Jason Fried

A couple of things need to be balanced, I think, as I'm doing just that with PriceUnlock (https://bychgroup.com/price-unlock/)

PriceUnlock will help SaaS owners finds the perfect pricing for their product, with more upside and less downside when trying new prices. Besides, it helps you stop leaving money on the table.

* THE THINGS*

1. You can "scratch and claw", as Jason Cohen (founder of WPEngine) puts it. He talks more about this in the YT link below and he also puts out this idea of 150 customers, not "1000 true fans". I highly highly recommend watching the video, regardless of going VC/bootstrapped. He also talks about 2 other ways besides scratching and clawing

https://youtu.be/otbnC2zE2rw?t=420

2. Building in public is an upward trend these days. Basically you share as many milestones/ups/downs about your journey of building it. This can be a trap as well: it only works if your audience is A) interested in you sharing that, B) probably hackers/builders etc.

I asked PG about this and he pretty much summed it up: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1375038728519974912

3. As I'm building PriceUnlock, you'll also notice that I'm collecting emails (the ol' way) to get people's interest. I don't want to make a mailing list, I want to build my product, so I'll aim to be better doing the second rather than the first. But it doesn't hurt to, as Rob Walling did with Drip, launch with some MRR hopefully... or at least with some interest.…

Specifically, it was in a meeting called by Jason Fried to address people who were concerned about the ongoing existence of an internal list of "funny customer names" (which by all accounts was extremely racist), in which Ryan Singer (who had reportedly previously posted a fair bit of politically right-wing content on internal forums -- those were all deleted when the "no politics at work" policy was rolled out) repeatedly asserted that white supremacy/privilege did not exist (he then resigned).

In the aftermath, DHH dug through old chat logs to find a time in the past when one of the people complaining about the list participated in a discussion about same without complaint, and posted it in a way that was visible to everyone saying that their prior participation meant that their current complaint was invalid.

Then they rolled out the no-politics-at-work policy in this post dated April 26 2021 -- I would encourage anyone interested in the specifics to read through the various versions and edits of this post made in the week following, all without noting that it was being actively changed: https://world.hey.com/jason/changes-at-basecamp-7f32afc5

Aside: Many HN readers may remember that Basecamp's drama from 2 years ago [1] made mention of "paternalism" and how they planned to end the practice within their benefit structure. I recall the phrasing to be a source of confusion and argument. I think there were still a lot of folks (myself included) who saw this as a form of societal absenteeism in an economy with challenges that are often not easily overcome with simply more money at an individual level. I do, however, think this is a dicey area where companies can spend more efficiently on some paternalistic benefits rather than flatly increasing salary (which may have fewer tax incentives). This needs to be balanced with the fact that US corporations are not legally incentivized to maximize employee happiness, they're incentivized to maximize profit and without a legal entity around worker benefit, this form of paternalism can feel cheap or dystopian with callbacks to "company stores" and jumping through hoops and checking boxes to maximize your salary.

[1]: https://world.hey.com/jason/changes-at-basecamp-7f32afc5o

If you're looking for people with moderately thick skin who don't seek to find offense everywhere, a good place to start is to avoid the folks who wrote this blog post:

> every discussion remotely related to politics, advocacy, or society at large quickly spins away from pleasant. You shouldn't have to wonder if staying out of it means you're complicit, or wading into it means you're a target. These are difficult enough waters to navigate in life, but significantly more so at work. It's become too much. It's a major distraction.

https://world.hey.com/jason/changes-at-basecamp-7f32afc5

There's absolutely no reason to believe that there were any "ultra-sensitive trigger-warning micro-aggression seeking activists" at Basecamp among the employees. All we have is a blog post from someone who is overly sensitive to reasonable professional conversations and didn't want to deal with "unpleasant" conversations at work. It's a story told from that person's perspective and we shouldn't take it as absolute truth.

>he implemented a policy of no personal opinions at Basecamp

Except he didn't do that, what he implemented was not making personal politics a part of Basecamp's workplace culture, which is a much more moderate thing than what you're accusing him of here.

You might not be aware of this, but it's possible to have a personal opinion about something and not bring societal and political discussions to the company account or forum. Here's the text of the new policy:

https://world.hey.com/jason/changes-at-basecamp-7f32afc5

"People can take the conversations with willing co-workers to Signal, Whatsapp, or even a personal Basecamp account, but it can't happen where the work happens anymore."

Again, this is not at all the same thing as "no personal opinions [allowed] at Basecamp."

For context in chronological order:

- Basecamp's initial policy change by Jason Fried: https://world.hey.com/jason/changes-at-basecamp-7f32afc5 (Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26944192)

- DHH's post on the changes: https://world.hey.com/dhh/basecamp-s-new-etiquette-regarding-societal-politics-at-work-b44bef69

- DHH's follow up post: https://world.hey.com/dhh/mosaics-of-positions-ae6d4d9e

- Article detailing insider account of this policy change: https://www.platformer.news/p/-what-really-happened-at-basecamp

And then this is DHH's response to the article.