Revisiting the good old days

Welcome to Rework, a podcast by thirty seven Signals about the better way to work and run your business. I'm Kimberly Rhodes from the thirty seven Signals team joined by Jason Fried, cofounder and CEO. This week, I wanna dive into one of the chapters of it doesn't have to be crazy at work. This was written back in 2018. Things sometimes change. So I wanna go back to, Jason, one of the chapters which has changed significantly. I'm gonna read just a little passage from it, and then I wanna get your thoughts on, like, where you stand now. Yep. So it is a chapter called the good old days. And you write, just a few years ago, we made a number of different products. Today, we make just one, face cam. We gave up everything else and the potential of millions more in revenue so we could focus in rather than pan wide. And then you and David also write, rather than continue to invent new products, take on more responsibilities, and grow more obligations, we continually aim to pare down and lighten the load even when times are great. Okay. Obviously, this is not recent. We're not just Basecamp. Yep. We have HEY, and now we're creating all of these other products. So kind of talk me through that, how that perspective changed back from 2018 when you guys wrote that to now. Well, like they say, like, what? To everything, there is a season, basically. I I think that when we first launched the company, there's a a grand expansion. You know, we made four products in four years and a few more after that. And then we realized we had too many things going on at once, and we don't wanna grow our staff. So we said we can't do all those things at once. We kind of contracted contracted for a while. And then we're like, you know, we have this itch to make something else. Originally, it started by making a new version of Highrise, which is our CRM tool that eventually turned into hey, our new email thing. We didn't set out to make a new email thing. We just kinda found ourselves there. And then we actually kinda looked in the mirror and essentially, like, this is kinda fun. We actually like making new things. This is actually what we do. And maybe we've been suppressing ourselves or repressing ourselves essentially by not doing this, but it was good. It was good to compress for a while and contract. And then we expanded again. So now we're in this expansion mode again. Right. And the expansion mode, it was, hey. We're now building this thing called Fizzy. We're doing Basecamp five. We built Campfire and Writebook under the once label. We may make some other things. We'll see. But we're back in this expansion thing. And so I think all things are true. There's times when contractions good. There's times when …