Is ONCE enough?

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Tyler (00:00):
I think said this on Twitter, I think, but I

(00:02):
appreciate that 37signalsexists. I appreciate that, like,
some folks are out there thatthey have the even though you
often have to say, like, youlike, as you put it, Ian, like,
"you, random bootstrapper, donot have the, like, tools,
advantages, you know, recurringrevenue to to execute this."
Like, I'm glad they're doing it.You know? Like, sometimes it's

(00:24):
almost like, it's almost like anart project. Right? It's like a
commentary on the state of thesoftware business world, you
know, that I'm like, "I'm notgonna do that, but I'm glad
you're doing it!"

Justin (00:39):
Yeah!
We have assembled a panel heretoday. We've got Ian Landsman
and Tyler Tringas, and we'rehere to talk about the post-SaaS

(01:03):
world of Once only payments (buyonce). We are going talk a lot
about the launch of Campfire by37signals.
And, actually, Tyler, I'll startwith you because you had a
Twitter video where you weretalking through (maybe in

(01:24):
anticipation of the launch),what you thought might happen.
Could you describe, beforelaunch, what were some of your
thoughts leading up to it? Whatdid you expect to see from
37signals? And maybe was thereany expectation that this might
become a viable model for moreindies? What were your thoughts?

Tyler (01:48):
Yeah. I think it's I think it's super interesting. I
feel like the 37signals folksare like, you know, sometimes I
think of myself and and kind ofall of us a little bit. We're
kind of anthropologists ofthese, like, you know, Internet
SaaS entrepreneurs kind of,like, just observing the whole
sociology of what's going on.And they're so interesting in

(02:08):
the sense that they both, like,often have really good insights
about, like, undercurrents ofdemand, but then they also
create it themselves becausethey have such a big marketing
presence and stuff like that.
And so it's really interesting.Like, what I was trying to do
was to kind of, like, pickapart, like, okay. What are the
trends that I think they'rejust, like, picking up on? And

(02:32):
then also what are the thingsthat they are kind of, like,
creating within the ecosystemjust by virtue of the fact that
they are really successful.They've been in the game for a
long time, and they're, like,incredible marketers in a lot of
ways.

Justin (02:45):
I mean, what I appreciated about your kind of
thoughts, And I think a lot ofpeople had this. The question
was, you know, when 37 signalssays they're they're introducing
a new paradigm, whether it's,we're getting off the cloud or
whatever, It's not like that'sjust for 37 signals. There's
this other question, like, isthis for now everybody? Is this
a new trend in bootstrapping,indie hacking, startups where,

(03:10):
you know, all of a sudden, once,type products are going to
proliferate in our space. And alot of that's by design.
They are like a religion. Peoplefollow them, and then people
copy and emulate them – for goodand bad!
Ian, let's switch over to you. Ipulled up the transcript from

(03:34):
some of your old episodes withAaron Francis. You guys have a
podcast called Mostly Technicalthat's very good (people should
listen to it). And, Ian, youare, you know, you're known to
be a critic of 37 signals, andeven you We're thinking, man,
they're gonna send sell, like,10,000 copies of this because of

(03:55):
their audience. Like, you wereexpecting it to be big. Is that
right?

Ian (03:59):
Yeah. I guess I would frame it slightly differently. I I
would expect I expected them tosell a lot of copies because of,
like, what Tyler was saying.They have our humongous
audience. Right?
And nobody's ever seen DHHScode, like, literally for that
reason of, like, an app.Obviously, they've seen it in
Rails, but they've never seen anapp that he's built, how do you
handle notifications? How do youhandle when a user gets

(04:21):
deactivated? Like, all thesestupid little things. Like, what
does DHH do Yeah.
For those things. Right? And soI definitely thought they'd sell
a ton of copies, mostly becauseof that, not so much because I
think there's any actual demandfor people to run a Slack
competitor on their own, youknow, servers. So I definitely

(04:41):
thought, at least early, itwould be the type of thing that,
yeah, they'd sell thousands ofcopies because people are just
gonna want for for $300, wannasee what d h I almost bought it.
I don't know anything aboutrail.
Yeah. But, like, you know, it'slike, hey. Yeah. What does DHH
do? Like, he's a genius.
Right? I'm totally agree withthat. So, yeah, I did think that
they would sell a good chunk onjust for that reason.

Justin (05:04):
This is what's so fascinating is that there was
kind of 2 elements to this.There was okay. Is this a new
like, is this the new model forindie entrepreneurs, like,
everyone's gonna be having onceproducts. And then there's the
other side of this, which is,like, oh, they're gonna sell
just thousands of copies Just onthe curiosity level.

Ian (05:26):
Right.

Justin (05:27):
Just people wanting to see the code. You know, we all
know folks like Adam Wavin andTaylor Otwell Who have sold
things like this. And so I thinkpart of us you know, there's
some people that bought TailwindJust to see how, you know, how
does Steve Shoeger design thingsand how does Adam Wathan write
HTML and CSS.

Ian (05:48):
Right.

Justin (05:49):
And some people probably don't even use it! They're just,
like, looking at the code, andthat was interesting enough.
And, likewise, for some ofTaylor Otwell's stuff in the,
Laravel ecosystem. And they selllots of copies. Like , we've
seen the volume that they'vesold, and I think in our minds,

(06:11):
it's like, well, you know, 37signals that the audience is
just so much bigger.
So one of the reasons I thoughtwe we wanted to talk is because
there's A tweet that I don'tthink people are talking isn't
getting enough discussion, andthe reception to it was odd to
me. So, David Heinemeier Hanssenon Twitter, February 7th: "Once

(06:32):
Campfire hasn't even been forsale for a week, but we've
already sold more than a quarterof a million worth of
installable software. The futurelooks bright For a world of
software where not everythinghas to have a monthly
subscription." So a quarter ofa million is $250,000 sold in,
whatever it was, under a week.My first impression was: "that

(06:55):
doesn't seem like that much."
What about you guys? What wasyour your reaction to that?

Ian (07:01):
Yeah. I mean, it's 800 copies, which is not a lot not a
lot of copies. And, you know, Iguess one big distinction from
what Taylor and Adam have done,right, is that those are, first
of all, they're, like, developertools, not end user software.

Justin (07:13):
Yeah.

Ian (07:13):
And then also they are they have built in, like, demand
generation where, like so theTailwind CSS documentation is,
like, super number 1 ineverywhere in Google. Right? And
so people come in searching forthings about CSS, and they're
like, oh, they sell tailwind UI.Like, I don't have to do the
thing I was gonna do and buildall that.
I could just buy this for $300from Adam and boom. Like, that's

(07:36):
great. Whereas this isDifferent. Right? Like, they
haven't really built that up.
It's like they're gonna try todo the paradigm shift through
their force of will. But, like,if DHH stops talking about it,
that's kind of the end of themarketing. Right? So, or, you
know, if it becomes if itbecomes a self sustaining thing,
great. But if it doesn't,There's not really, like, a plan
b to the that that I can see.

(07:57):
Like, there's no SEO angle.There's no they're not
necessarily even cross sellingit. So Yeah. So I think that 800
copies given their size andreach is not a lot.

Tyler (08:08):
I I guess I agree. Yeah. I mean, I also had another
category of just sort of, like,you know, we're talking about
where we kind of expected, like,kind of, like, inorganic sales.
Right? Like, things that arenot, like, the true, actual
customer, you know, who isexactly what's being targeted.
I also thought that, like, justthe price point alone and given

(08:30):
that they're targeting Slack,you'd have a lot of people buy
it just to just to try it out.You know what I mean? In sense
that, like, you know, maybe I'mnot even sold on it, but for
$300, I'll buy it, install it,and see because we spend $40,000
a year on Slack. So it's like,you know, even if I try it and
throw it away, it's worth areworking it out. So I kind of

(08:51):
expected there to be, like, allsorts of random pockets of of
demand.
And yeah. I mean, I guess it'spretty low. I guess I haven't
it's it's less than I would haveguessed. I would have definitely
have guessed 1,000 in within aweek. Yeah.

Justin (09:05):
Yeah. And especially for that price point. I mean, people
were also guessing. They thoughtthey thought it would cost a1000
or 3000, and then when the pricecame out, that was 300. It was
like, oh, well, that seems youknow, that is a no brainer for
anyone who's interested.

Tyler (09:18):
Did any of us buy it? Did you buy it? No.

Justin (09:21):
No. There's people on my team that said, oh, my a friend
bought it and showed me thecode. So maybe there's some of
that going on too. Like, Thatwas the

Ian (09:28):
People stealing the code. They're in the they're in the
streets where I spent my wholecareer. They're in the streets.
People are stealing your shitand sharing it. DHH.
That's what's going on.

Justin (09:38):
They're just they're getting robbed.

Ian (09:42):
Yes. They are.

Justin (09:43):
I mean, the there's a there's a couple different ways
we could go here. I think peopleare gonna want us to talk about
was this marketed well, was thispositioned well. I I think the
other thing to to just alsoemphasize is that, this idea of
once. I mean, this has beenaround for a long, long time.
Right.
And even from the original basecamp, I remember, like, an old

(10:06):
old hacker news thread wheresomeone had built an open source
version of Basecamp that youcould deploy yourself.

Ian (10:13):
Mhmm.

Justin (10:14):
And at the time, as an ardent 37 signals fanboy, I was,
like, defending them in thecomments saying, well, look at
this. You know, this is notgonna affect 37 signals at all.
You know, these open source hoston your own, options don't you
know, they don't. People wantSAS mostly for the customer
support and just to not have toworry about all the upgrades and

(10:37):
everything else. But this is nota new model.
I mean, statamic is

Ian (10:41):
a It's the original model.

Justin (10:43):
Yes. The original model. Yes.

Ian (10:44):
Right? It's, like, from the eighties. Like, you sell
software one time. And, like,maybe when I do version 2, like,
I'll sell it to you, and maybeyou get a discount because you
bought version 1 or whatever.Like, that's the original model
of selling software.
This is it.

Tyler (10:58):
Yeah. Yeah. Ian, what do you think about that? You
mentioned, like, you're, like,oh, surprised, like, people are
are stealing it. What do youthink about I think, like, you
probably know more than any ofus about, like, technically, how
would so maybe that explains,like, the folks who just wanna
see the code.
Maybe, like, one Right. Some,like, threw it up on a GitHub
repo, and everyone's looking atit in saving a $300, but, like,

(11:19):
what are the options here for ifthat is, like, a big problem and
explains, you know, a lot of thenonsales like, what can they do
about that? Beside I just readthe license just kinda says,
like, don't do it. Right? But,like, practically speaking, had

Ian (11:34):
That's, like, pretty much it. I mean, you can do more.
This all stems from a coreproblem, which is that they're I
mean, I guess if they're justbuilding software for developers
to see DHH's code, that's acertain thing. Right? But I
assume that's not really Whatthey're trying to do.
And according to the ones.comhomepage, it's not what they're
trying to do. But the ones.comhomepage is extremely sort of

(11:57):
It's just wrong about a lot ofthings in the market. Mhmm. And
so I mean, just just so peoplewho don't know, like, I've sold
an on premise help deskapplication for 20 years. It's a
similar to conceptually to this,right, where it's like a b to b
piece of software and peopleinstall it, and you give it to
their end users to perform somekind of function, whether that's

(12:20):
chat.
In my case, that's customersupport. Right? So, Yeah. So in
terms of stealing it, there'snothing you can do. The way the
way you get around stealing itis that what people really want
is the support kind of likeJustin said there, and, like,
that's a huge part of it.
Like, they want every release.They when you when they come to
you for support, you can checkto make sure they actually have
bought a license. And you prettymuch just don't care about the

(12:41):
people stealing it because,like, they're not customers
anyway, they weren't gonna buyit anyway, and you kinda move on
with your life. Like, you couldplay the there is, you know,
stuff you can to do and have itcall home and blah blah. But,
like, in the end, it tends tonot be worth the hassle of
implementing all that becausethere's nothing you can do
anyway, Especially on, like, a$300 piece of software.
It's not like, you know, a$100,000 piece of software.

(13:03):
Maybe I'm gonna try to suesomebody or whatever. It's like
There's nothing I'm gonna doabout this, so I just I'm gonna
ride that out.

Justin (13:09):
Well, let's get it. I I think the other thing the other
way you solve that problem isvolume. Right. So I'm sure lots
of people are stealing TailwindUI, but, Adam and company are
just getting so much volume thatit really doesn't matter. It's
just whoever's stealing it,there's just enough, people in
the pipeline that want it andwill pay for it, You know, in

(13:31):
the same way, you know, that, Imean, other things work this way
too.
There's always gonna be apercentage of folks that steal
it, but if you've got enoughpeople that are actively waking
up every day and paying for it,then it doesn't matter.

Ian (13:44):
And most people wanna pay. Like, it's just like the music
industry. Right? Like, the musicindustry made music Cheap enough
that people stop stealing it.Like, I'm sure Napster still
exists or whatever.
Right? There's probablysomewhere you can go and
download music As m p threes, Ihave no idea. Right?

Justin (13:58):
Yeah.

Ian (13:58):
But I don't nobody does because it's like, well, for $5
a month, I just get all themusic ever made, and I don't
have to, like, get hacked or getweird versions or all that
stuff. They just solved it bylining up the demand and the the
pricing right and That, youknow, it's that, like There's

Justin (14:14):
also an argument that some piracy is good. Like

Ian (14:17):
Sure.

Justin (14:17):
My 18 year old may or may not be Pirating a well known
software by a company named,runs with Abobi. But,
eventually, you know, people whopirate when they're teenagers,
For example, graduate, get jobs,and then ask their boss to buy a
license. And I my guess isactually that paid off for

(14:38):
Adobe. I think, it's ended upbeing better for them that, you
know, people pirate their stuffwhen they're poor and in
college.

Ian (14:46):
Well, it's a whole that's a whole theory behind, like, how
Microsoft Part of why theybecame dominant in, like, the
eighties nineties was because,like, everybody got word at
work. Everybody brought wordhome and used word at home from
their, like, Essentially stolenwork copy, and that was, like,
part of what drove the, like,well, if I buy a Windows
computer, I don't have to buy,like, software for it. Like, I
can bring my software from workhome and, like, that was all

(15:09):
part of that where they crushedeverybody there for a period of
time.

Justin (15:13):
Eventually, everyone you know, somewhere around 30 when
you've got kids And you're justtired of pirating stuff. You're
just like, okay. We're justpaying for stuff at home, at
work, wherever. The the tireddad thing goes in, and it's
like, okay. We're just payingfor cable.
Goddamn

Ian (15:29):
it. Yeah.

Justin (15:30):
Let's let's get into your theory, Ian, why why what
did they get wrong about onespecially on the once.com
homepage? What do you what doyou kinda think they got wrong
about, buy once, install, hostyourself.

Ian (15:45):
How many IT managers do you think they've actually talked
to? Not like software developerswho do some DevOps, But, like,
somebody down in the dungeon ofIT at a college. Right? Like, I
don't think they've talked tomany. Maybe none.
Right? And so, like, the one liewe don't have to go through the
whole website, but I feel likethe one line purposely
encapsulates it, which is IT ITdepartments are hungry to run

(16:07):
their own IT again, Tired ofbeing subvert subservient to Big
Tex rain clouds. And I justlike, literally, All of that is
completely wrong. Like, it'sjust wrong. Like, there's no
like, you could parse it.
You could I mean, I've talked toliterally thousands of IT
managers, and I've sold to themfor 20 years, and I've watched

(16:28):
as they all started on premise,and every single one of them was
like, you You have to have acloud version. We have to leave
your platform if you don't cloudversion. Okay. So we built the
cloud version. Right?
We did that all the way throughto today when now it's, like,
maybe 20% of our sales orProbably less honestly is on
premise in terms of new sales.Mhmm. And it's like, yeah, there
are reasons to be on premise.Like, Chase Manhattan just had a

(16:51):
thing, right, where they have60,000 IT people managing their
security and okay. Great.
Like, you're a bank. You wannarun your own security. You have
a lot of regulatory reasons todo that. Yeah. We have bank
customers.
They have huge IT departmentsthat run physical servers and
manage them and great. Fine.Yes. They want on premise
software. Totally great.

(17:12):
But the vast majority of ITmanager don't want it,
especially for something like anend user app. That's like
something they're not dealingwith. They don't wanna be
responsible for it. They wannafocus on their network security,
on the physical security, ondevice security. Like, they're
not Like, oh, man, Slack that wepay.
And, again, even, like, thestuff that comes up with, oh,
$100,000 for Slack, whatever,most people are pay not paying

(17:35):
off of Slack. Right? You'repaying a $100, $200, $500,
$1,000. Yeah. Like, at $1,000let's say you have $1,000 a
month for Slack.
If I'm gonna switch it with theon premise version, like, I
gotta have a server. I gottahave somebody responsible for it
247365. Because if it goes down,I'm gonna be the one who gets
yelled at. Right? If the CEO istrying to Slack somebody, and my

(17:59):
homegrown Slack thing by DHH isdown.

Justin (18:01):
Yeah.

Ian (18:02):
Well, now I'm in trouble. Right now, this is this is my
problem. Yeah. And why did I doit? And what's my answer for why
did I do it?
Well, we saved $10,000 a year.Yeah. That's a shitty answer.
Nobody wants to hear thatanswer. Right?
That's not a good answer. Andso, you know, it's just not
real. And then even the thecloud, Like, even the things
they're doing, IT managers aremoving away from physical

(18:24):
servers. They're still going tocloud services. Right?
Even the things that are onpremise are We now have an Azure
cluster of 70 servers or a 1000servers or whatever it is.
Right? Like so it's just Youknow, I do think there is some
stuff out there where, like,architectural things, there's
some demand for on premisethat's switched. Like, you wanna
run Elasticsearch And you wantit deployed into your network

(18:48):
and things like that. I thinkthere's some demand for that
kind of stuff, but It's it's andeven those even those, when you
see those, they're still fullymanaged by those companies.
Yeah. So, like, single Thor,Elasticsearch. Like, yes, you
can have them deployed in yourVPC on AWS, but you are not
responsible for any of it. Allthat's getting you is, like,
basically networking. So it's inyour network.

(19:10):
Some of them maybe give youaccess to the server. Some
definitely don't. They are theThe vendor is still, like,
performing all the securityupdates, managing the system,
all that stuff. Like, the ITmanagers are not doing that
stuff. So That's just why I feellike their whole premise was
like, this sounds like a goodidea.
People are tired of paying forSaaS, which I don't even believe

(19:30):
is true. And but let's just sayyou think that and I just think
it's a faulty that there's ahuge demand by IT departments to
get rid of an app that Onaverage, it's probably, like, a
$200 a month cost for theaverage install and, like, for
very little upside and a lot ofrisk. I just don't think that's
That's true, many more.

Justin (19:51):
Ian, while you were talking, you were just bringing
back waves of past trauma Forme, where I convinced my boss to
let me install replace our phonesystem With an on premise PBX
open source software, put putthe computer in a closet, and I

(20:12):
will manage it for are

Ian (20:14):
both there. 365 days a year. I think it was wrong.

Justin (20:18):
Just a nightmare. Just it turns out there was a open
security vulnerability I didn'tknow about. This thing just got
hit by denial of serviceattacks, brought down our whole
phone system, constantly had tohire some, You know, some guy
that knew how to fix it, and ittook him all day. It was just a
nightmare. And every time thephones didn't work, I was I got

(20:42):
called.

Ian (20:43):
That's you. You made that call to save a $1,000 or
whatever it was. Right? And,like well, that's the thing. I
mean, even that whole premiseof, like, it's never been Easier
to run a server.
Like, yes. Asterisk. Like,that's true. Mhmm. You can spin
up a server, and it is spun upin a relatively secure state.
Totally agree compared to, like,10 years ago. But the risks have

(21:05):
also never been higher. There'smore people trying to hack
everything in automated fashionsthan ever before. Mhmm. And if
they get into your network andthey ransomware your whole, you
know, site like, Again, well,why did we go with this on
premise thing that we have tomanage and be responsible for
and have security updates forand all this stuff?
And your answer is, well, wesaved $99 a month. Like Yeah.

(21:28):
That's not an answer anybodywants to hear when you're gun
getting ransomware for$3,000,000. Right? Like, that's
the trade off there is horrible.
And so it just you know, I Idon't I don't know.

Justin (21:39):
That that is a modern Seinfeld episode. Seinfeld.

Ian (21:42):
Lorenzo. Or no.

Justin (21:43):
Costanza. Costanza.

Ian (21:45):
Costanza. Get in here. They're in the system. They're
in the system.

Tyler (21:50):
I wondered as you were talking so so I think we should
talk about some of the thingsthat that once gets right. So I
think I wanna put a pin that weshould come back to that. But
but while we're on the topic, Ido think, like, I wondered, you
know, so this is not a pure ABtest. Right? So what we have is
this theory of once with theidea of pay once and run on your

(22:13):
own server, but it's actuallythe test is Campfire, which is
this very specific, very sort ofopinionated minimalist kind of
product.
And I wonder, a, just, like, howmuch of each of those things is
actually playing out and andthen b, so, like, how much of it

(22:33):
is people do or don't want onceas an idea, and how much of it
is people do or don't wantCampfire? And then I wonder if
there's, like, a bit of amismatch between those two
things. Like, to the extent thatthere are people who think
that's a good trade off, youknow, because they're like,
well, I know how to manageservers, like, in my sleep, and
I already managed 6 of them. Sowhat's one more? And Mhmm.

(22:55):
I do wanna make those tradeoffs, maybe they don't want a
sort of, like, fairly minimalistchat tool. Maybe that's the the
kind of people who are, like, Ihave 16 workflows set up within
Slack. I like my automations. Ilike that. You know, like, I
like, the thing about Basecampthat I think is magical was
this, like, really tightalignment with this use case

(23:17):
from the get go, which was,like, clients trying to like,
agencies trying to onboard theirnontechnical clients and giving
them just, like, the the mostapproachable doesn't need any
sort of explanation.
You're just in there. You'reusing the software. It's super
intuitive.

Ian (23:32):
Mhmm.

Tyler (23:32):
This feels maybe a little bit out of sync where it's kind
of like the person who would bepretty psyched on this, you
know, is maybe not that psychedon how stripped down Campfire
is, and they actually preferDiscord or Slack or something
like that. I don't know. Maybethat's a factor here.

Justin (23:51):
Oh, for I think I think for sure.

Ian (23:53):
Yeah. I think because to me, here's the thing. It's like
my beef as it were, which is,like, beef is a strong word.
Right? But I feel like, Youknow, they are great marketers,
and their inclination is we mustbe revolutionizing the whole
like, this is a revolution.
Whatever we're doing, it's arevolution. Right? And I think
if you just if it was not therevolution, but instead it was
like, hey. This is a cool toolfor a particular set of use

(24:15):
cases. Some of which make a lotof sense.
Like, obviously, a big onepeople you see complain about
all the time is, like, I have acommunity, and Slack does wanna
charge me Sensibly, a$1,000,000,000 because there's
20,000 people in my community,and there's no free version.
There's no way for me to dothat. Right? Whatever fun. So,
Yes.
That's great. Like, it's acommunity. It's low stakes. It's

(24:36):
kind of nobody's evenresponsible for it. Have a
server running with it.
It's not like even in acorporate network or anything.
Right? This is just like a thingthat's out there. You're running
the community. It's cheap.
It's easy. Yeah. It makes totalsense for that. And I think Then
in that world, I mean, I thinkthe product seems fine, and then
it comes down to, like, theproduct itself, like you're
saying, Tyler, where maybe thenis it Is it too stripped down?

Tyler (24:59):
I almost still feel like a cheaper SaaS version will be
better though for for, like,what you just described. You
know what I mean? Like, if it'smore if it's really going after,
like, if the actual laser focustarget are these communities for
whom Slack is completelymisaligned. Right? We've all
seen these communities whereit's, like, 6,000 customers in
Slack will charge you $1,000,000a year.
And you're just like, no, youknow, I, I don't know that there

(25:23):
would be a very high overlapbetween wanting to manage our
own servers, like, I think I'drather just have, like I'd
rather pay for Campfire SaaS ifI'm that person, and I'd rather
be, you know, like, a $150 ayear, you know, that I just
click and sign up for it andit's campfire. I don't know. It
still feels like that line.Like, it doesn't seem like any
properly lines up as, like, areally good fit between target

(25:46):
market and the offering. I don'tknow.

Ian (25:48):
Because then you are still tied down to, like, still devs.
Right? Like, this is really justfor devs like, maybe a dev who
runs a community or whatever,but you have to have a dev
involved because, like, you needsomebody to run the server. I
mean, I do think in the end,they'll probably have Some type
of, like, resellers who justhost it for people because
otherwise, like, I don't thinkit's gonna sell much of anything
at all without that. Like,people just want that.

(26:09):
That's what people want. And soYeah.

Justin (26:11):
Let's I I think we should get to that in a second.
But I I think there is amisalignment even in that use
case, Which is the thing aboutrunning a community, and I've
run MegaMaker since 2014, is,we've tried switching to all
sorts of We started on Campfireand then moved to WordPress p 2,
which is a hosted installyourself thing, and then moved

(26:33):
to Mighty Networks. And then Butyou know what wins is having
your chat in the app thateverybody in your your type of
people all

Ian (26:41):
have network effects.

Justin (26:43):
And so Yeah. Yeah. For most people, for most community
members, there's a misalignmentthere too, which is, like Right.
If you're gonna use chat andyou're actually gonna have an
active chat, You wanna use thechat that most people in your
world are used to using, andthat's gonna be Slack, Discord,
Facebook chat, Telegram there's,like, a list of things that

(27:06):
exist before some self hostedwebsite That you need to
remember to open up every day.That is just the the friction
there is so much higher.
There's all sorts of ways to doproduct development. And, you
know, Basecamp has proven thatthey can build products that
lots of people buy. But one oftheir philosophies that I

(27:27):
disagree with is that you can'tdo pre validation. So I would
agree with them that Until youput it for sale and put it up,
you don't really know. But thereis customer research you could
do beforehand, like Interviewinga bunch of IT managers and and
saying, like, here's what we'rethinking, and you'll get you'll
know very quickly, whetherthey're interested in your thing

(27:51):
or not.
This is the premise behind thebook, the mom test, which is you
can go out, ask potentialcustomers good questions that
aren't leading questions. Andyou could even ask them, like,
Tell us about your experienceswith on prem software. Tell us
what your your company's,attitude is towards on prem

(28:12):
software these days.

Ian (28:13):
On prem software you added in the last 2 years.

Justin (28:16):
Yeah.

Ian (28:16):
Or and versus how much have you gotten rid of? Right? Like
And

Justin (28:18):
talk about the whole experience. Talk about the time
you installed that PBX phonesystem. How'd that work out,
Justin? You know, like, there'sthere's you can do this kind of
research beforehand. And, again,there's all sorts of ways to do
product development.
And I'm not saying theirapproach is bad or good, but I
I've always disagreed with thatidea that you can't do some
beforehand. You won't reallyknow until you put it up for

(28:41):
sale, but you can do somebeforehand. You can see who is
already in motion and who'sproving that with their actions.
You know, are they activelybuying this kind of thing? Will
they actively switch?
Hey, Justin. You've run acommunity since 2,014. What have
you tried? Would you ever switchoff Slack? I get those messages
all the time, and I say, we'renot switching off Slack.

(29:04):
It's just it's where people are.I we've we've tried it 5 times.
We're done. You know?

Ian (29:09):
This is one of the things where I think it's unfortunate
that people sometimes justfollow them mindlessly because
They're in a very different thisis where a lot of their advice
to me is unfortunate sometimesbecause they are coming at such
a different place with, like, ahuge audience, And it's just
impossible to not be influencedby that. And it's like, yeah,
we're gonna try this on premisething, and we're gonna put some
devs on it for 3 months orwhatever. And who care like, I

(29:32):
don't wanna do all that boringstuff Justin just said. Right?
Like, I don't wanna talk to abunch of IT managers.
Like, I'm gonna put it out. And,again, I've done this for 20
years, and I'm get bored atTimes of having sold the same
product for 20 years. And soit's like, yeah, I just wanna
build a new product, and I'vedone that. And I put it out
there, and I've seen if itworked. And that's more fun than
Doing a bunch of productresearch and talking to people

(29:55):
and aggregating and whatever.
Right? So fine. So do that. Butthat doesn't mean it's
necessarily if you have one shotAnd you're starting up something
with your own money or you got alittle bit of money from
somewhere and, like, should youstart an on premise app? Like,
Not unless you have a very, verygood reason, like, to to do
that.
So, yeah, I think that's alittle bit

Justin (30:17):
I've been surprised that, how many folks, at least
in the Twitter, indiebootstrapping community are
saying, oh, no. This is asuccess. And I think I mean,
this may or may not be a successfor Jason and David. We don't
really know their truemotivations. I think they had
bigger aspirations for this.

(30:38):
I think they want this paradigmto win. I think they want it to
work. And, this this kind ofvolume we've seen for Campfire,
if this is true, unless they'vesold a lot more copies since DHH
tweeted, this is not The kind ofvolume a company like 37 signals
would say is a success. But thisis also not the kind of volume

(31:00):
that even an indie person, Ithink, Should think is a
success. Like, nothing has beenproven or disproven here.
If we're looking if we'resaying, oh, 37 signals is
introducing this new paradigm. Ishould it for my next business.
I don't think we have a goodcase study here anyway. You
know? Like, we have these theseguys that have an enormous
audience That are, I'd say,pretty good at PR who were on

(31:23):
every big podcast, you know,This Week in Tech and Lenny's
podcast, and, you know, they hadenough exposure For this ahead
of time

Ian (31:30):
But millions and millions of people heard

Justin (31:32):
about this. And so in that sense, it's like, woah.
This is not the response I wouldhave expected from that kind of
PR. And if you're just a littleindie, you know, and these
things often happen to be verylaunch Centric, you make most of
your money in the 1st week or 2.

Tyler (31:50):
Do we think that's gonna be true? I was just thinking
about that. Like, will you know,are we, extrapolating a lot
from, you know, other one timesale products, like, like info
products and stuff like that.You know, just based on nothing,
pure guess, like, would we thinkthat, you know, the curve of
campfire sales is gonna look alot like course or something

(32:13):
where it's just, like, prettymuch, like, the first two weeks
is, like, 80 to 90% of yourentire lifetime sales, or, you
know, what do we think aboutthat?

Justin (32:23):
I mean, it could

Ian (32:23):
I mean, I I would think yes. Again, this is just from my
experience of selling an onpremise product, like, they are
not doing the things you wouldotherwise do. Mhmm. So, like,
there's they are presenting itlike that type of course where,
like, I'm gonna do a huge blitz,And that's that's kinda what I'm
doing. And, DHH, I'm gonna talkabout it for a week or 2, and

(32:45):
that's what we're doing.
Like, I mean, the ones.com hasno pages. Right? Like, there's
no pages on ones.com. There's nothere's no one there's no
campfire versus Slack page.There's no anything trying to
get SEO optimized.
They obviously don't theyhaven't said anything, and I
very much assume they don't havea sales team who's gonna go
approach corporate clients andbe like, hey, ditch this $50,000

(33:07):
a year Slack for our 2.99product because, obviously,
those economics don't make anysense if you're selling a 2.9
product.

Justin (33:13):
They often cited, Shopify as, like, Shopify's use
case. Like, Shopify is spendingwhatever on Slack. I don't think
Shopify has switched to thiscampfire thing.

Ian (33:22):
We're not switching. There's zero by chance. I mean,
just the other thing is, like,everything else aside everything
else aside, You're an I justimagine you're an IT manager.
Right? You have all these peopleyou're responsible for.
You have the system securityresponsible for all this
responsibility. Okay. You'regonna take over the chat system.
You wanna be responsible for itin house. You go to the Campfire

(33:44):
page.
It tells you the support is barebones only support. That's,
like, literally the words theyuse is bare bones support. Like,
That's just not intriguingoption to me. Like so you're
saying when something goes wrongand if it's complicated more
then I had a problem, like,installing it on a clean brand
new system that you basicallyaren't gonna help me. Like,

(34:06):
maybe that's true.
Now DHH has tried to hedge it alittle on Twitter, I saw, and,
like, Under promise overdeliver, I guess, fine. But I
just feel like that's likeagain, do I are IT managers
following DHH? I don't think SoMhmm. So it's like, when I go to
the web page, what the web pageis selling me is bare bone
support. Mhmm.
Again, not a compelling, youknow, offering, really.

Justin (34:29):
What I was surprised about is that they did not have
a auto deploy with Heroku badgeon this thing right away, like,
just simple click, a bunch ofhosting partners. They often
they cited WordPress as one ofthe examples of you know,
WordPress has been doing thisforever. Well, if you've been
following WordPress' story OrWordPress

Ian (34:50):
Right. It's all the hosting.

Justin (34:51):
CPanel. As soon as you they got installed in cPanel,
and there was a one click deployIn every hosting provider in the
world, that's how WordPress wonthat's the distribution you want
in that game, if you want, youknow, lots of people to be
installing it.

Ian (35:09):
And even now with WordPress, I feel like that's
true of the, like, Free opensource WordPress, but if you are
running your commercial websiteon WordPress, like, you're not
even doing that.

Justin (35:19):
Yeah.

Ian (35:19):
You're going to WP Engine. You're going to WordPress calm
Mhmm. You're going to pantheon.Like, there's a million
obviously of these, like,dedicated WordPress hosts that
that they SaaSify WordPress foryou. Yeah.
Right? They take care ofsecurity. They take care of
updates. You don't have to thinkabout it. That's what they do.
And so, yeah, I mean, that wouldmake sense. That would then, of
course, defeat the purpose of,like, the full court press into,

(35:41):
like, run it yourself. Don'ttrust anybody else. Don't use
anybody else. You can do it onyour own.
If they roll out a bunch ofresellers with it and a bunch of
hosting partners, like, theyThey should have just built it
as a SaaS probably and run itthemselves.

Tyler (35:52):
Has anyone built that? Have you see because I feel like
you you could build one clickdeployed, managed hosting
Campfire. My sense is you buyone copy of the code yourself.
You basically have that firedup, and then you just tell
people go buy a license to giveus your license key. You know,
you could probably spend thatbusiness No.

Ian (36:11):
It's it's Against the license specifically that you
can't host it.

Tyler (36:15):
I don't think so. I think you're not allowed to resell it,
but I think it is.

Ian (36:19):
It says hosting too. Yeah.

Tyler (36:20):
Oh, really? That's interesting.

Ian (36:22):
Mhmm.

Tyler (36:22):
Okay. It's

Ian (36:22):
in the FAQ. I mean, that's something I think I think
they're gonna change that prettyquickly because I think Yeah.
They're just gonna have to.

Tyler (36:29):
That that doesn't make any sense that you would
prohibit as long as you'rebuying the license, you know,
having somebody then provide,like, a managed hosting. Okay.
That's interesting. Right?

Justin (36:38):
I I think they're they could sell a lot more copies of
this, and I think, one ideawould be to add it to the Heroku
marketplace, add it to theDigitalOcean marketplace make it
very, very easy to go toDigitalOcean. You can buy a
license probably through theythey probably won't like this
because it's through It'sthrough other stores that people

(36:59):
control, but that's one way youcould sell a lot more copies is
just make it dead simple to autoinstall this on Heroku and, or
DigitalOcean or wherever.

Tyler (37:10):
There are people used to buying a $300 product through
their, like, DigitalOceanaccount. Yeah. Like, do do they
support, like, one clickinstall, like, you know, because
that the the benefit ofWordPress was it was one click
doubt, but there was no costassociated with it. Right?

Justin (37:26):
Like I wonder if anyone's done that because

Ian (37:27):
I There is I mean, AWS has a marketplace where, like,
people buy very expensive thingsthrough it. But, again, it's not
with the, like, you're on yourown for support and, like, that
whole kind of vibe of it's it'sa different sort of mindset. It
does say an FAQ reseller whitelabel, so I guess maybe somebody
could I'm pretty sure I saw themtweet about this. The real

(37:48):
somebody asked them, like, canwe host it for people? And they
said no, but I guess you coulddo it.
Right? But, again, it's kind ofa weird thing. Like, usually, in
these type of setups, which Iused to do this for HubSpot.
Before HubSpot, we had HubSpotcloud. We had a hosting partner,
and they did exactly this.
Like, when somebody wanted ithosted, we just send them to the
hosting partner, and theycharged them for hosting, and

(38:08):
they had to buy a HubSpotlicense. You know, like, it's
kind of not it it just doesn'tseem like what they're going
after, but, I mean, they coulddo it Mhmm. If they wanted to.
You know? It too.
You know?

Justin (38:19):
What happens when you buy it? Do you just get a access
to a GitHub repo?

Ian (38:23):
No. I think they just give you, like, a one line, Like, a
command line call that you makeand it downloads and installs.

Justin (38:30):
Interesting.

Ian (38:31):
That which looks pretty easy in straightforward.

Justin (38:33):
I actually I think in this sense. I I think that they
are very good PR people. Like,they were on all the right
podcasts. They were talkingabout it. They they know how to
craft a manifesto and make a bigsplash.
I I felt like the marketing forthis was not very good,
actually. I think, like yousaid, I I don't think the the
marketing site is very well doneor compelling. You're missing

(38:57):
out on all those SEOopportunities, and also the the
the fact that the, that youwould At least not I maybe they
did try, but it feels like allthe distribution here is with
the hosting providers. Like, ifyou could just get some partners
right off the bat that make thissuper easy, then it's like, oh,

(39:18):
sweet. I can just, you know, buyit and then auto deploy it to
DigitalOcean, you know, noconfiguration required.
But, any other ideas onmarketing or thoughts on the
marketing of it.

Ian (39:31):
I mean, I think to your point before, maybe this is,
like, their canary in the coalmine. Like, instead of talking
to a bunch of IT managers, it'slike, let's put out a manifesto.
Let's put out a product, that weknow people use, chat, and we'll
see if there's interest. And ifthere is, maybe we do a whole
line of things that are likeThat's right. And Yeah.
If there's not, then we don't.Like, I mean, I think it there's

(39:52):
a pretty big, like, poker tellhere, which is that They didn't
come out with Basecamp onpremise Mhmm. Which would be the
most logical thing. Right? Like,if IT managers are sick of this
and everybody wants to hosteverything, Why wouldn't you
have Basecamp on premise?
Like and still offer Basecampcloud. Right? But then you have
Basecamp on premise. Maybe youyou have all this private
details with you and yourclients. Like, You wanna be in

(40:13):
charge of it.
You're a consultancy, 95% of thepeople using base camp, right,
or some type of a consultancy.And so you have some IT premise,
like, generally, some somecapability, so have base camp on
premise, but they didn't dothat. Right? So that's where I'm
like, maybe it's a little moreyou know, I don't think spent a
ton of hours on this. I thinkit's, like, pretty bare bones as

(40:34):
Tyler said.
And so it's like, let's this isour market research.

Tyler (40:37):
Yeah. I think also, like, for folks who don't know the
whole sort of history of thiskind of stuff, like, you know,
entrepreneurs who are justsaying, like, oh, should my next
business use this businessmodel? Definitely need to know
that Campfire was a preexistingproduct. Right? That it was a
standalone product that they 37signals, you know, had for a
long time, and then they kindof, like, sunset it slash

(40:59):
integrated it into core basecamp.
So they kind of, know, again,like, I have no idea what that
technically entails to just sortof take it off the shelf and,
you know, polish it back up as aas this like, on prem version.

Ian (41:12):
I think they rebuilt it. I think they rebuilt it. I don't
think it's the old version.

Tyler (41:15):
Yeah. But, I mean, it's still just, like, a lot of the,
like, design and and decisionchoices and all that kind of
stuff. It's, like, it's not likethey came out with, like, they
Cision Choices and all that kindof stuff. It's like it's not
like they came out with, likethey said, like, the once is a
totally new paradigm, and wehave something like, hey, like,
their email thing is totallynew. Mhmm.
You know, it may well be andthis might also tie into, let's
say, not going full bore onmarketing besides like the stuff

(41:38):
that's easy and free, which isgoing on podcast is just like,
this may be a test of like, isit worth it to build new
products under this paradigm?Phase 1, ship this thing that,
you know, is gonna be theeasiest possible thing we can we
can actually ship and just seewhat happens and use that as a
test. You know?

Justin (41:56):
Yeah. It's an it's it's the other difference And I I put
this under the umbrella ofmarketing is I thought Jason's,
intuition about email wasactually right When he said, you
know, people have there hasn'tbeen anything new in email for a
long time. And after a while,you know, after 10 years have

(42:16):
passed Since Gmail launched orwhatever, people are often just
eager to try something new. Youknow? It's like when we were
younger, There was Hotmail andthen or Yahoo Mail and then
Hotmail and then Gmail.
Like, these things were kindacoming out all the time, And
there just hadn't been any newemail provider really making a

(42:38):
big splash

Ian (42:39):
Yeah.

Justin (42:39):
In a long time. And although there was little
examples with Superhuman andthings. It's like, oh, wow.
There's some demand here. And Ithink he correctly identified a,
a wave that was building, whichis, I think people are kinda,
you know, ready for somethingnew and fresh.
Whereas with, With chat, really,Slack kinda capitalized on that.

(43:05):
There was Campfire and thenHipChat And Yammer and it was
like everybody was starting touse these things, so the demand
was growing. And then Slack camein with the, you know, the cute,
fun, well designed version ofthat, and it just spread like
wildfire. This didn't seem tohave that same kind of thing,
though. It's not like, you know,Discord is relatively new.

(43:28):
It it doesn't feel like therewas this this same kind of
latent demand of, like, oh, man.If there was a fresh, you know,
chat app out there, I would loveit. It's like it didn't have
that same kind of momentum.

Ian (43:42):
There's also, like, I mean, the another well, we haven't
even said the name yet, but it'sa huge elephant here is,
Microsoft Teams, which, like,almost every corporate entity
already has access to Teams forfree as part of whatever other
thing they own at Microsoft. Andso, like, you already have,
like, cord and Microsoft Teamsfor free Mhmm. You know, chat,

(44:03):
and then you have Slack forsometimes free or else your paid
chat. Like, there's a lot ofcoverage here already. And so, I
mean, in that regard, it's likemaybe they felt like we don't
wanna do, like, an SaaS chatthing because there's not a lot
of oxygen there, and maybe thiswill be different or whatever.
You know? But I'm also notmarketing wise, I'm not
surprised to see them take thisapproach because this how they

(44:23):
run things. Like, even if you goon base camp, like, there's not
a lot of SEO organized pages onbase camp. Like, there's no base
camp versus Asana page. I don'tthink there's like, there's just
A lot of those, like, hundredsof pages and hundreds of blog
posts, like, with all thevarious keywords and everything.
All the stuff the rest of ushave to do To, like, sell our
software. Like, they they don'tgo that route in there because
they do this other kind ofmarketing, which if you can do

(44:45):
it, is great.

Justin (44:46):
Oh, I wonder about that. How do you how do you think
people are finding Basecampright now? Like, Basecamp seems
to have just a ton of normal assusers all over the world. It's
gotta be word-of-mouth or searchor, like, they've built up some
sort of marketing asset. Yeah.

Ian (45:03):
I think it's both. I mean, I think it's Search. I thought
that their search, like I'm surethey search, like, for project
management software. It's, like,pretty good, right, which is
gonna be the big one.

Tyler (45:12):
It sounds like I got the sort of inherent virality of it,
you know, in the sense that thethe user base is a lot of these
agencies and stuff, so they'reconstantly inviting clients to
it who didn't have their ownbusiness and stuff like that. So
I

Justin (45:24):
mean, I heard about Basecamp and 37 signals reading
Time Magazine in, like, college,I think.

Ian (45:31):
Right.

Justin (45:32):
So, like, there was a time where they were, like, they
they were on the cover of, FastMoney or whatever called the
with the the title The bad boysof Silicon Valley or something,
like, they had a media blitz fora while that was they may still
be benefiting even from that. Idon't know.

Ian (45:48):
Yeah. They are they are bottom of page 2 for project
management software on Google,which is not that's not enough
for the amount of customers theyget. So it's It's definitely,
you know, probably more of likeit is built into the product,
which I think is a huge thingthese days and something that,
like, I'm working more towardswith my own product is having
more of that, you know, builtinto the product itself that is

(46:11):
inherently going to spread theproduct, as people use it. Yeah.
And Basecamp obviously has that,As father said, because you're
just inviting other people inand other companies, and you
have all this interaction, andpeople get to see it and use it
and then take it with them, whenthey have that kind of need,
which I think is huge.

Justin (46:27):
Yeah. And don't underestimate the compounding,
advantage of doing that for 20years.

Ian (46:33):
And it's just like a lot of people.

Justin (46:34):
There's just a lot of people that have used Basecamp
at some agency or, you know,doctor's office or wherever
they're using it, and it's likethat That kind of word-of-mouth
when you go to the next place,and it's like, well, let's use
Basecamp, but that's what I use.Because I'm I'm the question I
always have with them is Wealways talk about their halo
effect. Like, they've got thishuge audience and all these

(46:56):
things. I always wonder how muchof what percentage of their
customers are fans. And my in myhead, I'm thinking it's probably
actually quite a smallpercentage, like 5% or 10%
maybe.

Tyler (47:09):
I bet it's higher than anything else, stuff. I think,
like, the what you're saying istrue is that that we overstate
the value of an audience. Andoftentimes, there's not that
much of an overlap between theaudience you build and your
target customers, but I betwhatever percentage it is, it's
the highest for them than anyother software company, you
know, in the world, I think theydo do a job of, like, attracting

(47:33):
their own customers throughtheir books and stuff like that
being, like, here's how toremote work and why you should,
like, give a shit about remotework and why it's amazing. And
by the way, here's our softwarethat enables it. You know?
I think they have really good,like, integrated marketing like
that. So, you know, you know,whatever number it is, it's
probably the highest. That'sthat I probably do high
watermark.

Ian (47:52):
Yeah. That and that early leverage of that. Right? Like,
has anybody ever gotten morebang for their buck out of that
audience early on? Like, whenthey Initially, in 2006, 2007,
like, made maximum use of beingrails and rails becoming famous.
Right? Like, base camp waseverywhere, being talked about
everywhere. You know, theypractically invented SaaS.

(48:12):
Right? Like, essentially, for,like, for a small bootstrap
style company, they did inventSaaS.
So, you know, I think theymaximize that, which is great.
Yeah. And

Justin (48:22):
let let's not underestimate the value. Like,
their top I just put Basecampinto Ahrefs. Their top link to
Basecamp by traffic and valueand etcetera is from
rubyonrails.org. So, I mean,that that we we can't
underestimate the fact that theyalso have one of the most
popular, programming frameworksout right now and that, you

(48:45):
know, that that, gives them somejuice.

Ian (48:49):
We see that in the Laravel world. Like, the Laravel
commercial products have donegreat, and then there's no SEO,
and there's no Traditionalmarketing and there's no sales
team. Right? There's Laravel,and people love Laravel, and
then people use the products andpeople Talk to other people
about the products and thatwhole thing. Right?
So

Justin (49:07):
Yeah. I

Ian (49:07):
mean, that's a great marketing path if you can pull
it off. Like, it's an in in theworld. Yeah. Well, okay. Well,
that's not like a, like, aviable business strategy for
most people.
Right? But but if you could Ifyou could do it, like, that's
it's awesome. Yeah.

Justin (49:27):
Yeah. Even then, like, jQuery, I don't think had a
commercial product associatedwith it that gave them the same.
Well, let's let's get intoTyler's question, which is what
did they do right? Yeah. Tyler,why don't you start here?
What what did Once Or Campfireget right here.

Tyler (49:43):
Well, I I mean, I think that, like so, basically, I
think, especially, like, out ofour discussion here, I think,
like, once is a better pitchthan switch to Campfire. Like, I
think I'm more and moreconvinced that, like, once is a
better idea than the relaunch ofCampfire. Just I definitely feel
like there is subscriptionfatigue, you know, like, up and

(50:04):
down. I think, like, consumersare feeling it. They're being,
like, I've got a subscription to6 different streaming services
and, you know, athletic greensand creatine gummies and, you
know, like everything is justlike on subscription.
It's like stacking up, you know,and then businesses are in the
same boat. They're like, oh myGod. You know, we have all these

(50:24):
subscriptions we even forgotabout. You know, I do think
there's like subscriptionfatigue. And I think there is
also a sense that software inparticular SAS is kind of
overpriced.
I think both of those are, areprobably like real things that
they are identifying a tippingpoint on, especially kind of,
like, come out of this kind ofeconomic cycle where a lot of

(50:46):
businesses are starting to payattention to that, where we went
through this, like, kind ofchaos where everyone was just
like, just buy whatever you needand add as many as you need. And
now folks are maybe being like,this has gotten way out of hand
here. So I do think, like, partof the reason why this resonated
so quickly. And even when theyjust announced once, just as an
idea without any productsattached to it, are that folks

(51:10):
are feeling that they areresonating with that. They're
empathizing with that.
I think like for me, I thinkthat there is kind of like less
like, more unbundled ways toaddress that. Right? So I do
think just like, for example,cheaper SaaS, like, I think, you
know, Campfire for, like, $29 amonth Mhmm. You know, flat fee

(51:32):
for unlimited users would maybebe a better product than, this
kind of open source version. Ithink that the once paradigm
maybe is a better fit for likekind of prosumer tools.
So like, I'd actually be curiousto hear what you guys think
about like taking, let's justsay once just the landing page
is like actually correct for aminute. Like what would be the

(51:54):
best tool to launch under that,like, best product to launch
under that paradigm.

Ian (51:58):
Right.

Tyler (51:59):
Because, like, for me, I hear so I'm constantly
recommending this, app calledKrisp, which

Ian (52:04):
is this, like I was just gonna talk

Justin (52:05):
about Krisp.

Tyler (52:06):
Noise.

Justin (52:06):
Yeah.

Tyler (52:06):
Like, I'm using it right now. Yeah. And I recommend it
all the time to people, like,literally 8 out of 10 times that
I send it to somebody go, oh myGod, another subscription. Are
you kidding me? You know?
And I don't know. It's likedollars a year or something like
that. It's like app works likemagic. It's like no brainer.
People are it.
You

Justin (52:22):
know? Although Krisp the reason we switched to Krisp is
because compared to intercom, Itis like orders of magnitude more
affordable.

Tyler (52:30):
I'm telling you what's slightly different. Okay. But
that's a good example too. Butthe one I'm talking about is
this app that filters outbackground noise

Ian (52:37):
Oh, Chris

Justin (52:37):
with a k.

Ian (52:38):
Chris with a k.

Tyler (52:39):
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But that's So that's just a a
cheap app people as well, youknow?

Justin (52:45):
Yeah.

Tyler (52:45):
Like, kind of the same

Justin (52:46):
Yeah. I think I think, Krisp, the the chat app is a
good I think the the opportunityfor indie, which is that, you
know, intercom decided to goupmarket and go enterprise and
in in the process squeezed outSMBs and small companies. And
Krisp came along and said,listen. We're gonna do all of it
for $99 a month, and it's gonnabe incredible software made in

(53:09):
France. And, you're gonna loveit.
And, it's it's very well madesoftware. It's affordable. I
recommend it all the timeBecause it's an affordable
option, and they have a greatbusiness because they're
addressing a market thatIntercom just said we're not
interested in. So I I thinkthere is a huge opportunity

(53:30):
there. It's still SaaS.
Right? It's still SaaS. And ButI think that's almost the lesson
is if there is a trend of,subscription fatigue, I'm still
not totally convinced aboutthis. Like, you know, we sell a
prosumer SaaS. Most of ourcustomers are prosumers, And, we

(53:54):
haven't seen a ton of people,canceling.
Like, our our, our growth ratesare still good. We're still
growing. Our churn is, I think,relatively low. It's, like, 2.5%
or something like that. So wehaven't seen a big uptick in
people canceling because ofsubscription fatigue.

(54:16):
We've seen pockets of it, like,you know, after COVID or
whatever, there's, like, alittle a little jump of people
saying, I have too manysubscriptions. But overall,
Since 2018, as a prosumerproduct, we haven't seen a lot
of subscription fatigue.

Tyler (54:33):
Just to play devil's advocate on that, though, I do
think we might years is a littledifferent because it's hosting.
Right? So it kinda, like, has tobe ongoing. It it like, there's
really no logical version of,like, a pay once. But, like, I
do think also you might not justsee subscription fatigue showing
up in churn.
It's like might also beinvisible, basically people who
don't sign up. So for example,when I recommend this like AI

(54:55):
filtering tool that you don'thave to have. Yeah. If people
look at it and they see one moresubscription, there might be a
category of people who wouldpay, like, one time who just,
like, don't ever sign up becausethey're you have too many
subscriptions. I can't keeptrack of it.
Like, I'm that way withstreaming services right now.
I'm just, like, not subscribingto stuff because I don't want a
million more subscriptions. Youknow? Like Yeah.

Ian (55:16):
I do. I I think that's true, but also it depends a lot
on the market. Like, I don'tfeel like with HelpSpot, we ever
have that because it's like,whatever. You have 20 full time
agents. They spend literally 8hours a day every day.
So they are going to need to payfor this software, whether you
pay us or somebody else. Like,there's not an expectation that,
like, oh, this is the last pieceof software that's driving me
over the edge. We're literallyusing it, like, a 1000 hours a

(55:40):
week of time are in this pieceof software. Right? So it's
fine.
Mhmm. But there are so that'skinda maybe part of the problem
with Campfire. Right? It's,like, trying to replace
something that is like, well,we're in Slack all day every
day. It's such high usage thing.
It's not an area where I'm,like, annoyed by the
subscription that much asopposed to, like yeah. Like,

(56:00):
Obviously, on my Amex bill is 50other things that are, like, I
used it once. I use it once amonth. I use it once a day for 2
minutes. It's like those thingsstart to add up, and you're
like, oh, man.
Like, yeah, this would be cool.Once a week, I need this, but
it's, like, another $9 a monthfor this one day a week you
know, one time a week, I needthis thing, and it's like, no.

(56:20):
I'm not I'm just not gonna buyit because, like, it's just one
more thing, and we have toremember Cancel in 6 months or a
year or whatever. Yeah. So,like, there are like, I do think
there is some, like,opportunities there for it to
be, like, super cheap or annualsuper cheap or once or whatever.
There are some things like thatthat aren't so enterprise
dependent.

Justin (56:40):
Is is there another example of a product that maybe
is targeted at prosumers or SMBsor smaller companies, whatever,
that is buy once, host yourselfthat is relatively successful.

Tyler (56:57):
It's not quite host yourself, but there's the
entire, like, themes business,like, Shopify themes and and
press something. Yeah. That thatI do think kind of have fit
they're, like, the closestanalog to, like, fairly
successful businesses whereyou're kind of pay once or ends
up being, like, payinfrequently. Right? Like, every

(57:18):
18 months or so, there's a new,like, optional paid upgrade kind
of thing.
Yeah.

Ian (57:23):
But I

Tyler (57:23):
don't know about the actual

Justin (57:25):
I think that business is amazing, by the way, but that
seems like A quite a differentbusiness.

Ian (57:29):
Yeah. There's no security implications usually there and
all that kind of stuff.

Justin (57:34):
Yeah. The only one I can think of is something like
statomic, which is a CMS thatyou pay for once or you you can
get a new license every year ifyou want, and then you host it
yourself. But I actually thinkthe advice I've been trying to
give static forever is for themto get into the hosting game,
because I think they would havea much, I think the business

(57:54):
would be better. In some ways,the lesson I'm getting from this
is unless you're gonna goupmarket And charge 100 of 1,000
of dollars for on prem software.If your target is small
companies and prosumers andwhatever, If you have a once
product like statomic, I wouldactually say maybe you should

(58:15):
consider offering some hostingOr partner with some more
hosting providers, and, you youknow, you each get a a a chunk
of, of revenue or whatever.

Tyler (58:24):
This is the entire commercial open source playbook.
Right? Which is basically, youknow, it's it's pay nothing
upfront and then optionally payfor, you know, managed hosting
and stuff like that. And there'stons of successful businesses
doing that. And so pay once iskind of the inverse, right.
Which is like pay upfront andthere's no hosting available,
but they basically said paynothing up front if you want the

(58:47):
code, but if you want us to hostit. So

Ian (58:50):
Yeah. I mean, pay once and nothing after is not Even
really, like it's really like avery consumer oriented mindset.
I there is no business softwarein a sense Like this, because
there's always, like like, evenstatamics is $65 a year for
updates or like, there's always,like, you know, HubSpot was on

(59:10):
premise and you own the license.So it would run forever if you
stop getting support, but it wasbasically a SaaS, from a Pricing
perspective because you had topay a $100 a year per user Mhmm.
In, you know, support andupdates.
And nobody wants to run itwithout support and updates
because why would you ever wantto run it without support and

(59:30):
updates? So, like, now listen.Are there a small percentage
that run I mean, we whatever.Occasionally, we come across a
customer who is still runningit, they don't have support and
updates, and they're on version2 from 10 years ago and fine.
Like, whatever.
Yes. They could do that. Mhmm.But 98% of people, right, didn't
do that. They either Stoppedusing it and churned at some
point.
They stopped paying because theywent to something else, or

(59:51):
they've just paid foreverbecause they're like, yeah. We
we want dates and securityfixes. And when there's a
problem, we wanna be able tocall you and, you know, all
those things. So it is a littleweird. I don't know if there's a
lot of b to b apps that would gowith the no support forever
mindset.

Justin (01:00:08):
This is my favorite Ianism. My favorite. Is it
Ianism or inlandism? Is I don'tknow. I like both.
It's, it's about volume. Thesoftware business is about
volume.

Ian (01:00:19):
That's true. Yes.

Justin (01:00:20):
And I I think this is one thing that I missed early on
when I was trying things out isthat, like, transistor works
because Every day, hundreds ofpeople are looking well, not
just 100. Thousands of peopleare looking for podcast hosting,
and they enough of those peoplefind us, and we get we literally
need hundreds of trials everymonth for our model to work.

(01:00:44):
Tailwind UI Probably hashundreds or thousands of people
buying it every single day orevery single hour. I don't even
know. Right.
But but you want volume, andvolume is, like, Enough interest
that's driving the funnel sothat once they get to you,
there's enough daily, weekly,monthly, annual volume there

(01:01:05):
that you can convert enough andhave a business. It and the once
the challenge I think is gonnabe it's like if it's truly once,
You're you're just not gonnahave in so many of the product
verticals, you're not gonna haveenough volume. You have to keep
the volume going, so you're notRight.

Ian (01:01:23):
It doesn't build on itself ever. Yeah. It's only new sales,
which is, you know, a much muchI'll be I mean, I don't know.
I'd seen them not being veryinterested in this, to be honest
with you. Like, I mean, themoney is not even if it was very
successful, the money isminuscule Compared to base camp
Yeah.
Just because of how they set itup. Like, 300 time dollars one
time, just not a lot of money.And, I mean, they By their own

(01:01:44):
mission, right, made 100 of1,000,000,000, maybe close to a
$1,000,000,000 at this point.Like, I think I think people
don't realize how big base campis. I think people think base
camp is like, Oh, man.
Those guys make $50,000,000 ayear or whatever. No. Mhmm. Base
camp has a lot of zeros. It's ahumongous business, and I just
feel like they're I don't know.
Like, if I ran a business thatbig, would I wanna have this

(01:02:04):
little thing that was doing a1,000,000, 2,000,000, $5,000,000
a year? Like Again, all the wayback to beginning, I thought it
would have more benefits for,like, the Rails developers and
such who would just wanna, like,see the code. Mhmm. You know, it
acts as, like, a getting intorails learning tutorial because,

(01:02:27):
like, you can see how the prosbuild the real app that
functions and all that stuff.

Justin (01:02:32):
Yeah.

Ian (01:02:32):
And maybe it's That people don't value it up to $300. Maybe
it's that everybody's sharingit, so they don't need to pay
for it.

Justin (01:02:38):
I wonder if they marketed it marketed it as a
course if it would have donebetter. Like, DHX people
tweeting about

Ian (01:02:45):
it like that. Like, I've seen a bunch of people be like,
you don't buy any course. Justbuy this and look at the code.
And, like, That makes sense tome. You know?
Like

Justin (01:02:52):
Yeah. The positioning of that

Tyler (01:02:53):
flap a couple of screen paths on there just like doing
the walkthrough of the owed andsell it for $3,000.

Ian (01:03:01):
Yeah. They, well, should do that.

Justin (01:03:03):
The thing is the way this was presented is it was
presented as a philosophy, as aparadigm, as a thesis that the
bootstrap or the indie or thestartup community now has to
respond to. So it's like, here'sthe thesis. We're giving it to
you guys. Now this is gonna be athing. And so now, it's like

(01:03:23):
people are always saying, like,well, why do you guys Why does
anybody have to comment on thisat all?
It's like, well, it's a it's ait's an open thesis that's out
there now, that kind of thecommunity has to grapple with.

Tyler (01:03:37):
Yeah. I was just gonna say, I think, like, the 80 20
here is, like, if you think alot of this is compelling and
you apply it to your ownbusiness in your market, and you
say, I think this is more rightthan wrong, you know, the the
sort of basic premise of once asapplied to whatever it is you're
building. I would probably startwith, like, a cheap annual

(01:03:58):
subscription.

Justin (01:03:58):
Mhmm. Right?

Tyler (01:03:59):
You know what I mean? Like and just try to frame it
that way because they stillthink you get, like, most of the
of the underlying benefits ofwhy this was so resonant with a
lot of folks without some of theworst aspects of it. For
example, just like how difficultit is to build a business
without any kind of recurringrevenue whatsoever. Mhmm.

Jason (01:04:17):
So I

Tyler (01:04:17):
think, like, if I have a one takeaway of, like, what
should, like, a new bootstrapperthink about once? It should be,
like, consider a low price pointannual plan really, like,
heavily market that, you know,versus, like, very high, multi
subscription alternatives andand kinda start there. You know,

(01:04:39):
I I don't think there's enoughof a boost, and I think we
probably have seen that, like,latching on to the once type of,
like, marketing wave. At leastthe initial conclusion is is
probably not enough there to tomake it worth your while to,
like, go all in on once with anew product. I think that's
obviously, like, very earlydays, so that's to be
determined.

(01:04:59):
But that's where I would landas, like, a one line takeaway
for, Bootstrapper right now.

Justin (01:05:04):
Mhmm. Yeah. I think that's good. What about you,
Ian?

Ian (01:05:06):
Yeah. I agree. Like, for the in terms of bootstrapper
advice, as I often feel About 37signals of ice is, like, it
actually doesn't apply to youvery much, the person out there,
because yeah. I mean, even thisinitial launch, like, you're not
gonna be on all these hugepodcasts. Right?
You're not getting any of thisjuice that they got. So you'll
have your own level of juice.Like, maybe you have some

(01:05:27):
connections. Maybe you can getone good podcast or whatever.
Like, you can do some stuff, butyou're not gonna be ubiquitous
and everywhere, like, they canbe.
And so yeah. And, I mean,definitely, like, talk if you
were thinking about on premisethe math on, like, how many

(01:05:49):
customers you need if they neverpay you again, or if they pay
you once every 3 or 4 years,because you're gonna have kind
of like, well, new versionupgrade cycle or whatever
because, like, I mean, listen,we have people paying for
HubSpot. We've been paying since2,006 And I've paid a $100,000
or a $150,000. Right? And it'slike, if instead they had just

(01:06:10):
paid me one time $300, Like,that doesn't take many of those
to be, like, your business iscompletely different, and you're
basically out of business.
Like, I would be out ofbusiness. Right? If I had no
recurring aspect it. Even thoughI didn't even though it's own
licenses, the recurring aspectwas the support and upgrades.
And so I had this recurringelement That does builds up over

(01:06:30):
time, over years, and is thefoundation that gets you through
the down periods.
Right? Where, like, somethinglike, All of a sudden, there's
SaaS. Like, for 3 or 4 years,there was no SaaS, and we just
sold on premise, and it wasfine. And then there's Zendesk
and everybody else, and they'relike, people want SaaS. Right?
And that took us time to, like,For us to build a SaaS platform
and, like, do all that stuff.And so you don't wanna have no

(01:06:52):
income, like, during that periodwhere, like, things you get a
little shaky. Like, you youwanna have oh, yeah. We have
these other 100 of customers whoare, like, paying us every year
and happy. And, like, they'renot necessarily on the cutting
edge.
Like, they're not looking aroundbeing like, What's the new
hotness and things like that?Like Mhmm. So yeah. Like Yeah.
Again, like, some softwaredevelopers, another little is I

(01:07:14):
think terrible market.
I think nobody should sell tosoftware developers unless you
have a very, very specificinsight or something there,
access to the market becauseThey're horrible customers.
They're always looking for thenext great thing and what's
gonna improve them. What's hot.Like, whereas when you sell to
Bob, the manufacturer, Like,they just as long as your stuff
works, they don't ever look atan alternative. Like, they're

(01:07:36):
fine.
They're happy. They're lovinglife. So, like, those are great
customers.

Justin (01:07:40):
Yeah.

Ian (01:07:40):
So yeah. You know, that's always in general. You gotta be
careful about copying anybodyelse in the industry because you
don't know what they have goingon. You don't know their edges.
Mhmm.
So, yeah, you gotta you gotta becareful there.

Justin (01:07:50):
Yeah. I think folks should really do their research
on kind of 3 different levels.One, go and find some people who
do have one time sale products.Listen to their podcast. Like,
if you listen to Adam Wathan, hehas one of the most successful
products I've ever seen in mylife.
Even he is anxious about onetime sales.

Ian (01:08:09):
He is anxious all the time.

Justin (01:08:11):
Listen to his podcast. You'll hear that it's It's a
thing, and he doesn't need to beanxious. He's gonna be fine. But
find people and then evenobserve, like, oh, that's the
kind of business, that's thekind of scale, That's the kind
of insight or advantage you needto have to succeed in that
market. Right?
The second is, if you have a athesis like, you know, I'm gonna

(01:08:34):
build the on prem version ofMailchimp, Do some interviews.
Come and talk to me. Come andtalk now we wanna reduce our
email bill. I think a lot ofcompanies do. But if you came
and told me, like, here's a athing that you're gonna host
yourself and use SES or whateverdoes that stuff, I'm gonna be
like, no.
I don't want that. I just want amore affordable version of

(01:08:57):
Mailchimp, please. And so andthat it's even more than that.
Right? I want a more affordableversion of Mailchimp that still
has all the features and thingsI like about Mailchimp.
So it's it's a high bar. Right?Yeah. Oh, another example that I
thought of was Paldi. He atBalsamic, they publish their
revenue numbers every year.
Just look at the trend In theirbusiness, they've got onetime

(01:09:20):
desktop sales, and it's justgoing down, down, down, down.
What's going up, up, up, up issoftware as a service. So

Ian (01:09:27):
There's literally nobody in in the industry who doesn't have
that exact same chart. There is,like, nobody Who sells an end
user in any way oriented productwhere the on premise version's,
like, going up and the SaaSversion's going down. Like, That
doesn't exist for anybody. Imean, again, like we talked
about, there are some thingsgrowing a little bit with, like,
these infrastructure typethings, but not an end user

(01:09:48):
oriented app. Like, Not not athing.

Justin (01:09:51):
Alright. I think let's leave it there. That was good,
guys.

Ian (01:09:53):
Yeah. Thanks for having us on.

Justin (01:09:54):
Yeah. Great stuff. Definitely go check out Ian
Landsman on Twitter. Maybe youshould ask Ian what his, budget
is at HelpSpot for CBD gummysubscriptions.

Ian (01:10:06):
Not none. Maybe I gotta get in on that. That's a write off,
I hear, so let's do it.

Justin (01:10:11):
And go check out Tyler Tringus on Twitter as well and
what he's doing with calmcompany, lots of good thoughts
there. And, I'm on Twitter aswell, m I, Justin. If you have
feedback about this, Definitelyhit us up. We'd love to hear it.
And, yeah, we'll maybe do afollow-up episode in 6 months
when we've got more information.
Maybe all of our all of ourpresent day information was

(01:10:33):
wrong and will be proven.

Ian (01:10:34):
Could be.

Justin (01:10:35):
It will be proven so.

Ian (01:10:37):
Not impossible. Alright.

Justin (01:10:38):
See you next time. Alright.

Ian (01:10:39):
You.

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