Jason Fried

The only thing you can really control are your costs. You can't control the alternatives in the market. The competition, you can't control them. You can't determine the market itself. You can't control the economy.

Figure out how to do as much as they can on their own before they bring on a second person. Really work and struggle through something on your own. The moment you bring on someone else, you've got another mouth to feed.

The reason I think it's great for entrepreneurs to start bootstrapping is because they just have more practice making money, and they get better, and better, and better at the fundamental skill you need to have ultimately to run a successful business, which is to make money.

I am not driven by data, or I don't have different P&Ls for each product in a way where we're looking at them very carefully. It's in total, collectively, are we making more money than we spend? That's the only thing we ultimately look at.

This is a way to be. It's an alternative to what you're often hearing in our industry, which is, 'Go big or go home. Raise a bunch of money and get huge, and unicorn status,' and the whole thing. That's a way. Just know though that basically almost nobody makes it that way.

Small is not just a stepping stone, small is a great destination itself.

We build products with two people at a time. So every feature we work on in Basecamp, or HEY, or whatever we're building is two people, one programmer, one designer, and they have a maximum of six weeks to deliver the feature that they're working on.

You don't need to outdo the competition, it's expensive and defensive. Underdo your competition. We need more simplicity and clarity.

Give your intuition credit. Give your gut credit. It's absorbed everything. And plus the things that you don't know it absorbed that are valuable.

I think everything's a judgment call. And so yeah, data can play a part. All sorts of things can play a part, but unless you're letting a machine make the decision, that's purely rational. If you're asking a human to make it's a judgment call.

How does this feel? Is something we talk more about at work than pretty much anything else, which is like, how does this screen feel? How does this flow feel? How does this feature feel?

This is not an estimate of time, it's an appetite, which is a radically different approach. An estimate is like how long do we think it's going to take? We instead have appetites. Our appetite for any individual feature is no more than six weeks. Essentially that's our budget we're willing to spend.

Work expands to fill the time available. So for us it's about appetite.