Jason Fried: Build for Yourself, Keep Costs Low and Stay Small

[upbeat music] I wanna start with what you told me last night, that you feel the best way to make a product, or the best way to make a product for you, is by you are the actual customer. You are making the products that you want to use.

Yeah, I don't know how to do it any other way. Like, I-- this is how I've always done it. So back when I was fifteen, sixteen, I started in software, making stuff, actually, something called FileMaker Pro, which is, like, way back when, where you can make these databases for yourself. And I, I made this database to keep track of my music collection because I was loaning out tapes and CDs to friends and never getting them back. So I'm like: I need a way to keep track of this stuff, because I keep losing these things. So I made this product, which I eventually called AudioFile, but I made it for myself. It was just this, this database, right? And I made a nice interface because I liked art, I liked making stuff, and so I made this thing, and, uh, I, I eventually just decided that, like, I'll put a little text file in this, in this archive of the software that said, "If you like this, send me twenty bucks." And I put it up on AOL, so this is, like, pre-internet, right? Put it up on AOL, and I got this envelope, actually, an airmail envelope, the one of those with, like, the red and blue check marks, like, old school, like, envelope from... And it's from Germany. And I open it up, and someone had printed out this, this piece of paper, uh, which was the thing I included with the software and gave me a twenty-dollar crisp US bill, right? And that was the moment I think it all clicked for me, which is, make stuff for yourself. There's probably other people out there like you who want what you want, and make it available to sell. So you are the customer, you are the audience. It's you, you, you, and then there'll be other people just like you. We're not all that unique. There's plenty of people who like what we like, plenty of people who don't, and there's plenty of products for them, too. But there's enough that like what you like, and so that's where I got started.

Yeah, you have this, uh, this interesting idea where if you're just making what you want, right, doesn't matter-- You just have to go and collect more people that like the things that you like and kind of ignore the people that don't.

Yes, and this is all tied into, like, keeping your costs low. So, you know, you-- if you have a lot of costs, high costs, big company, you have to find a lot of people like you. But if you keep your costs low, keep your company small, at the time, it was just me, you know, when I was doing the software thing, and I was making, like, I don't know, twenty grand a year, like, selling software as a solo person when I was, like, sixteen years old or something like that, or seventeen, then I went into college a little bit as well. And it's like, that's an amazing little small side business, a huge side business when you're that age, right? Because I had no expenses. And so, so it's easy. I only had to find, like, you know, a few thousand people to, to pay me that money, twenty bucks, right, to, to, to, to get that eventually. But if I had a big business and had a lot of people and a lot of overhead, I'd have to find a lot of people like me, and that's harder. So the whole game for me is to make things as simple as possible, as easy for me as possible. So keep your costs low, keep your company as small as you possibly can, and make great stuff, and then you don't have to find as many people just like you, but the ones you find who really love what you do. And that's like, that's enough. Like, that is enough. You can stop there, keep doing stuff, but you can kind of stop there conceptually and go, "I'm gonna make stuff for me, people like me. I don't need the whole world to like what I like. I need, like, enough of a small world to like what I like, and we're, we're golden."