V1 is for Us

Welcome to Rework, a podcast by thirty seven Signals about the better way to work and run your business. I'm your host, Kimberly Rhodes, and I'm joined as always by the cofounders of thirty seven Signals, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hanssen. Well, if you've listened to the podcast for any period of time, you've heard Jason and David talk about building software for us, that thirty seven signals uses all of its own products. We use Basecamp to build Basecamp and just how that is an important focus for the company. I thought we would talk more about it today. Jason, you recently explained to the company again that this is an important priority for us. Kinda tell us a little bit about that. Yeah. So we just had our meetup in Montreal, and we showed off two products that we're working on internally. These have been sort of discussed internally, but we've never showed them off as a group. So I showed them off with two of the designers, and I was I was sort of referencing use cases. Like, this could be used for this, and this could be used for that. And we even showed examples of it being used for tracking which flowers you have in your garden. Is this random? Whatever. But the thing is is and I gave the presentation, and it made the points. But I actually had this tinge of regret afterwards, which was, why am I showing things that it could do? Why do we have to imagine use cases? Whenever you do that, you gotta really check yourself pretty quickly. Why are we building this again? Because we're imagining how people might wanna use it? They might use it for that reason, but it can't be built for an imaginary reason. It has to be built for a real reason. And by the way, these these products we're building are built for a real reason, but I felt like I had to justify them in a sense or it was like a demo. So let me show you the all the things it can do. But it was a red flag, and so I posted something yesterday actually internally saying like, hey. We need to get back to remembering why we're building these things and specifically why we're building version one. And version one is for us. Other people hopefully will use it, will like it, will have the same needs that we have, will want their same product for the reasons we want it, but it has to be for us, it has to be tied to our use cases. And in fact, we should tie even a tighter knot and not have to imagine any external use cases. That's not to say that it can't be used for other things. For example, when we built Basecamp, version one of Basecamp was entirely 100% our use cases. And it turns out a lot of other companies have very …