Jason Fried – you can't control the market

This podcast is hosted by transistor dot f m. Hey, everybody. Happy holidays, and welcome to build your SaaS. This is the behind the scenes story of building web apps in 2020, soon to be 2021. I'm Justin Jackson, and I got into a little Twitter debate with Jason Fried of Basecamp. And I DM ed him and said, hey. Let's let's have a a Skype conversation about this. And so we jumped on the mics and talked it out, and I found the whole thing I think the whole thing is fascinating. I think you're going to like it a lot. Here it is. Jason Fried and I kind of, not duking it out, having a good back and forth, a good discussion. And what, reveals itself is that a lot of our business philosophy is informed by our experience and our personal history. Give it a listen. I and I can't remember how you and I even got into this. I think I said, yeah. Demand isn't just a function of do people want this, but also how many people want this, and how much will they pay? And I can't tell if you and I are just, like, talking past each other in the sense that we have a different definition or, or what. So where do you think our disagreement is with when it comes to this idea of, market or demand? Because it it seemed like you were saying you can control pricing, but that's it. Am I understanding Yeah. Kind of. So alright. First of all, I think what's interesting about discussions about market is I think what people leave out, and not that you you left this out, not that you don't understand this because you do, because I I read your stuff and I know who you who you are and everything, is that market's also a function of your own economics. Like, you if your costs are low, your market might be considerably larger than if your costs are high or vice versa. Like, point is is that I might be able to exist there might be a market, and company a cannot exist in that market because their costs are crazy. But company b could because they only have four people, and, like, they don't need much to get by to make a profitable, sustainable business. So it's not just about, like, the market size. It's about what are your costs? Because I might be able to live in a market with only a thousand customers because I have I'm just making up numbers because I have 10 employees, and my annual spend, let's call it a million bucks, whatever, versus a company that had that's built has 340 people. They can't exist in a in a market with only a thousand customers that are willing to pay them $200 a month or something like that. So that's kinda market's a tricky term because I think people think it's the …