Is ONCE enough?

Ian Landsman: This podcast is hosted by Transistor fm.

Tyler Tringas: I think I, I said this on Twitter, I think. But I like appreciate that 37 signals exists. I appreciate that like some folks are out there that they have the. Even though you often have to say like you like, as you put it, Ian, like you random bootstrapper, do not have the like tools advantages, you know, recurring revenue to execute this. Like, I'm glad they're doing it. You know, like sometimes it's almost like uh, it's almost like an art project. Right? It's like a commentary on the state of the software business world, you know, that I'm like, I'm not going to do that, but I'm glad you're doing it, you know.

Host: Yeah. We have assembled a, uh, panel here today. We've got Ian Landsman and Tyler Tringas and we're here to talk about the post SaaS. The post SaaS, uh, World of once only payments or buy once. Um, we're going to talk a lot about the launch of campfire by 37 signals. And um, maybe actually Tyler, I'll start with you because you had a uh, Twitter video where you were kind of like talking through maybe in anticipation of the launch, what you thought might happen. Um, do you maybe just describe kind of before launch, what were some of your thoughts kind of leading up to it? What did you expect to see from 37 signals? And maybe was there any expectation that it, that this might become a viable model for more indies? What were, what were you kind of thinking?

Tyler Tringas: Yeah, I think it's, I think it's super interesting. I feel like the 37signals folks are like, you know, uh, sometimes I think of myself and kind of all of us a little bit, we're kind of like anthropologists of these like, you know, Internet SaaS, entrepreneurs kind of like just observing the whole sociology of what's going on. And they're so interesting in the sense that they both like often have really good insights about like undercurrents of demand, but then they also create it themselves because they have such a big marketing presence and stuff like that. And so it's really interesting. Like what I was trying to do was to kind of like pick apart like, okay, what are the trends that I think they're just like picking up on? And then also what are the things that they are kind of like creating within the ecosystem just by virtue of the fact that they are really successful, They've been in the game for a long time and they're like incredible marketers in a lot of ways.

Host: I mean, what I appreciated about your kind of thoughts, and I think a lot of people had this. The question was, you know, when 37signals says they're. They're introducing a new paradigm, whether it's, uh, we're getting off the cloud or whatever, it's not like that's just for 37 signals. There's this other question, like, is this. For now everybody, is this a new trend in bootstrapping indie hacking startups where, you know, all of a sudden once, um, type products are going to proliferate in our space? And a lot of that's by design. They are, uh, you know, they are, uh, like a religion. People follow them and then people copy them and emulate them and uh, for good and bad. Ian, let's switch over to you. I. I pulled up the transcript from some of your old episodes with Aaron Francis. You guys have a podcast called Mostly Technical that's very good. People should listen to it. And Ian, you are, you know, you're, uh, known to be a critic of 37signals. And even you were thinking, man, they're gonna send. Sell like 10,000 copies of this because of their audience. Like, you were expecting it to be big, is that right?

Ian Landsman: Uh, yeah, I guess I would frame it slightly differently. I expected them to sell a lot of copies because of like, what Tyler was saying. They have a humongous audience. Right. And nobody's ever seen DHHS code, like literally for that reason of like an app. Obviously they've seen it in Rails, but they've never seen an app that he's built. How do you handle notifications? How do you handle when a user gets deactivated? Like all these stupid little things? Like, what does DHH do? Yeah, for those things. Right. And so I definitely thought they'd sell a ton of copies. Uh, mostly because of that. Not so much because I think there's any actual demand for people to run a Slack competitor on their own, you know, servers. Um, so I definitely thought, ah, at least early it would be the type of thing that, yeah, they'd sell thousands of copies because people are just gonna want for. For 300 bucks, I'm gonna want to see what the. I almost bought it. I don't know anything about Rails. Yeah, but like, um, you know, it's like, hey, yeah, what does DHH do? Like, he's a genius. Right? I'm totally agree with that. Ah, so, yeah, I did think that they would sell a good chunk. Um, just for that.

Host: This is what's so fascinating is that there was Kind of two elements to this. There was, okay, is this a new, like, is this the new model for indie entrepreneurs? Like everyone's going to be having once products. And then there was the other side of this, which is like, oh, they're going to sell just thousands of copies. Just on the curiosity, uh, level, just people wanting to see the code. You know, we all know folks like Adam Wavin and Taylor Otwell who have sold things like this. And so I think part of us, you know, there's some people that bought Tailwind just to see how, you know, how does Steve Shoeger design things and how does Adam Wavin, uh, write HTML and css, Right. Um, and some people probably don't even use it. They're just like looking at the code. And that was interest enough. And uh, likewise for some of Taylor, uh, Atwell's stuff in the uh, Laravel ecosystem. And they sell lots of copies. We've seen the volume that they've sold. And I think in our minds it's like, well, uh, 37 signals. The audience is just so much bigger. So one of the reasons I thought we wanted to talk is because there's a tweet that I don't think people are talking, uh, isn't getting enough discussion. And the reception to it was odd to me. So, David, uh, Hanemeier Hansen on Twitter February 7th once Campfire hasn't even been for sale for a week, but we've already sold more than a quarter of a million dollars worth of installable software. The future looks bright for a world of software where not everything has to have a monthly subscription. So a quarter of a million is $250,000 in uh, whatever it was under a week. My first impression was that doesn't seem like that much. Uh, what about you guys? What was your reaction to that?

Ian Landsman: Yeah, I mean it's 800 copies, which is not a lot, not a lot of copies. And you know, I guess one big distinction from what Taylor and Adam have done, right, is that those are first of all they're like developer tools, not end user software. And then also they are, they have built in like demand generation where like, so the Tailwind CSS documentation is like super number one in everywhere in Google, right? And so people come in searching for things about CSS and they're like, oh, they sell Tailwind ui, like, I don't have to do the thing I was going to do and build all that. I could just buy this for 300 bucks from Adam and boom, like, that's great. Whereas this is different Right. Like they haven't really built that up. It's like they're going to try to do the paradigm shift through the force of will. But like if DHA stops talking about it, that's kind of the end of the marketing. Right. So um, or you know, if it becomes, if it becomes a self sustaining thing, great. But if it doesn't, there's not really like a plan B to that that I can see. Like there's no SEO angle. There's no, they're not necessarily even cross selling it. So. Yeah. So I think that 800 copies, given their size and reach is not a lot, I guess.

Tyler Tringas: I agree.

Host: Yeah.

Tyler Tringas: I mean I also had another category of just sort of like, you know, we were talking about where we kind of expected like uh, kind of like inorganic sales. Right. Like things that are not like the true uh, actual customer, you know, who is what's being targeted. I also thought that like just the price point alone and given that they're targeting Slack, you'd have a lot of people buy it just to, just to try it out, you know what I mean? In the sense that like you know, maybe I'm not even sold on it, but for 300 bucks I'll buy it, install it and see because we spend $40,000 a year on Slack. So it's like, you know, even if I try it and throw it away, it's worth.

Host: Yeah.

Tyler Tringas: So I kind of expected there to be like all sorts of random pockets of, of demand and. Yeah, I mean I guess it's pretty low. I guess I haven't. It's less than I would have guessed. I would have definitely have guessed thousands within a week.

Host: Yeah. And especially for that price point, I mean people were also guessing, they thought it would cost 1,000 or 3,000. Um, and then when the price came out that was 300, it was like, oh well that seems that is a no brainer for anyone who's interested.

Tyler Tringas: Did any of us buy it? Did you buy it?

Host: No. There's people on my team that said, oh, a friend bought it and showed me the code. So maybe there's some of that going on too.

Ian Landsman: That was the people stealing the code. They're in the streets. Where I spent my whole career, they're in the streets. People are stealing your shit and sharing it. Dhh. That's what's going on.

Host: They're just, they're getting robbed.

Ian Landsman: Uh, yes they are.

Host: I mean the, there's a, there's a couple different ways we could go here. I think people are going to Want us to talk about? Was this marketed well? Was uh, this positioned well? I think the other thing to, to just also emphasize is that uh, this idea of once, I mean this has been around for a long, long time. And even from the original Basecamp, I remember like uh, an old, old hacker news thread where someone had built an open source version of Basecamp that you could deploy yourself. And at the time as an ardent 37 Signals fanboy, I was like defending them in the comments saying well look at this, you know, this is not going to affect 37 signals at all. Um, you know these open source host on your own uh, options don't, you know they don't people want SaaS mostly for the customer support and just to not have to worry about all the upgrades and everything else. But this is not a new model. I mean uh, Statimic is the original model. Yeah, it's the original model before all that.

Ian Landsman: Right. It's like from the 80s like you sell software one time and like maybe when I do version 2, like I'll sell it to you and maybe you get a discount because you bought version one or whatever. Like that's the original model of selling software. This is it.

Tyler Tringas: Uh, yeah.

Host: Yeah.

Tyler Tringas: Ian, what do you think about that? You mentioned like you're like oh, surprised, like people are, are stealing it. What do you think about. I think uh, like you probably know more than any of us about like technically how would. So maybe that explains like the folks who just want to see the code. Maybe like one somebody uh, threw it up on a GitHub repo and everyone's looking at it and saving the 300 bucks. But like what are the options here for if that is like a big problem and explains you know, a lot of the non sales like what can they do about that? Beside I just read the license just kind of says like don't do it. Right. But like practically speaking that's like pretty much it.

Ian Landsman: I mean you can do more. This all stems from a core problem which is that there, I mean I guess if they're just building software for developers to see DHH's code, that's a certain thing, right? But I assume that's not really what they're trying to do. And According to the ones.com homepage it's not what they're trying to do. But the ones.com homepage is extremely sort of, it's just wrong about a lot of things in the market. And so I mean just so people who don't know, like I've sold an on premise help desk application for 20 years. Um, it's a similar to, conceptually to this, right? Where it's like a B2B piece of software and people install it and you give it to their end users to perform some kind of function, whether that's chat. In my case, it's customer support, right? So, yeah. So in terms of stealing it, there's nothing you can do. The way, the way you get around stealing it is that what people really want is the support. Kind of like Justin said there. And like that's a huge part of it. Like they want every release. They, when you, when they come to you for support, you can check to make sure they actually have bought a license. Um, and you pretty much just don't care about the people stealing it because like, they're not customers anyway, they weren't going to buy it anyway. And you kind of move on with your life. Like you could play the, there is, you know, stuff you can try to do and have it call home and blah, blah. But like, in the end it tends to not be worth the hassle of implementing all that because there's nothing you can do anyway. Especially on like a 300 piece of software. It's not like, uh, you know, a hundred thousand dollars piece of software. Maybe I'm going to try to sue somebody or whatever. It's like there's nothing I'm going to do about this. So I just, I'm going to ride that out.

Host: Well, let's get it. I think the other thing, the other way you solve that problem is volume, right? So I'm sure lots of people are stealing Tailwind ui, but uh, Adam and company are just getting so much volume that it really doesn't matter. It's just whoever's stealing it, there's just enough, uh, people in the pipeline that want it and will pay for it, you know, in the same way, you know that I, uh, mean other things work this way too. There's always going to be a percentage of folks that steal it, but if you've got enough people that are actively waking up every day and paying for it, then it doesn't matter.

Ian Landsman: And most people want to pay. Like, it's just like the music industry, right? Like the music industry made music cheap enough that people stop stealing it. Like I'm sure Napster still exists or whatever, right? There's probably somewhere you can go and download music as MP3s. I have no idea. Right? Yeah, but I don't. Nobody does because it's like, well, for five bucks a month, I just get all the music ever made and I don't have to like get hacked or get weird versions or all that stuff. They just solved it by lining up the demand and the pricing. Right. And that's it.

Host: There's also an argument that some piracy is good. Like my 18 year old May or may not be pirating a well known software by a company named, uh, rhymes with abobe. Um, but eventually, you know, people who pirate when they're teenagers, for example, graduate, uh, get jobs and then ask their boss to buy a license. Um, and my guess is actually that paid off for Adobe. Uh, I think, uh, it's ended up being better, better for them that, you know, people pirate their stuff when they're poor and in college.

Ian Landsman: Well it's the whole, that's the whole theory behind like how Microsoft. Part of why they became dominant in like the 80s and 90s was because like everybody got word at work. Everybody brought word home and used word at home from their like essentially stolen work copy. And that was like part of what drove the like, well if I buy a Windows computer, I don't have to buy like software for it. Like I can bring my software from work home. And like that was all part of that where they crushed everybody there for a period of time.

Host: Eventually everyone, you know, somewhere around 30, when you've got kids and you're just tired of pirating stuff, you're just like, okay, we're just paying for stuff at home, at work, wherever the tired dad thing goes in. And it's like, okay, we're just paying for cable. God damn it. Yeah, um, let's get into your theory, Ian. Why? What did they get wrong about on, especially on the Onece.com homepage? What do you, what do you kind of think they got wrong about, uh, buy once, install, host yourself.

Ian Landsman: How many IT managers do you think they've actually talked to? Not like software developers who do some DevOps, but like somebody down in the dungeon of it at uh, a college. Right. Like uh, I don't think they talk to many, maybe none. Right. And so like the one line, we don't have to go through the whole website, but I feel like the one line purposely encapsulates it, which is id. IT departments are hungry to run their own IT again. Tired of being subvert, uh, subservient to big tech's rain clouds. And I just like literally all of that is completely wrong. It's just wrong. There's no, like you could parse it. You could have talked to literally thousands of IT managers, and I've sold to them for 20 years and I've watched as they all started on premise and every single one of them was like, you have to have a cloud version. We have to leave your platform if you don't have cloud version. Okay, so we built the cloud version, right? We did that all the way through to today, when now it's like maybe 20% of our sales, or probably less honestly, is on premise in terms of new sales. And it's like, yeah, there are reasons to be on premise. Like Chase Manhattan just had a thing, right, where they have 60,000 IT people managing their security and okay, great. Like you're a bank, you want to run your own security. You have a lot of regulatory reasons to do that. Yeah, we have bank customers, they have bank huge IT departments that run physical servers and manage them. Um, and great, fine. Uh, yes, they want on premise software, totally great. But the vast majority of IT managers don't want it, especially for something like an end user app that's like something they're not dealing with. They don't want to be responsible for it. They want to focus on their network security, on the physical security, on device security. Like they're not like, oh man, Slack that we pay. And again, even like the stuff that comes out with uh, $100,000 for Slack, whatever most people are paying, not paying off a Slack, right? You're paying $100, $200, $500, $1,000. Yeah, like at $1,000, let's say you have a thousand dollars a month for Slack. If I'm gonna switch it with the on premise version, like, I gotta have a server, I gotta have somebody responsible for it 24 7, 365. Because if it goes down, I'm gonna be the one who gets yelled at, right? It's the CEO is trying to slack somebody. And my homegrown Slack thing by DHH is down. Yeah, well, now I'm in trouble right now. This is my problem and why did I do it? And what's my answer for why did I do it? Well, we saved $10,000 a year. Yeah, that's a shitty answer. Nobody wants to hear that answer, right? That's not a good answer. And so, you know, it's just not real. And even the, the cloud, like even the things they're doing, IT managers are moving away from physical servers. They're still going to cloud services. Right? Even the things that are on premise are. We now have an Azure cluster of 70 servers or a thousand servers or whatever it is, right? Like so it's just, you know, I do think there is some stuff out there with like architectural things. There's some demand for on premise that's switched. Like you want to run elasticsearch and you want it deployed into your network and things like that. Um, I think there's some demand for that kind of stuff. But it's, it's. And even those, even those, when you see those, they're still fully managed by those companies. So like single store elasticsearch, like, yes, you can have them deployed in your VPC on aws, but you are not responsible for any of it. All that's getting you is like basically networking. So it's in your network. Some of them maybe give you access to the server, some definitely don't. Um, they're. The vendor is still like performing all the security updates, managing the system, all that stuff. Like the IT managers are not doing that stuff. So that's just where I feel like their whole premise was like, this sounds like a good idea. People are tired of paying for SaaS, which I don't even believe is true. Um, and, but let's just say you think that. And I just think it's a faulty. That there's a huge demand by IT departments to get rid of an app that on average is probably like a $200 a month cost for the average install and like for very little upside and a lot of risk. I just don't think that's, that's true, um, anymore.

Host: Ian, while you were talking, you were just bringing back waves of past trauma for me where I convinced my boss to let me install, replace our phone system with an on premise PBX open source software. Put the computer in a closet and I will manage it for our home office.

Ian Landsman: You'll be there 365 days a year if anything goes wrong.

Host: Just a nightmare. Just. It turns out there was open, um, security vulnerability. I didn't know about this thing just got hit by denial of service attacks. Brought down our whole phone system. Constantly had to hire some, you know, some guy that knew how to fix it and it took him all day. It was just a nightmare. And every time the phones didn't work, I was, I got called.

Ian Landsman: That's you. You made that call to save $1,000 or whatever it was, right? And like, oh, that's the thing. I. That whole premise of like, it's never been easier to run a server. Like, yes, asterisk, like that's true. You could spin up a server and it is spun up in a relatively secure state. Totally agree. Compared to like 10 years ago. But the risks have also never been higher. There's more people trying to hack everything in automated fashions than ever before. And if they get into your network and they ransomware your whole, you know, site, like again, uh, well, why did we go with this on premise thing that we have to manage and be responsible for and have security updates for and all this stuff. And your answer is well, we saved $99 a month. Like yeah, that's not an answer anybody wants to hear when you're getting ransomware for uh, $3 million. Right? Like that's the trade off there is horrible. And so it just, you know, I don't, I don't know.

Host: That is a modern Seinfeld episode. Seinfeld, Costanza, Costanza, get in here.

Ian Landsman: They're in the system. They're in the system.

Tyler Tringas: I wondered as you were talking. So I think we should talk about some of the things that once gets right. So I think I want to put a pin that we should come back to that. But while we're on the topic, uh, uh, I do think I wondered. So this is not a pure AB test, right? So what we have is this thing, theory of wants with the idea of pay once and run on your own server. But it's actually the test is Campfire, which is this very specific, very sort of opinionated, minimalist kind of product. And I wonder A, just like how much of each of those things is actually playing out and then B, so like how much of it is people do or don't want once as an idea and how much of it is people do or don't want Campfire. And then I wonder if there's like a bit of a uh, mismatch between those two things. Like to the extent that there are people who think that's a good trade off, you know, because they're like, well I know how to manage servers like in my sleep and I already managed six of them, so what's one more? And I do want to make those trade offs. Maybe they don't want a sort of like fairly minimalist chat tool. Maybe it's the kind of people who are like I have 16 workflows set up within Slack, I like my automations, I like that. You know, like I like the thing about Basecamp that I think is magical was this like really tight alignment with this use case from the get go which was like clients trying to like agencies trying to onboard their non technical clients and giving them just like the, the most approachable doesn't need any sort of explanation. You're just in there, you're using the software. It's super intu. This feels maybe a little bit out of sync where it's kind of like the person who would be pretty psyched on this, you know, is maybe not that psyched on how stripped down Campfire is. And they actually prefer Discord or Slack or something like that. I don't know, maybe that's, uh, a factor here.

Host: Oh, for. I think, I think, for sure.

Ian Landsman: Yeah. I think because to me, here's the thing is like my beef, as it were, which is like, beef is a strong word. Right. But I feel like, you know, they are great marketers and their inclination is we must be revolutionizing the whole. Like, this is a revolution. Whatever we're doing, it's a revolution. Right? And I think if you just. If it was not the revolution, but instead it was like, hey, this is a cool tool for a particular set of use cases, some of which make a lot of sense. Like, obviously a big one. People you see complain about all the time is like, I have a community and Slack does want to charge me ostensibly a billion dollars because there's 20,000 people in my community and there's no free version. There's no for me to do that. Right. Whatever. Fun. So, yes, that's great. Like it's a community. It's low stakes. It's kind of. Nobody's even responsible for it, have a server running with it. It's not like even in a corporate network or anything. Right. This is just like a thing that's out there. You're running the community, it's cheap, it's easy. Yeah, it makes total sense for that. And I think then in that world, I mean, I think the product seems fine and then it comes down to like the product itself. Like you're saying, Tyler, where maybe then is it, Is it too stripped down?

Tyler Tringas: I almost still feel like a, uh, cheaper SaaS version would be better though, for, for like what you just described. You know what I mean? Like, if it's more, if it's really going after, like if the actual laser focused target are these communities for whom Slack is completely misaligned. Right. We've all seen these communities where it's like 6,000 customers and Slack wants to charge you a million dollars a year and you're just like, no, you know, um, I don't know that there would be a very high overlap, uh, between wanting to manage your own servers. Like, I think I'd rather just have, like, I'd Rather pay for Campfire SaaS if I'm that person. And I'd rather like 150 bucks a year, you know that I just click and sign up for it and it's Campfire. I don't know, it still feels like uh, line. Like it doesn't seem like anything properly lines up as like a really good fit between target market and the offering.

Ian Landsman: I don't know because then you are still tied down to like still devs, right? Like this is really just for devs and like maybe a dev who runs a community or whatever but you have to have a dev involved because like you need somebody to run the server. I mean I do think in the end they'll probably have some type of like resellers who just host it for people because otherwise like I don't think it's going to sell much of anything at all without that. Like people just want that. That's what people want. And so yeah, let's.

Host: I think we should get to that in a second. But I, I think there is a misalignment even in that use case which is the thing about running a community and I've run mega maker since 20002014 is uh, we've tried switching to all sorts of things. We started on Campfire and then moved to WordPress P2 which is a hosted install yourself thing and then moved to Mighty Networks and then. But you know what wins is having your chat in the app that everybody in your type of people all have huge network effects. And so uh, for most people, for most community members, there's a misalignment there too which is like if you're gonna use chat and you're actually gonna have an active chat, you want to use the chat that most people in your world are used to using and that's going to be Slack, Discord, Facebook Chat, Telegram. There's like a list of things that exist before some self hosted website that you need to remember to open up every day. Um, it's just ah, the friction there is so much higher. There's all sorts of ways to do product development and um, you know Basecamp has proven that they can build products that lots of people buy. Um, but one of their philosophies that I disagree with is that you can't do pre validation. So I would agree with them that until you put it for sale and put it up, you don't really know. But there is customer research you could do beforehand like interviewing a bunch of IT managers and saying like here's what we're thinking and you'll get, you'll know very quickly, um, whether they're interested in your thing or not. Uh, this is the premise behind the book, the mom test, which is you can go out, ask potential customers good questions that aren't leading questions. And you could even ask them, like, tell us about your experiences with On Prem software. Tell us what your, your company's, uh, attitude is towards On Prem software these days.

Ian Landsman: How much On Prem software have you added in the last two years and burst? How much have you gotten rid of? Right?

Host: And talk about the whole experience. Experience. Talk about the time you installed that PBX phone system. How'd that work out, Justin? You know, like there's there. You can do this kind of research beforehand and again, there's all sorts of ways to do product development. And I'm not saying their approach is bad or good, but I've always disagreed with that idea that you can't do some beforehand. You won't really know until you put it up for sale. But you can do some beforehand. You can see who is already in motion and who's proving that with their actions. You know, are they actively buying this kind of thing? Will they actively switch? Uh, hey, Justin, you've run a community since 2014. What have you tried? Would you ever switch off Slack? I get those messages all the time and I say, we're not switching off Slack. It's just, it's where people are. I, uh, we've, we've tried it five times. We're done.

Ian Landsman: You know, this is one of the things where I think it's unfortunate that people sometimes just follow them mindlessly because they're in a very different. This is where a lot of their advice to me is unfortunate sometimes because they're coming at such a different place with like a huge audience and it's just impossible to not be influenced by that. And it's like, yeah, we're going to try this on premise thing and we're going to put some devs on it for three months or whatever and who cares? Like, I don't want to do all that boring stuff Justin just said, right? Like, I don't want to talk to a bunch of IT managers. Like, I'm going to put it out. And again, I've done this for 20 years and I'm get bored at times of having sold the same product for 20 years. And so it's like, yeah, I just want build a new product and I've done that and I put it out there and I've Seen if it worked. And that's more fun than doing a bunch of product research and talking to people and aggregating and whatever. Right? So fine to do that, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily. If you have one shot and you're starting up something with your own money or you got a little bit of money from somewhere and like, should you start an on premise app? Like, not unless you have a very, very good reason like, uh, to do that. So yeah, I think that's a little bit.

Host: Hey, how come your team doesn't have their own podcast? Head over to Transistor and use my coupon, Transistor FM. Justin, you'll get 15% off your first year of podcast hosting. I've been surprised that, uh, how many folks, um, at least in the Twitter indie bootstrapping community are saying, oh no, this is a success. And I think, I mean this may or may not be a success for Jason and David. We don't really know their true motivations. I think they had bigger aspirations for this. I think they want this paradigm to win. I think they want it to work. And this, this kind of volume we've seen for Campfire, if this is true, uh, unless they've sold a lot more copies since DHH tweeted, this is not the kind of volume a company like 37signals would say is a success. But this is also not the kind of volume that even an indie person I think should think is a success. Like, nothing has been proven or disproven here. If we're looking at, if we're saying, oh, 37signals is introducing this new paradigm, I should try it for my next business. I don't think we have a good case study here anyway. You know, like we have these guys that have an enormous audience that are, I'd say, pretty good at pr, who were on every big podcast, you know, this Week in Tech and Lenny's podcast and you know, they had enough exposure for this ahead of time.

Ian Landsman: Millions and millions of people heard about.

Host: Yeah. And so in that sense it's like, this is not, uh, the response I would have expected from that kind of pr. And if you're just a little indie, you know, and these things often happen to be very launch centric, you make most of your money in the first week or two.

Tyler Tringas: Do we think that's going to be true? I was just thinking about that. Like, Will, you know, are we, uh, extrapolating a lot from, you know, other one time sale products, like uh, like info products and stuff like that? You Know, just based on nothing pure guess. Like would we think that, you know the curve of Campfire sales is going to look a lot like a uh, course or something where it's just like pretty much like the first two weeks is like 80 to 90% of your entire lifetime sales or you know, what do we think about that?

Host: I mean it could, I mean I,

Ian Landsman: I would think yes. Um, again this is just from my experience of selling an on premise product. Like they are not doing the things you would otherwise do. So like there's, they are presenting it like that type of course where like I'm gonna do a huge blitz and that's, that's kind of what I'm doing and I'm dhh, I'm gonna talk about it for a week or two and that's what we're doing. Like I mean the ones.com has no pages right? Like there's no pages on one stock. Com. There's no, there's no one. There's no campfire verse Slack page. There's no anything trying to get SEO optimized. They obviously don't, they haven't said anything and I very much assume they don't have a sales team who's going to go approach corporate clients and be like hey, ditch this fifty thousand dollar a year slack for our 299 product. Because obviously those economics don't make any sense if you're selling a 2:9 product.

Host: They often cited uh, Shopify as like Shopify's use case. Like Shopify spending whatever on Slack. I don't think Shopify has switched to this campfire thing.

Ian Landsman: Not switching. There's zero chance. I mean just the other thing is like everything else aside, everything else aside, you're an I just imagine you're an IT manager, right? You have all these people you're responsible for. You have the system security responsible for all this responsibility. Okay, you're going to take over the chat system. You want to be responsible for it in house. You go to the campfire page, it tells you the support is bare bones only support. That's like literally the words they use is bare bones support. Like that's just not intriguing option to me. Like so you're saying when something goes wrong and if it's complicated, more complicated than I had a problem like installing it on a clean brand new system that you basically aren't going to help me. Like maybe that's true now. Dhh. Just tried to hedge it a little on Twitter I saw and like under promise over deliver I guess Bo. But I just feel like that's like again, are IT managers following? Dhh, I don't think so. So it's like when I go to the web page, what the web page is selling me is bare bones support.

Host: Mhm.

Ian Landsman: Not a compelling, you know, offering really

Host: what I was surprised about is that they did not have a auto deploy with Heroku Badge on this thing right away. Like just simple click a bunch of hosting partners. Um, they Often, they cited WordPress as one of the examples of, you know, WordPress has been doing this forever. Well if you've been following WordPress's story where WordPress killed it cPanel as soon as they got installed in cPanel and there was a one click deploy in every hosting provider in the world, that's how WordPress won. That's the distribution you want in that game if you want, um, you know, lots of people to be installing it.

Ian Landsman: And Even now with WordPress I feel like that's true of the like free open source WordPress. But if you are running your commercial website on WordPress like you're not even doing that. Yeah, you're going to WP Engine, you're going to WordPress.com, you're going to Pantheon. Uh, like there's a million obviously of these like dedicated WordPress hosts that they sassify WordPress for you. Right. They take care of the security, they take care of updates. You don't have to think about it, that's what they do. And so yeah, I mean that would make sense. That would then of course defeat the purpose of like the full court press into like run it yourself. Don't trust anybody else, don't use anybody else. You can do it on your own. If they roll out a bunch of resellers with it and a bunch of hosting partners like they, they should have just built it as a SaaS probably and run it themselves.

Tyler Tringas: Has anyone built that? Have you seen? Because I feel like you, you could build one click deployed managed hosting campfire. My sense is you buy one copy of the cod, you basically have that fired up and then you just tell people, go buy a license to give us your license key. You know, you could probably spend that business.

Ian Landsman: No, uh, it's against the license specifically that you can't host it.

Tyler Tringas: I don't think so. I think you're not allowed to resell it.

Ian Landsman: But I think it says hosting too. Yeah.

Tyler Tringas: Uh, oh really? That's interesting.

Ian Landsman: Mhm.

Tyler Tringas: Okay.

Ian Landsman: It's in the faq. I mean that's something I think, I think they're going to change that pretty quickly because I think yeah, uh, they're just going to have to uh.

Tyler Tringas: That doesn't make any sense that you would prohibit as long as you're buying the license. You know, having somebody then provide like a managed hosting. Okay, that's interesting. Right.

Host: I think they could sell a lot more copies of this and I think uh, one idea would be to add it to the Heroku Marketplace. Add it to the Digital Ocean Marketplace. Make it very, very easy to go to DigitalOcean. You can buy a license uh, probably through. They probably won't like this because it's through other stores that people control. But that's one way you could sell a lot more copies is just make it dead simple to auto install this on Heroku and um, or DigitalOcean or wherever.

Tyler Tringas: Are people used to buying a $300 product through their like DigitalOcean account? You know, like, do they support like one click install? Like, you know, because the benefit of WordPress was it was one click install but there was no cost associated with it. Right.

Host: I wonder if anyone's done that because

Ian Landsman: there is, I mean AWS has a marketplace where like people buy very expensive things through it. Um, but again it's not with the like you're on your own for support and like that whole kind of vibe of it's. It's a different sort of mindset. Um, it does say an FAQ reseller white label. So I guess maybe somebody could. I'm pretty sure I saw them tweet about this. Somebody asked them like can we host it for people? And they said no, but I guess you could do it. Right. Um, but again it's kind of a weird thing like usually in these type of setups, which I used to do this for helpspot before Help Spot, we had Helps our cloud. Uh, we had a hosting partner and they did exactly this. Like when somebody wanted it hosted we just sent them to the hosting partner and they charged them for hosting and they had to buy a HubSpot license. You know, it's kind of not. It just doesn't seem like what they're going after. But I mean they could do it uh, if they wanted to.

Host: You know what happens when you buy it? Do you just get a access to a GitHub repo?

Ian Landsman: No, I think they just give you um, like a one line, like a command line call that you make and it downloads and installs. Okay, interesting that which looks pretty easy and straightforward.

Host: I actually, I think in this sense I think that they are very good pr People like, they were on all the right podcasts, they were talking about it. They know how to craft a manifesto and make a big splash. I felt like the marketing for this was not very good, actually. Uh, I think like you said, I don't think the marketing site is very well done or compelling. You're missing out on all those SEO opportunities. Um, and also the fact that, um, you would at least not. Maybe they did try, but it feels like all the distribution here is with the hosting providers. If you could just get some partners right off the bat that make this super easy, um, then it's like, oh, sweet, I can just buy it and then auto Deploy it to DigitalOcean. Uh, no configuration required. But, uh, any other ideas on marketing or thoughts on the marketing of it?

Ian Landsman: I mean, I think to your point before, maybe this is like their canary in the coal mine. Like instead of talking to a bunch of IT managers, it's like, let's put out a manifesto, let's put out a product, um, that we know people use chat and we'll see if there's interest, that if there is, maybe we do a whole line of things that are like this. Right. And ah, if there's not, then we don't like. I mean I think there's a pretty big like poker tell here, which is that they didn't come out with basecamp on premise, which would be the most logical thing, right? Like if IT managers are sick of this and everybody wants to host everything, why wouldn't you have basecamp on premise, like and still offer basecamp cloud? Right. But then you have base camp on premise. Maybe you have all this private details with you and your clients, like you want to be in charge of it. You're a consultancy, 95 of the people using basecamp. Right. Or some type of consultancy. And so you have some IT premise, like generally some, some capability. So have a basecamp on premise. But they didn't do that. Right? So that's where I'm like, maybe it's a little more, you know, I don't think they spent a ton of hours on this. I think it's like pretty bare bones as Tyler said. And so it's like, let's. This is our market research.

Tyler Tringas: Yeah. I think also like, for folks who don't know the whole sort of history of this kind of stuff, like, you know, entrepreneurs who are just saying like, oh, should my next business this use this business model, definitely need to know that Campfire was a pre existing product. Right. That it was a standalone product that they 37 signals had for a long time and then they kind of like sunset it slash integrated it into core basecamp. So they kind of, you know, again, like I have no idea what that technically entails to just sort of take it off the shelf and you know, polish it back up as a uh, as this like on prem version.

Ian Landsman: I think they rebuilt it. I think they rebuilt it. I don't think it's the old version.

Tyler Tringas: Yeah, but I mean it's still just like a lot of the like design and, and decision choices and all that kind of stuff. It's like, it's not like they came out with like they said, like the once is a totally new paradigm and we have something like hey, like their email thing, totally new. You know, it may m well be. And this might also tie into let's say not going full bore on marketing. Besides like the stuff that's easy and free, which is going on podcasts, is just like, this may be a test of like, is it worth it to build new products under this paradigm? Phase one, ship this thing that you know is going to be the easiest possible thing we can, we can actually ship and just see what happens and use that as a test, you know.

Host: Yeah, it's an interesting. The other difference, and I put this under the umbrella of marketing is I thought Jason's um, intuition about email was actually right when he said, you know, people have, there hasn't been anything new in email for a long time. And, and after a while, you know, after 10 years have passed since Gmail launched or whatever, people are often just eager to try something new. You know, it's like when we were younger, there was Hotmail and then, or Yahoo Mail and then Hotmail and then Gmail. Like these things were kind of coming out all the time and there just hadn't been any new email provider really making a big splash, um, in a lot of time. Although there was little examples with Superhuman and things. It's like, oh wow, there's some demand here. And I think he correctly identified a uh, wave that was building which is, I think people are kind of ready for something new and fresh. Whereas with chat, um, really Slack, uh, kind of capitalized on that. There was Campfire and then Hipchat and Yammer and it was like everybody was starting to use these things so the demand was growing and then Slack came in with the, you know, the cute, fun, well, uh, designed version of that and it just spread like wildfire. This didn't seem to have that same kind of thing though. It's not like um, you know, Discord is relatively new. It doesn't feel like there was this same kind of latent demand of like, oh man, if there was a fresh, you know, chat app out there, I would love it. It's like it didn't have that same kind of momentum.

Ian Landsman: There's also like, I mean another, we haven't even said the name yet, but that is a huge elephant here is Microsoft, uh, teams which like almost every corporate entity already has access to teams for free as part of whatever other thing they own in Microsoft. And so like you already have like Discord and Microsoft Teams for free, you know, chat and then you have slack for sometimes free or else you're paid chat. Like there's a lot of coverage here already. And so I mean in that regard it's like maybe they felt like we don't want to do like an um, SaaS chat thing because there's not a lot of oxygen there and maybe this will be different or whatever, you know. But I'm also not marketing wise. I'm not surprised to see them take this approach because this is how they run things. Like, even if you go on Basecamp, like there's not a lot of SEO organized pages on Basecamp, like there's no Basecamp versus sauna page. I don't think there's like, there's just not a lot of those. Like hundreds of pages and hundreds of blog posts like with all the various keywords and everything. All the stuff the rest of us have to do to like sell our software, like they, they don't go that route and there because do this other kind of marketing which if you can do it is great.

Host: Although I wonder about that. How do, how do you think people are finding Basecamp right now? Like Basecamp seems to have just a ton of normal ass users all over the world. It's gotta be word of mouth or search or like they've built up some sort of marketing asset.

Ian Landsman: Yeah, I think it's both. I mean I think it's search. I still think there's search. Like I'm sure they search like for project management software is like pretty good, right? Which is going to be the big one.

Tyler Tringas: It's also got the sort of inherent virality of it, you know, in the sense that the user base is a lot of these agencies and stuff. So they're constantly inviting clients to it who then have their own business to run and stuff like that.

Host: I mean I heard About Basecamp and 37signals reading Time magazine in like college. I think right so, like, there was a time where they were, like, they. They were on the COVID of, uh, Fast Money or whatever, called the. With the title the Bad Boys of Silicon Valley or something. Like, they had a media blitz for a while that was. They may still be benefiting even from that. I don't know.

Ian Landsman: Yeah, they are. They are bottom of page two for project management software on Google, which is not. That's not, uh, enough for the amount of customers they get. So it's. It's definitely, you know, probably more of like it is built into the product, which I think is a huge thing these days. And something that, like, I'm working more towards with my own product is having more of that, uh, you know, built into the product itself that is inherently going to spread the product as people use it.

Host: Yeah.

Ian Landsman: Um, and Basecamp obviously has that, as Toug said, because you're just inviting other people in and other companies and you have all this interaction and people get to see it and use it and then take it with them, um, when they have that kind of need, which I think is huge.

Host: Yeah. And don't underestimate the compounding advantage, uh, of doing that for 20 years. And it's just like a lot of people. There's just a lot of people that have used Basecamp at some agency or, you know, doctor's office or wherever they're using it. And it's like that, that kind of word of mouth when you go to the next place and it's like, well, let's use Basecamp. That's what I use. Because the question I always have with them is we always talk about their halo effect. Like, they've got this huge audience and all these things. I always wonder what percentage of their customers are fans. And in my head, I'm thinking it's probably actually quite a small percentage. Like 5% or 10% maybe.

Tyler Tringas: I bet it's higher than anything else, though. I think, like, what you're saying is true is that we overstate the value of an audience. And oftentimes there's not that much of an overlap between the audience you build and your target customers. But I bet whatever percentage it is, it's the highest for them than any other software company, you know, in the world. I think they do do a job of, like, attracting their own customers through their books and stuff like that, being like, here's how to remote work and why you should, like, give a shit about remote work and why it's amazing. And by the way, here's our software that enables it. You Know, I think they have really good like integrated marketing like that. So, you know, whatever number it is, it's probably the highest. That's probably the high water mark.

Host: Yeah.

Ian Landsman: That and that early leverage of that. Right. Like, has anybody ever gotten more bang for their buck out of that audience early on? Like when they initially in 2006 and 2007, like, made maximum use of being Rails and Rails becoming famous. Right. Like, Base Camp was everywhere being talked about everywhere. You know, they practically invented SaaS. Right. Like essentially for like, for a small bootstrap style company, they did invent SaaS. Um, so, you know, I think they maximize that, which is great.

Host: Yeah. And let's not underestimate the value. Like their top. I just put Basecamp into Ahrefs. Their top link to Basecamp by traffic and value and etcetera, is from Ruby on rails dot org. Um, so I mean that we can't underestimate the fact that they also have, uh, one of the most popular, um, programming frameworks out right now. And that, uh, gives them some juice.

Ian Landsman: We see that in the Laravel world. The Laravel commercial products have done great and there's no SEO and there's no traditional marketing and there's no sales team. There's Laravel and people love Laravel and then people use the products and people talk to other people about the products and that whole thing. Right. So yeah, I mean, that's a great marketing path if you can pull it off. Like, it's an incredibly hard again, it's like start an amazing framework that is one of the top three programming frameworks in, in the world. Well, okay, that's not like a, like a viable business strategy for most people.

Host: Right.

Ian Landsman: But, but if you could, if you could do it, like that's, it's awesome. Yes.

Host: Yeah. Even then, like jQuery, I don't think had a commercial product associated with it, uh, that gave them the same, uh, well, let' but let's get into Tyler's question, which is what did they do? Right. Tyler, uh, why don't you start here? What did once or campfire get right here?

Tyler Tringas: Well, I mean, I think that like, so basically I think especially like out of our discussion here, I think like once is a better pitch than switch to campfire. Like, I think I'm more and more convinced that like once is a better idea than the relaunch of campfire. Just I definitely feel like there is subscription fatigue, you know, like up and down. I think like consumers are feeling it. They're being like, I've Got a subscription to six different streaming services and you know, athletic greens and creatine gummies and you know, like everything is just like on subscription. It's like stacking up, you know, and then businesses are in the same boat. They're like, oh my God, you know, we have all these subscriptions we even forgot about. You know, I do think there's like subscription fatigue and I think there is also a sense that Software in particular SaaS is kind of overpriced. I think both of those are probably like real things that they are identifying, uh, a tipping point on. Especially kind of like come out of this kind of economic cycle where a lot of businesses are starting to pay attention to that. Where we went through this like kind of chaos where everyone was just like, just buy whatever you need and add as many businesses as you need. And now folks are leaving like uh, oh, this has gotten way out of hand here. So I do think like, like part of the reason why this resonated so quickly and even when they just announced once just as an idea without any products attached to it, are that folks are feeling that they are resonating with that, they are empathizing with that. I uh, think like for me, I think that there is kind of like less, like more unbundled ways to address that. Right. So I do think just like for example, cheaper SaaS, I think think, you know, campfire for like 29amonth, you know, flat fee for unlimited users would maybe be a better product than this kind of open source version. I think that the once paradigm maybe is a better fit for like kind of prosumer tools.

Host: Mhm.

Tyler Tringas: So like, I'd actually be curious to hear what you guys think about like taking, let's just say once just the landing page is like actually correct for a minute. Like what would be the best tool to launch under that, like best product to launch under that paradigm.

Host: Right.

Tyler Tringas: Because like for me I hear. So I'm constantly recommending this um, app called Crisp, which is this like I was just gonna talk about Chris. Yeah, I'm using it right now. Yeah. And I recommend it all the time to people. Like literally 8 out of 10 times that I send it to somebody go, oh my God, another subscription. Are you kidding me? You know, and I don't know, it's like dollars a year or something like that. It's like app works like magic. It's like a no brainer. People are feeling it, you know, um,

Host: although Crisp, the reason we switched to Krisp is because compared to Intercom, it is like orders of magnitude more affordable.

Tyler Tringas: I'm telling you something slightly different. Okay, but that's a good example too. But what I'm talking about is this app that filters out background noise.

Host: Oh, Chris with the K.

Tyler Tringas: So that's just a uh, cheap tool as well, you know. Yeah, like kind of the same.

Host: Yeah. I think, I think Crisp, the, the chat app is a good, I think the opportunity for indie, um, which is that Intercom decided to go upmarket and go enterprise and in the process squeezed out SMBs and small companies. And Crisp came along and said, listen, we're going to do all of it for $99 a month and it's going to be incredible software made in France and uh, you're going to love it. And uh, it's very well made software. It's affordable. I recommend it all the time because it's an affordable option and they have a great business because they're addressing a market that Intercom just said we're not interested in. So I think there is a huge opportunity there. It's still SaaS, right? It's still SaaS. Um, but I think that's almost the lesson is if there is a trend of subscription, ah, fatigue, I'm still not totally convinced about this. Like um, you know, we sell a prosumer SaaS. Um, most of our customers are prosumers. And um, we haven't seen a ton of people canceling. Uh, like our, our uh, our growth rates are still good. We're still growing. Uh, our churn is I think relatively low. It's like 2.5% or something like that. Um, so we haven't seen a big uptick in people canceling because of subscription fatigue. We've seen pockets of it. Like uh, you know, uh, after Covid or whatever there was like a little, a little jump of people saying oh, I have too many subscriptions. But overall since 2018 as a prosumer product, we haven't seen a lot of subscription fatigue.

Tyler Tringas: Just to play devil's advocate on that though, I do think you might. Yours is a little different because it's hosting. Right. So it kind of like has to be ongoing. Like there's really no logical version of like a pay once. But like I do think also you might not just see subscription fatigue showing up in churn. It's like, might also be invisible basically people who don't sign up. So for example, when I recommend this like AI filtering tool that you don't have to have.

Host: Yeah.

Tyler Tringas: If people look at and they see one more subscription, there might Be a category of people who would pay like one time who just like don't ever sign up because they're like, you have too many subscriptions. I can't keep track of it. Like I'm that way with streaming services right now. I'm just like not, not subscribing to stuff because I don't want a million more subscriptions, you know?

Ian Landsman: Like, yeah, I do. I think that's true. But also it depends a lot on the market. Like I don't feel like with help spot we ever have that because it's like whatever. You have 20 full time agents, they spend literally eight hours a day every day. So they are going to need to pay for this software whether you pay us or somebody else. Like there's not an expectation that like, oh, this is the last piece of software that's driving me over the edge. We're literally using it like, like a thousand hours a week of time are in this piece of software. Right. So it's fine. But there are um. So that's kind of maybe part of the problem with Campfire. Right. It's like trying to replace something that is like, well, we're in slack all day every day. Um, it's a high usage thing. It's not an area where I'm like annoyed by the subscription that much. As opposed to like, yeah, like obviously on my AMEX bill is 50 other things that are like I used it once, I use it once a month, I use it once a day for two minutes. It's like those things start to add up and you're like, oh man. Like yeah, this would be cool. Once a week I need this. But it's like another $9 a month for this one day a week. You know, one time a week I need this thing. And it's like no, I'm not, I'm just not gonna buy it because like it's just one more thing I'm have to remember to cancel in six months or a year or whatever.

Host: Yeah.

Ian Landsman: So like there are like, I do think there is some like opportunities there for it to be like super cheap or uh, annual super cheap or once or whatever. There are some things like that that aren't so enterprise dependent.

Host: Is there another example of a product that maybe is targeted at prosumers or SMBs or smaller companies, whatever that is. Uh, buy once, host yourself. That is relatively successful.

Tyler Tringas: Uh, it's not quite host yourself but there's the entire like themes business. Like Shopify themes. Yeah. That I do think kind of have fit. They're like the closest analog to like fairly successful businesses where you're kind of pay once or ends up being like pay infrequently. Right. Like every 18 months or so there's a new like optional paid upgrade kind of thing. Um, but I don't know about.

Host: I think that business is amazing by the way, but that seems like a quite a different business.

Ian Landsman: Yeah, there's no security implications usually there and all that kind of stuff.

Host: Yeah, the only one I can think of is something like statimic which is a uh, CMS that you pay for once or you can get a new license every year if you want uh, and then you host it yourself. Um, but I actually think the advice I've been trying to give Static forever is for them to get into the hosting game. Um, because I think they would have a much. I think the business would be better in some ways. The lesson I'm getting from this is unless you're going to go upmarket and charge hundreds of thousands of dollars for on prem software, if your target is small companies and prosumers and whatever, if you have a once product like statimic, I would actually say maybe you should consider offering some hosting or partner with some more hosting providers and you each get a chunk of uh, revenue or whatever.

Tyler Tringas: This is the entire commercial open source playbook which is basically it's pay nothing upfront and then optionally pay for managed hosting and stuff like that. And there's tons of successful businesses doing that. And so pay once is kind of the inverse. Right. Which is like pay upfront and there's no hosting available. But they basically said pay nothing upfront if you want the code but if you want us to host it.

Ian Landsman: So yeah, I mean pay once and nothing after is not even really like it's really like a very consumer oriented mindset. Um, if there is no business software and ascending like this because there's always like, like even statamic is 65 a year for updates or like there's always like you know, help spot was on premise and you own the license so it would run forever if you stop getting support. But it was basically a SaaS uh, from a pricing perspective because you had to pay $100 a year per user in uh, you know, support and updates and nobody wants to run it without support and updates because why would you ever want to run it without support and updates. So like now listen, is there a small percentage that run? I mean we, whatever. Occasionally we come across a customer who is still running it and they don't have support and updates, and they're on version two from 10 years ago. And fine, like, whatever, yes, they could do that. But 98% of people, right, didn't do that. They either stopped using it and churned. At some point, they stopped paying because they went to something else, or they've just paid forever because they're like, yeah, we want updates and security fixes, and when there's a problem, we want to be able to call you and you know, all those things. So. So it is a little weird. I don't know if there's a lot of B2B apps that would go with the no support forever mindset.

Host: This is my favorite. Ianism. My favorite. Is it Ianism or Ian Landism?

Ian Landsman: I don't know. I like both.

Host: It's about volume. The software business is about volume.

Ian Landsman: That's true. Yes.

Host: And I think this is one thing that I missed early on when I was trying things out is that, like, transistor, uh, works. Because every day hundreds of people are looking. Well, not just hundreds. Thousands of people are looking for podcast hosting. And enough of those people find us and we get. We literally need hundreds of trials every month for our model to work. Um, Tailwind UI probably has hundreds or thousands of people buying it every single day or every single hour. I don't even know. But you want volume, and volume is like, enough interest that's driving the funnel so that once they get to you, there's enough daily, weekly, monthly, annual volume there that you can convert enough and have a business. And once the challenge I think is going to be, it's like, if it's truly once, you're just not going to have in so many of the product verticals, you're not going to have enough volume. You have to keep the volume going. So, uh, you're not right.

Ian Landsman: It doesn't build on itself ever. It's only new sales, which is, you know, a much much. I mean, I don't know. I see them not being very interested in this, to be honest with you. Like, I mean, the money is not. Even if it was very successful, the money is minuscule compared to Base Camp.

Host: Yeah.

Ian Landsman: Just because of how they've set it up. Like 300 time dollars one time, just not a lot of money. Uh, and I mean, they buy their own m Mission. Right. Made hundreds of millions, maybe close to a billion dollars at this point. Like, I think. I think people don't realize how big Base Camp is. I think people think Basecamp is like, oh, man, those guys make $50 million a year, whatever. No, Basecamp has a lot of zeros. It's a humongous business. And I just feel like they're. I don't know, like, if I ran a business that big, would I want to have this little thing that was doing a million, 2 million, $5 million a year? Like, yeah, yeah, I don't know. You know, like, we'll see. I mean, maybe they stick with it and they love it and they just want to do it to do it. And. And I think it has other benefits. Again, all the way back to the beginning, I thought it would have more benefits for like, the Rails developers and such who would just want to, like, see the code. You know, it acts as like a, uh, getting into Rails learning tutorial because, like, you can see how the pros build the real app that functions and all that stuff. Yeah, and maybe it's that people don't value it up to 300. Maybe it's that everybody's sharing it so they don't need to pay for it.

Host: I wonder if they'd marketed it, marketed it as a course, if it would have done better. Like, dhh.

Ian Landsman: I've seen people tweeting about it like that. Like, I've seen a bunch of people be like, you don't buy any course, just buy this and look at the code. And like, that makes sense to me,

Host: you know, like, yeah, the positioning of that.

Tyler Tringas: Slap a couple screencasts on there, just like doing walkthroughs of the code and sell it for $3,000.

Ian Landsman: Ah, they probably should do that.

Host: Uh, the thing is, the way this was presented is it was presented as a philosophy, as a paradigm, as a thesis that, that the bootstrapped or the indie or the startup community now has to respond to. So it's like, here's the thesis. We're giving it to you guys now. This is going to be a thing. And so now, uh, it's like people are always saying, like, well, why do you guys. Why does anybody have to comment on this at all? And it's like, well, it's an open thesis that's out there now. Uh, that kind of the community has to grapple with.

Tyler Tringas: Yeah, I was just going to say, I think like the 8020 here is like, if you think a lot of this is compelling and you app it to your own M business and your market and you say, I think this is more right than wrong. You know, the, the sort of basic premise of once as applied to whatever it is you're building. I would probably start with like a Cheap annual subscription. Right. You know what I mean? Like, and just try to frame it that way because I still think you get like most of the, of the underlying benefits of why this was so resonant with a lot of folks without some of the worst aspects of it. For example, just like how difficult it is to build a business without any kind of recurring revenue whatsoever. So I think like, if I have one takeaway of like what should like a new Bootstrapper think about once, it should be like, consider a low price point annual plan, really like heavily market that, you know, versus like very high, um, monthly subscription alternatives and kind of start there, you know, I don't think there's enough of a boost and I think we probably have seen that like latching on to the once type of like marketing wave at least the initial conclusion is there's probably not enough there to make it worth your while to like go all in on once with a new product. I think that's obviously like very early days, so that's to be determined. But that's where I would land as like a one line takeaway for Bootstrapper. Uh, right now.

Ian Landsman: Now.

Host: Yeah, I think that's good. What about you, Ian?

Ian Landsman: Yeah, I agree, like for the, in terms of Bootstrapper advice, as I often feel about 37 signals advice is like, it actually doesn't apply to you very much person out there. Um, because, yeah, I mean even this initial launch, like you're not going to be on all these huge podcasts, right? Like, you're not getting any of this juice that they got. So you'll have your own level of juice. Like maybe you have some connections, maybe you can get on one good podcast or whatever. Like you can do some stuff, but you're not going to be ubiquitous and everywhere. Like they can be. And so, yeah, and I mean definitely, like talk, if you think about on premise specifically, like, go talk to some IT managers. Yeah, go talk. Make sure that they actually want the thing you're thinking about on premise. Um, totally agree. Like bust out a spreadsheet, do the math on like how many customers you need if they never pay you again or if they pay you once every three or four years because you're going to have that kind of like, well, new version upgrade cycle or whatever. Because like, I mean, listen, we have people paying for HelpSpot who've been paying since 2006 and have paid $100,000 or $150,000, right? And it's like if instead they had just paid me one time $300 like that doesn't take many of those to be like your business is completely different and you're basically out of business. Like I would be out of business. Right. No recurring aspect to it. Even though I, even though his own licenses. Um, the recurring aspect was the support and upgrades. And so I had this recurring element that just builds up over time, over years and is the foundation. It gets you through the down periods right. Where like something like all of a sudden there's SaaS. Like for three or four years there was no SaaS and we just sold on premise and it was fine. And then there's Zendesk and everybody else and they're like people want SaaS. Right. And that took us time to like for us to build a SaaS platform and like do all that stuff. And so you don't want to have no income like during that period where like things you get a little shaky like you, you want to have. Oh yeah, we have these other hundreds of customers who are like paying us every year and happy and like they're not necessarily on the cutting edge. Like they're not looking around being like what's the new hotness? And things like that. Like um, so yeah, like yeah again like selling software developers. Another little Ianism is I think terrible market. I think nobody should sell software developers unless you have a very, very specific insight or something there access to the market because they're horrible customers. They're always looking for the next great thing and what's going to improve them, what's hot like whereas when you sell the Bob the manufacturer like they just as long as your stuff works, they don't ever look at an alternative like they're fine, they're happy, they're loving life. So like those are great customers.

Host: Yeah.

Ian Landsman: So yeah that's always in general you gotta be careful about copying anybody else in the industry because, because you don't know what they have going on, you don't know their edges. Uh, so yeah, you gotta be careful there.

Host: Yeah, I think folks should really do their research on kind of three different levels. Uh one, go and find some people who do have one time sale products. Listen to their podcast. Like if you listen to Adam Wathin, he has one of the most successful products I've ever seen in my life. Even he is anxious about one time sales.

Ian Landsman: He is anxious all the time.

Host: Listen to his podcast, you'll hear that it's a thing and he doesn't need to be anxious to be fine. But find people and then even observe like oh that's the kind of business. That's the kind of scale, that's the kind of insight or advantage you need to have to succeed in that market. Right. Uh, the second is, um, if you have a thesis like, uh, you know, I'm going to build the on prem version of mailchimp, do some interviews, come and talk to me. Come and talk now. We want to reduce our email bill. I think a lot of companies do. But if you came and told me like here's a thing that you're going to host yourself and use SES or whatever does that stuff, I'm going to be like, no, I don't want that. I just want a more affordable version of mailchimp, please. Um, and so, and it's even more than that, right. I want a more affordable version of mailchimp that still has all the features and things I like about mailchimp. So it's a high bar. Oh. Another example that I thought of was Peldi, uh, at Balsamiq, they publish their revenue numbers every year. Just look at the trend in their business. They've got one time desktop sales and it's just going down, down, down, down. What's going up, up, up, up is software as a service.

Ian Landsman: There's literally nobody in the industry who doesn't have that exact same chart. There is like nobody who sells an end user in any way oriented product where the on premise version's like going up and the SaaS version is going down. Like that doesn't exist for anybody. I mean again like we talked about, there are some things growing a little bit with like these infrastructure type things, but not an end user oriented app. Like it's not, not a thing.

Host: All right, I think let's leave it there. That was good guys.

Ian Landsman: Yeah, thanks for having us on.

Tyler Tringas: Yeah, great stuff.

Host: Definitely. Go check out Ian Landsman on Twitter. Maybe you should ask Ian what his uh, budget is at helpspot for cbd. Gummy subscriptions?

Ian Landsman: None. Maybe I got to get in on that. That's uh, a write off I hear. So let's do it.

Host: And go check out Tyler Tringas on Twitter as well and what he's doing with Calm Company. Lots of good thoughts there. And uh, I'm on Twitter as well. Mijustin, if you have feedback about this, definitely hit us up. We'd love to hear it. And yeah, we'll maybe do a follow up episode in six months when we've got more information. Maybe all of our, our, all of our present day information was wrong and will be proven. Could be it will be proven so not impossible. All right, see you next time.

Ian Landsman: Thank.

Tyler Tringas: You.

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