’m looking for, I’m just looking.

This one sounds kinda silly, but it’s very real and very common. You want to jump into a Basecamp and just have a look around. You’re in a discovery mindset. What’s happened today? What happened yesterday? Who said what? What topics did the conversations revolve around? Was there new work added to do? Was anything completed? Anyone share any visual concept or ideas I might want to check out? Who knows! You only know that you want to know.

Basecamp 3 makes this super easy. For example, let’s say I wanted to see what’s been going on in Team OMG. “Team OMG” is our customer service’s Basecamp. I just visit their Basecamp and scroll down.

At the bottom of every Basecamp is a full history log of everything that ever happened in that Basecamp — all the way back to day one. It’s basically everything flatted by time — new/completed to-dos, discussions, files that were shared, new documents, schedule items, comments, answers to automatic check-in questions — they are all here organized by time.

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Now, on top of all this you can of course search by keyword. That’s the easy one. You can also filter your searches just to a specific Basecamp, a specific person, a specific kind of content (“just search the schedule”), etc. But I hope the examples above give you a sense of some of the other ways you can find what you need in Basecamp 3!

I’m often asked for advice. I’ve decided it’s time I give less of it. There are things I used to know that I just don’t know anymore. I should stop talking about those things — it’s unfair to anyone who’s listening.

If you want advice on product design, copywriting, reducing complexity, business strategy for a well-established small business, or building a team — happy to help. I know I can be valuable there because those are things I’m thinking about and working on every day. I’m current.

But if you want advice on how to start a new business, how to get your first customer, how to hire your first employee, or anything related to starting something brand new, I’m not your man. It’s been 16 years since I started my company. I just don’t remember what it’s like anymore. I’m out of touch.

Advice, like fruit, is best when it’s fresh. But advice quickly decays, and 16 year-old advice is bound to be radioactive. Sharing a life experience is one thing (grandparents are great at this — listen to them!), but advice is another thing. Don’t give advice about things you used to know. Just because you did something a long time ago doesn’t mean you’re qualified to talk about it today.

Think you’ll get a good answer from a 30 year old telling you what it’s like to be 15? Or a 20 year old remembering what it’s like to be 5? Shit, I’m 41 now, and all I remember about being 25 is that I wasn’t 26. How clearly do you really remember anything from 16 years ago? And how many of those memories are actually marred by time and current experiences? How many of those things really happened the way you recall them today?

If you want to know what it’s like to start a business, talk to someone who just successfully started one. If you want to know what it’s like to hire your first employee, talk to someone who just successfully hired theirs. If you want to know what it’s like to make an investment, talk to someone who just made a successful one.

While distance from the event itself can provide broader perspective, the closer you get to the event, the fresher the experience. If I want to know what something’s really like, I’d take a fresh recollection over a fuzzy memory. I think the same is true for advice.

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Advice I will give: If you’ve got work to do, and it involves other people too, then Basecamp 3 is for you. Check out the all-new Basecamp 3 for free.

I spent half of last week in New York, and the other half in Baltimore. But I only packed enough contact lenses for New York.

I wear daily wear lenses, so I have to replace my lenses every day. I usually over-pack lenses so I have at least twice as many as I’ll need, but this time, in a blurry rush to get out of the house on time, I forgot.

I realized this as I was nearing my last day’s supply. Shit!

So I called my optometrist back in Chicago to ask them if they could send my prescription to a local Lenscrafters in Baltimore so I could pick up a box when I arrived in town.

They looked up my prescription and discovered it had expired earlier this year. My prescription hadn’t changed in 5 years, but it had still technically expired so they couldn’t approve it, or send it. The answer was no. Definitively no. No sir. And that was the end of that. Policy ahead of flexibility for a customer in need. I get it, but I didn’t like it.

So what to do. Ultimately we decided to run over to a local Target. They have an eye clinic with walk-ins available. I could quickly get a new exam and then buy a box of lenses there. That would tide me over. Perfect!

So we hopped in the car, sped over to Target, and walked into the clinic.

It was empty, other than a fellow named Ron. He ran the clinic there that day. Ron had a very Wilford Brimley look about him. Friendly. Good sign! I could walk right in, put my face against the crazy contraption, read some letters, and get on with it.

I explained the situation to Ron, and he stopped me. He said “That’s ridiculous. There’s no reason to put you through the time and expense of a whole new exam just for a couple days worth of lenses. You’re stuck, let’s get you unstuck. Call your optometrist at home and put me on the phone with them.”

So I did.

Ron didn’t ask them to transfer the prescription. He just asked them to read it out loud. “What was Jason’s last prescription?” They told him. He said, “Got it, thanks!”.

Then he went into the back, pulled a few spare trial lenses, and handed them over with a smile. I asked if I owed him anything, he said no — but there’s a jar over here where you can pop a few bucks in for kids who can’t afford glasses. And that’s exactly what I did.

Ron is a very reasonable man. He considered the situation, considered the risk, and did the reasonable thing. He helped someone out who was stuck in a bind. He imagined what it would be like if he was in my shoes, and I was behind the desk instead. He’d want from me what I asked of him. That’s the best service you can ever give.

It made me think about our business. We should be Ron. We all should be more like Ron. Snap out of corporate policy mode, and act under the good neighbor code.

Business lessons are everywhere (I’ve written about that before). You don’t have to seek out famous mentors, attend expensive conferences, or worship the best minds in the industry. Just pay attention and observe everyday dealings between everyday people in everyday situations. School’s in session at every moment. The best lessons are experienced first hand.

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Are we like Ron? I sure hope so! Put us to the test and check out the all new Basecamp 3.