The Startup Ideas Podcast
The ultimate guide to product building with the man who changed software
Mon, 09 Sep 2024
I’m joined by Jason Fried, Co-founder and CEO of 37signals, as we deep dive on innovative startup ideas, our frameworks to building products people love, and our thoughts on the current software landscape. 1) The "Scratch-off Ad" app idea:• Full-screen ad you scratch off with your finger• Blow into mic to clear "dust"• Chance to win prizes/coupons• Global, once-a-day experiencePotential: Massive user base, high engagement 2) "Shower Door Sketch" app concept:• Simulates drawing on steamy shower glass• Ephemeral canvas that fogs up & clears• Add shower sounds for immersion• Screenshot to save ideasPerfect for creative brainstorming!3) Key insight: Bring real-world experiences to digital• Leverage mystery, surprise, uncertainty• Create moments that can't be replicated• Tap into universal human experiences"There's some sort of deeper universal things to tap into here." - Jason4) The power of limitations in software:• Time-based experiences (HQ Trivia)• Visit-once websites• Apps with "open hours"Creates scarcity & increases perceived value 5) Hobbyist ethos missing in modern software:• Early internet had more quirky, fun projects• Less focus on monetization, more on exploration• Need for "weirder" apps and experiencesChallenge: How can we make the internet weird again? 6) Cozy software movement:• Make apps feel warm, comfortable• Contrast to clinical, cold modern design• Focus on user experience & delightGoal: Create software people genuinely enjoy using Want more free ideas? I collect the best ideas from the pod and give them to you for free in a database. Most of them cost $0 to start (my fav)Get access: https://www.gregisenberg.com/30startupideas 🎯 To build your own portfolio businesses powered by community you might enjoy my membership.You'll get my full course with all my secrets on building businesses, peer-groups to keep you accountable, business ideas every single month and more!Spots are limited.https://www.communityempire.co/📬 Join my free newsletter to get weekly startup insights for free:https://www.gregisenberg.com/70,000+ people are already subscribed.To improve your rankings your business on Google and using AI for SEO, sign up tohttp://boringmarketing.com/FIND ME ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergInstagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/FIND JASON ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://x.com/jasonfriedLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-fried/37signals: https://37signals.com/Episode Timestamps:0:00 Intro02:17 Startup Idea 1: The "Scratch-off Ad" app 18:44 Startup Idea 2: "Shower Door Sketch" app concept:33:43 Frameworks for building products people love
But I'm like, well, what if you can make an ad that is the product? What if ads could be the product? How could you get people to look at these things as if that's the only thing they're there for? Now, great advertising is one thing, but there are very few great ads. So anyway, here's the idea.
So I think it could make a ton of money and literally there'd be almost nothing to do to make this thing happen, except getting the word out. And I think the word would spread so rapidly.
How much do you think about marketing when you think about an idea? How much are you thinking about how am I gonna get the first 100,000 people to download this?
I don't think about that at all. For me, it's like,
the idea any good i don't i think it is do i i don't know let's build something and see and then it's like a goosebumps feeling like i think we're on to something that to me is the best feeling in product development it's the feeling of i think we're on to something here but a lot of the a lot of it is the software industry is too serious it takes itself too seriously and i just would like to see some more people playing i'll say this it feels like this idea of cozy software that you're talking about
Feels like 1 in 100, not 50 in 100. Most software feels a bit boring right now. I'd like to see more weird in software again. Yeah, let's make the internet weird again. Yeah. I am so excited to have Jason Fried, someone I've looked up to for a very long time on the pod. Jason could be anywhere, but he has chosen to spend his time with us. Thousands of people who love startup ideas and builders.
And thanks for being here, man. Yeah, it's great to be here, Greg. Thanks for having me on. And I said, you can only come on if you have an idea. And your response was, I've got something I can't get out of my head. And so what's going through your head?
So I have had this idea for a number of years, which I don't like, actually. I don't like it because I think it's good, but it's ugly in a sense in that I actually don't, in a sense, I don't want to see this idea in the world. But there's something about it that seems so simple and that it would be so popular that I can't get out of my head. So here's the idea.
First of all, it's advertising based, which I don't like to begin with. So the whole premise of this I don't like, okay? You know, scratch off tickets, right? You know, little lottery tickets, whatever, right? My kid, my son loves that we get them every once in a while, five bucks worth and scratch them off, right?
And so it kind of hit me a number of years ago, like that whole act of scratching something off is a very fun thing. It's one of the few... like cheap mysteries in the world. Like for a buck, you can like, you don't know what's going to happen. It's very rare to find that these days. So I like this idea of scratching something off. So I thought that you could make an app. Okay.
That is basically, actually, let me step back for a second. I don't like ads and I don't like ads typically because they tend to be in the way. They're always like in the way of what you actually want. But I'm like, well, what if what if you can make an ad that is the product? What if ads could be the product?
Like, how could you get people to look at these things as as if that's the only thing they're there for? Now, great advertising is one thing, but, you know, there are very few great ads. So anyway, here's the idea. Every day, let's say at noon, GMT. This would be a global phenomenon, perhaps. It could be geolocated. There could be different things in different places.
But the idea would be once a day, you load up this app. Anytime you want during the day, but only resets once a day. And there's an ad. So you load it up and there's a full screen ad, like a tastefully done full screen ad. Could be video, probably still just to start. And it's sort of printed on this sort of gray substrate, like a scratch off ticket, right?
And you have to scratch it off, you know, with your finger. You got to scratch off the screen with your finger. And the whole thing has to be scratched off before the next thing happens. Now, what would be fun is... The scratch off part, like whenever you scratch off a real ticket, there's always like these little remnants of like crumbs of the silvery powdery, whatever it is.
So I thought it'd be fun that you have to go like this into your microphone. Basically, it would pick up the sound and it would like blow off the dust. So you have to scratch it off and then go. And this would be a thing like everybody in the world could do once a day. Right. Once you do that. Once it's all gone, there would be some sort of a pause.
And there would either be a coupon for the company that sponsored the ad, or there'd be nothing. Just like when you scratch off a ticket, like the chances, the odds are very low, but sometimes you get a free ticket. Sometimes you get a buck, a dollar, three, whatever it'll be. The company would decide what they would give to a maximum of 5% of the people who used it.
So this has to remain a long shot and a bit of a mystery and a bit of a, I don't know what's going to happen today. But, and you only get to do it once a day. But I think you could build something as simple as that. And that would kind of be it. Now, you could have special interests. You could have geographical things. So in the United States, you get a certain ad.
If you're somewhere else, you get a different ad. If you're into bikes, you could get just bike advertisers. There's a whole bunch of things you could do here. But it would be, in my opinion, the simplest possible way to get the most people to look at one thing a day, because they might get something behind the scenes. And it's kind of also a fun mystery. And the ad is the product.
And the blowing into the thing is sort of a fun thing. And like, that is it. Now, I think this could be huge, actually. I think a lot of people would do it. I think it could be like an international phenomenon kind of thing because it's so stupid and simple and like, why not?
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Your next cash-flowing business is waiting for you. I don't know what the legal implications are of doing a scratch-offy kind of thing, but I like this idea that the phone, it has all the elements. It's touchscreen, you can move your finger, you can blow into it, and then it's a full-screen ad, and there's maybe something like a prize behind it. Again, I kind of don't want this to exist because...
I just don't like the idea of selling ads. But I think someone who didn't mind that could make this into something quite big and interesting. And there's probably a lot of other things you could do with it. So that's my idea.
Well, Jason, you came on the wrong pod to share an idea because these people will eat up this idea. All of a sudden, there's going to be like 25 seed-funded startup founders who are just going to go after this.
I mean, think about if I'm making things up. A hundred million people launch this app every day. Like I could totally imagine that happening because there's nothing to do but scratch something off and see if you won something. So you could see this becoming this massive way to get people all to focus on their phone on this one ad for 25, 30 seconds a day, every day.
And you can imagine the ad inventory you could have and how it could line up. People could buy certain days that were special days that are coming. You could just imagine a whole ad sales team backfilling this with tons and tons of inventory. So I think it could make a ton of money and literally there'd be almost nothing to do to make this thing happen except getting the word out.
And I think the word would spread so rapidly. And all I'm asking for is 1%. That's all you're asking for. Just loop me in somehow. But anyway, what do you think of this?
So do you remember HQ Trivia? Yes, I do. Yes, I do. Yes. So Russ, who's the founder of HQ Trivia, is a good friend of mine. is a genius. And he was the co-founder of Vine before, which essentially was TikTok. He was like the host of trivia as well, right? He was never the host. He was the product co-founder and CEO. The host was a guy named Scott Rogowski, I think. Okay, okay.
But I know what you're talking about. I know the thing, yeah. What was brilliant about HQ Trivia? So the fact that, to your point, it happened at the same time every day. People felt like they were a part of something bigger than themselves. The commitment was pretty low. It didn't take very long. You can do it with your friends.
And there was a variable reward, to your point, around maybe I can actually win whatever it is they're giving away. I think what you're saying in a lot of ways is you're taking a lot of the mechanics that, well, it actually came from scratch-offs, but that comes also from HQ Trivia and you're applying it to...
a game where the advertiser... The problem with HQ Trivia was, if you remember, it was like, first they're giving away $10,000, then $100,000, then $1 million. They're raising venture capital to subsidize it. You're saying, no, no, no, don't raise venture capital, subsidize it. You're saying, get advertisers.
Yeah, you don't need to have any cash. There wouldn't be any cash prizes. there'd be some, I think you could have all these creative prizes from the advertiser who's advertising. So it could be a coupon off. It could, I don't know what it could be. There could be things. You have to be very creative.
I'd love to see it be very creative, but the advertiser who's going to get a hundred million people or more to look at their ad for like, you have to start with a full screen ad and you have to get rid of it, which is also kind of a weird thing, but like They are responsible for the prize, for the distribution of the prize. There is no money to be given away.
And whoever would make this app would just be selling the ads, basically. And then they'd be in charge of getting more people to look at this every day. And the other thing I thought of would be your odds. Because I like this idea, and HQ Trivia did this, and TV, live TV used to do this, which is like, I like that there'd be a schedule and that something would happen. And you could imagine...
the whole planet stretching here, but like picking up their phone at the same time doing this. So my sense would be, it'd be interesting to have time be a function of probability of winning. So the closer you do it to the moment it goes live, the higher the chance of you winning perhaps or something. So if you do it at 7 p.m.
and let's say it goes up at noon, you can imagine everyone kind of doing it at noon because like maybe their chances, maybe they have a 3% better chance of winning or something like that. The further off you go, the less chance that you have just to create this this moment for everybody across the world at the same time to do this thing together.
There's another idea that my friend Scott Heiferman, you know, Scott Heiferman. Very well. Yeah. Very well. Scott and I talked about this idea, a different idea, but similar years and years and years and years ago.
which we talked about building, which we didn't do, which is similar, not to this ad thing, but to this, this scheduled internet experience thing, which was every day, let's pick again, pick noon GMT. You'd go to a webpage. Now we had some weird ideas. I'll share those in a minute, but to make this weirder, but let me, the premise was everyone would go to the same webpage and a video would play.
And it'd be a video that would teach you how to do something. It could be like candle making. how to sketch a room in proportion. It could be a quick recipe. It'd be a three minute max video. It would be on YouTube or it wouldn't be on YouTube. Actually, it wouldn't be on YouTube. It would just be in this platform. Okay.
People could submit these and we'd have this ad, this admin in the background going, yeah, that's a good idea. No, that's really well done. Whatever. We'd have this big, bigger thing. It would play for three minutes. And when you showed up, it would start playing and it would play from wherever you jumped in, like live TV.
And then like if you came in 45 seconds later, you're not seeing the beginning and there's no rewinding and there's no archive. There's no way to look at this later. If you missed it, you missed it. It's over. You show up at the same time. We serve this video out in real time and then it's over. And then the remaining 24 or 23 hours and 57 minutes of the day, there's basically an ad.
And some brand could buy the ad at that URL for the whole day. And they can have a whole website. They could do a whole thing. It could be an entire website, not just like a static ad. But this idea, again, that everyone shows up at the same time to learn something new together. Maybe you already know how to do it, but it'd be kind of this fun thing. And the rest of it's an ad.
But the weirder thing was we were going to say, what if you did this at a new URL every single day? You'd see the URL in different places and it'd be sort of a mystery in a game and like an underground thing to figure out if you can find out where the URL is going to be for tomorrow's show, essentially. We thought that would be kind of fun. Anyway, didn't do that either.
But it's the same kind of like having fun with real time, making a little bit of a mystery, a little bit of a treasure hunt and not really knowing what's going to happen. So I like that kind of stuff.
One of the things that you're saying, which I think is really the future of the internet is, Adding opening hours and closed hours to apps. Yeah. That's basically what you're saying. So it's funny because when, you know, in the real world, you know, you can't go to your grocery store at 2.30 in the morning. It's closed. Or you can't go to your favorite breakfast restaurant at 9 p.m. It's closed.
But on the internet, everything is so readily available. And it's funny because I was talking to my wife last night. We recently got like linear television. I don't know what that is. Like television. We got like cable, cable TV. Got it. Yeah. Things are on right now.
Things are on.
Yes.
Yeah.
Things are on. And I was talking to my wife and I was like, wow, this is amazing. And she's like, why is this amazing? As I'm like, I just put on Comedy Central, I think it was. And I was like, because I don't need to do anything. We're not going on to Netflix and then trying to figure out, oh, within Netflix, what do I need to watch? Making all the decisions.
So I think what you're saying is really interesting, which is you kind of have to be there.
You kind of have to be there. It's like a great comedy show. You're like, oh, you had to be there, you know, because it's all in the delivery. There's something about that moment. Tied to that would be neat to have. I mean, this is a stupid, again, another stupid idea, but there's something in it that I like, which is speaking about your point about TV.
It'd be cool if there was a TV that you could buy. Maybe not cool. It'd be dumb. But let's imagine there's a TV you could buy that just had an on and off switch and no channels at all. It just picked a random channel every time you turned it on or off. Or on, I should say. So you turn on, turn it off, turn it on, new channel. Turn it off, turn on, new channel.
You don't know what you're going to get, but there's one button. It's on or off. Each time it just serves up whatever the hell it wants in real time. Like it's a real legitimate cable channel, but you don't know if it's going to be history channel or some local public access or sports or whatever it's going to be. It's just going to be what it is.
And I think that while these are obviously novelties and not like that interesting, There's something that in itself would be like people wouldn't really use that. It'd be sort of, again, a novelty, like a kind of a gag, interesting sideshow.
But given that everything is on demand, everything's available to you all the time, it'd be interesting, I think, for there to be a few things on the Internet that are not that way, that are right now, only now, not archived, not saved. If you miss it, you miss it. I like that. I think that's kind of fun.
And there's probably a lot of other ideas that we could, you know, play with around that general idea. And free, you know, and it's a free app, right? Totally free. This would be totally free. I mean, the whole thing would be launch the app, add, scratch it off, blow it off. Do you win or not? Don't know. Tomorrow I'll try again. Like free, obviously.
But I think it could be one of those things that just takes off. It just has a virality to it that irritates me actually. Yeah. But anyway, maybe something like this even exists. I don't even know. But I feel like if the right people did it the right way, it could definitely take off.
Right. Well, I think it's you have to channel your inner Russ. You either need to be Russ or you need to channel your inner Russ. So what's Russ doing right now?
Is Russ available?
Honestly, probably. He has an incredible house and nature. He's got a few things going on, but I think that for the right idea...
come out of hiding come out of hibernation he would he would come he's he's brilliant um i've got another idea okay here we go we got no no jason please this is just opening up so i started on this idea a number of years ago never i got somewhere and then just didn't go anywhere i love drawing in the shower on a shower door or a glass shower door.
Steam creates the shower or creates the, what's interesting about drawing on a shower is that you're removing. Again, it's like, I like this idea of removing versus adding, you know, removing the scratch thing. So you're drawing and removing the steam. And I draw interfaces all the time on shower doors. That's where a lot of my like product interface ideas come from. I play out with it on the door.
And the reason I like it is because it's so ephemeral that you, you sketch this thing. And then, And 45 seconds later, the steam is gone. It's like it's not there anymore. So it's like this perpetual idea board where I don't have to erase anything. It doesn't matter. There's nothing that's that's precious about it. It's just temporary. Just like the shower. I'm not in there that long.
I'm 10 minutes, 15 minutes, whatever, screwing around like great. So I'm like, how can I, but there's something about the white noise and the temporal or temporary nature of it that I like and the removal. So I had this idea to basically have an iPad app. You launch it, steamy shower.
immediately just steams up okay it doesn't launch steamed up it launches clear and then steams up within a second or two to kind of have the effect if you put on headphones you're going to hear shower noise so you're going to hear like water you don't have to have headphones you don't have to use the audio part but if you do you're you're in the shower very relaxing and you just draw
And it fogs back up. Perhaps I wouldn't, V1 would be, that's it, you're done. If you like something you drew, take a screenshot. There's no like save, it's just, that's it. It's a perpetual refreshing sketchboard, basically, made of fake steam. Now, you could imagine there's a setting somewhere where you could change the steam, re-steam duration or whatever. But no, don't want any of that.
I love, like, what's the simplest possible version of this? Load it up, steam, draw, goes away, you're done. Like it, screenshot it. whatever, put on headphones, there's sound. If you don't, there's no sound. Maybe there's sound without headphones. I think it'd be cool though, if it only worked with headphones, like it wouldn't just play through the speaker.
I don't know if that's even possible, but it'd be kind of interesting to really have to feel like you're really in it. So that's another idea. Again, based on these, like the simplest possible version of something is always really interesting and entertaining. The reason I started building this was someone I'd hired an iOS developer. And frankly, I'd like to still do this.
So if someone out there wants to do this with me, let's do it. I'd like to do it. The thing we ran into was simulating. It has to be good. The steam part and the feel of running your finger over it. And sometimes you get a few drips and sometimes you don't. I want that to be so realistic. And I feel like I need to work with someone who knows how to render things. stuff realistically in that way.
Um, and, um, personal is working with shoes. Great. But like it just, it, we didn't really get far enough and that was, it just kind of faded away, but I'd love to do this. I'd love to do this cause I want this to exist in the world. It'd be free again. Um, I'd call it like shower door. I don't know what the hell we'd call it. Um, shower sketch or steam, steam, steam wand.
I don't know what it would be, but, but, but that's what it would be. So if you're out there and you want to do this, um, Show me that you can somehow.
I was going to say, that's what I was going to say.
I don't want a bunch of emails from people like, because that happens.
You have to be world-class at this. You have to feel it. Yeah. Sorry, go ahead. No, I was just going to say, you have to be, this needs to be a problem that you inherently understand and you can picture it and you have the skill set to, and have ideally done something similar before so that you're not spending a year trying to figure this out.
Yeah, there's like so little to it, but there's a lot to it. The app does like nothing, basically, but the nothing that it does needs to be just so right to feel as natural as it would to really draw on a steamy shower door. I know someone could pull this off. I'd love to support it and make it happen. I would use it all the time.
One of the things that bugs me about sketching apps is how permanent they are. I know you can delete and the whole thing, but like there's just tools, there's tools everywhere. I don't want any of that. I just want to surface and I want to go away. And if I like what I did, I'll save it with a screenshot. That's enough.
Yeah. What I'm, what I'm picking up on, well, actually before I say what I'm picking up on, What you're describing to me is what I call the margarita pizza problem, which is a margarita pizza. Of course, it's so simple. It's just dough and tomato sauce and cheese.
But the difference between the best margarita slice you've had and Domino's pizza, not hating on Domino's because Domino's has its place in society as well. But it's not like you're eating a slice in Naples. Um, so that's what you're saying with, with your product. Like it needs to be Naples, not Domino's.
And by the way, in the comment section, I know what we're going to get people saying, Oh, why, why are you talking smack about Domino's pizza? Like,
Domino's at the right time is the perfect choice. There you go. As this thing would be the perfect thing to reach for when you want to be in that mode. And there'll be many times when I would use a sketching app for other reasons. So this is all about the Domino's moment, the shower door moment, this idea at least. But yeah, I think it's actually surprisingly hard to pull off well.
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That's what we realized as we got into it. And part of it is even just the finger dynamics of like, there's something so in the analog world, things do what they do. Like you put your fingertip on something and the drawing is going to be the same exact thickness as your fingertip. Because it's analog. It's your fingertip that's literally removing.
So whatever contact point, if you press harder, it's thicker. If you press lighter, it's less, right? If you use your fingernail, you can get a thinner line. And we couldn't quite get there with the touchscreen dynamics at the time. Maybe we didn't know how. Maybe we weren't able to. Maybe this has been a number of years now. Maybe it's changed.
But it'd be really nice to have pressure sensitivity and have it really truly detect the outline of your finger and make sure that that would make the removal of the steam precisely that much. So there's just no uncanny valley here. It's like it behaves exactly as the real thing would. If anyone out there goes, I love that kind of thing and I know I can absolutely do that, please reach out.
Maybe I'll regret saying that, but... I'd really love to see this work.
How much do you think about marketing when you think about an idea? How much are you thinking about how am I going to get the first 100,000 people to download this?
I don't think about that at all. For me, it's like, is the idea any good? I think it is. I don't know. Let's build something and see. And then it's like a goosebumps feeling. I think we're onto something. That to me is the best feeling in product development. It's the feeling of, I think we're onto something here.
We're working on a current product right now, which I can't share many details about, but we just played with an idea. It's so hard to be so abstract here, but we play with an idea around images that in this category of product, this is not an invention of a new category. It's an existing category. But in this category, images are not typically part of the vernacular.
We found a way to make images like first-class citizens in this category. And it's super unusual and weird, but when you do it, you go, oh, we're onto something here. There's something here. That's what I think about, is finding those there's something here moments. And then I always feel like,
I've managed to build up a large audience on Twitter and LinkedIn, let's say, and maybe a few other places. I feel like I can get the word out. And I feel like if it's any good, other people will then get the word out. So my interest is not in how do I market this? It's how do I make this really good that it will market itself as best it can? Not everything can do that.
Some things spike and then die, you know, so you have to have some sort of something that's going to carry it over the longterm. And, and these kinds of ideas, I think that the scratch off one, I think could carry itself because it's one of those things like people would tell other people about and, There might be some other ways to make it more viral.
Like, hey, if you tell someone else about this, we're going to increase your odds by 1%. There's a million ways you could game that, which is, again, why I kind of don't like it. It's like pure gaming in a sense. It's like pushing every gaming lever button switch you could. And I'm sure you could do that. The shower door thing is more like maybe a very niche, super niche thing.
I don't care if 600 people use it. I don't care if 18 people use it. I want it. I'd be happy if I'm the only one who finds it interesting at all. Um, and so I don't really care about that. You know, that's like a personal passion project for me.
That actually just got me thinking of a whole other idea, which is, okay. What if there were limited, limited edition apps that, So just like how there's vintage cars and there's only like a thousand of this one model of Porsche, let's say, this shower app could be like one of a thousand and it just could be an expensive app.
You know, it's funny. I think someone tried to do this though years ago. It was like a fart app that was like a thousand bucks or something in Apple. And it was like, That was the novelty, you know, and Apple like said, no, you can't charge a thousand bucks for this or something like that. But I do, I don't know.
Um, I know with, with test flight, I think you can of course limit the number of downloads or however that works, but I don't think you can do that with the app store in general. So I don't know how you do that, but I like, I like this idea. Um, And there's things you could say, well, you'd have to enter a code, but Apple would not allow you.
There's a lot of things Apple wouldn't let you do there. Maybe on Android you could do that. I like the spirit of that, though.
But those people aren't on Android, realistically. Like the person, you know, I think it would have to be iOS, right?
I mean, some, some apps are just going to naturally be limited by their demand. It's like most people go like, I'm not what a sketch thing. That's like steam and I can't save anything and goes away. Like what? That's like, so that might naturally, you know, maybe there are 900 people in the world who find that interesting, but no, I like, I like the idea of, um,
I mean, it's kind of what we've been talking about at a different level, which is this idea of limits, like the real time limit. Like you're either there when it happens, you had to be there or it didn't happen. Yes. And this would be, you know, you either got it. I mean, one thing you could do, actually, you can put something in the app store, I believe, and then discontinue it.
And then it would just stay on people's phones. I don't think that it's deleted. I know we almost certainly that's how that works. unless Apple's changed those rules, but I think there was a time when that was true. Maybe it's still true. So you could like disc, this is how like high-end watch brands create watches a collector's market. They'll make a limited number of watches.
They won't necessarily be a limited edition. Sometimes there are limited editions. There's many of those. But like Patek Philippe, for example, will make a watch for six years or for four years and then just discontinue it. So it wasn't like we're going to make a thousand.
It's like we're going to make this and we're going to decide at some point that there's enough out there and we're going to support the collector community by making sure that this will never be made again and then it will hold value or whatever. So you could just discontinue things, not go into them with limited edition ideas, but just discontinue when you're done.
Enough people have grabbed this. Enough people have downloaded this. We're done. It'd be cool, though, if there was some sort of secondhand trading market for apps you can't get anymore. Totally. I don't know how that would work. I don't think you could do that. But there's some fun stuff in there.
In 2010? 14 or 15, we had a really popular app, but it got acquired and got shut down. It was this video discovery app. It was called Five Buy. And it was shut down and our team, this is around the time when Flappy Bird was really popular. So we skinned Flappy Bird so that when you open up the Five Buy app post it closing down,
it turned into Flappy Bird, but with our logos and our branding and yeah. So you didn't have to download a new version of the app. It just, wow. And people like Ryan Hoover and all these people were going into the app and Ryan wrote like a whole blog post about it. Yeah. And it was so funny. Like it went viral, like millions of people, you know, millions of impressions.
People were trying to get their hold on apps. There's something here. And I think like the genius of everything you're saying, like to summarize is, The real world has a lot of ideas for how to develop a product that's going to work. Because you mentioned time. You mentioned surprise, treasure hunts.
A lot of the stuff you're saying, ephemerality, a lot of the stuff you're saying is, hey, this is happening in the real world, and I wonder if this could happen in software.
Yeah, I think there's... You might say like, well, it happens and it's happening in the real world. That's great. The internet's different or software is different. Why it shouldn't happen here. It's not like fit to happen here. But I think, I think there's, I think there's some sort of deeper universal things to tap into here. Like mystery, surprise, uncertainty moments.
Like this is happening in this moment and then it's not happening anymore. This is what makes things valuable in a lot of ways. Like that they're not always on demand. That like, you know, you go somewhere and then you leave and like you're not there anymore. And they could only experience the thing when you were there. You can take a video and pictures, but you know they're never the same.
They remind you to some degree, but you can never really be there. It's like being, you know, I don't know, the Grand Canyon. Like there is no photograph that actually represents the Grand Canyon. Every photograph, the best photograph is purely an abstraction.
Um, because when you're there, the, the volume, the size, the, the, the, the, um, the scope of the thing leaves an impression that is impossible to capture in pixels. It just, you cannot. And there's other things like that. I mean, like love is like that. Like there's all these other things that were, these are feelings that can't be captured.
And that's kind of partially what makes them really, really special. Uh, and, um, you can't, we're not, I'm not suggesting that we, that you can do that necessarily digitally, but there's, there's some variations of that that I think would be fun to play with.
And I'd also just like to see, and this is not fair because there, there are, there's plenty of like fun software, but a lot of the, a lot of it is the software industry is too serious. It takes itself too seriously. And I just would like to see some more people playing with software, playing with ideas in these ways, not like creating games. Games are fun, obviously, but,
But not about the game mechanics so much, but just like conceptual ideas like that, like the shower door stuff is like more about playing with something. It's an idea that you're trying to simulate that sort of not like a flight simulator where it's like you're trying to do something very complicated in a sense, but just trying to actually simulate something very simple. I don't know.
Maybe there are plenty of things like that. There might be just like even sound apps or something that just like recreates the sound of nature. These things exist and whatever. So it's not like I'm not saying anything super novel here, but I'd like to see more of those kinds of things out there in the world.
What have you seen recently of a piece of software that has had a little bit of fun that you're like, whoa, these people, they're on, you know, this is interesting. Like, have you had a lot of Is software boring now, or are you seeing stuff that's exciting you?
I'm trying to find an app. I think I may have deleted it. There's some company. Maybe you'll know who they are. They make timers and really fun typographical things that are super simple things that just look really fun and look really cool. I can't remember what they're called now. There's also some company called...
something saw, gosh, like it was like simple software or like unnecessary, or I forget what the name of the company was, but they were making really cool apps that really are just like, you already have a timer, but this timer is like more fun, you know, that kind of thing.
You know, to be honest, I think this is maybe not where you're going with the question, but we recently bought, we actually traded. So we had a Jeep Wrangler and we traded it for a Land Rover and And so I had a very traditional experience at a car dealership, which was like a bad experience. It's like four hours of sitting around and paperwork and going to the finance office.
And it's like there was nothing fun about that except getting in the car was fun. But the rest of it was just bad experience. And then we recently just traded. We had an Audi e-tron, which we're trading for Tesla. That experience has been fun. And actually, there are very, very few things in this world, I think, that are truly like night and day within the same industry.
I don't know if you've bought a Tesla or been through the experience, but it is a night and day fundamentally different experience. You do everything through your phone.
it's actually fun and interesting to see like where you're at and when your car is going to be delivered and you don't really know and they give you a date and then you fill out some more stuff and someone texts you and there's excitement. And it's like, it's actually a fun thing and there's no paperwork. It's all digital. It's super simple.
Uh, there's no like finance guy trying to sell you, you know, the upsells and the wheel entire pack. It's like, it's just actually like a fun experience. And it's not like the software is fun, but the experience is actually fun, especially in contrast to what else exists. This is something that I, I really admire about them.
And something we've tried to do in our products is to try to make them feel cozy and comfortable and, in a way that I find a lot of software to be very clinical and cold, especially like modern design aesthetics, a lot of stuff just feels very cold and clinical.
Um, so I think you can bring a little bit of like, this feels warm, so it's not necessarily fun, but there's a warmth to it, which I think is cool to see. Um, there was that one app or that one game years ago, maybe it still exists. It's like that sort of skiing game where you kind of hold your finger down and yep. I forget what it's called. Beautiful. Absolutely beautiful, simple, artfully done.
The whole thing is just, was so wonderful and maybe still is. That's one of the last experiences I've had using software. And this is a number of years ago where I felt like one person made this just to delight people. Anyway, I'd love to see more of that and less like How big could this be? Even though the idea I was sharing earlier, I feel it could be big and gamed and the whole thing.
I think it says something that we can't come up with 100 apps quickly. Both you and I create software, involved in software, have been in it for a while, but we can't off the top of our head be like, here's the 20 different things. I think it feels like I'll say this. It feels like this idea of cozy software that you're talking about feels like 1 in 100, not 50 in 100.
Most software feels a bit boring right now.
I think boring is a good word for a lot of stuff, actually. And it's unfortunate. You have these incredible little hand computers or laptops, whatever it is. What I feel like is missing, and again, this is maybe like the old guy coming back and talking about how it used to be, right? I don't want to be that.
But there does seem to be a hobbyist ethos, which seems to be missing in a lot of software. It used to be more of the hobbyist, like almost surprising themselves with the fact that they made something that works. It was like... awesome. And it's in that, that this thing works. This is great. Like it's totally quirky and weird.
And I made it for myself and maybe you can use it vibe, which was like the vibe, uh, like shareware and all the stuff that happened before the internet. Um, and early days, the internet too, um, and early websites and early personal blogs, like that kind of stuff. There was a, there was definitely an era of hobbyists, fun exploration. We don't know what this thing is yet.
And I think what ends up happening is that as, as you begin to understand what something is, some of that fun leaks out of the bottom. It's just like, you know it too well now. And there's less of an explorer's mentality. It'd probably be like, if you were to go to a piece of land in the mountains that you've never been to, the first time is like, wow. You go back three or four more times.
There's more wow because you discover new parts to it. But if you've been back 15, 20, 30 times, you know it too well now. And there's no more surprises left. I mean, there could be like an owl could fly by or something like, you know, whatever. There could be other things. But you go there with a sense of like, I know this now. And because I know this, I'm not expecting to be surprised.
There's that awe is sort of missing. And I feel like the software industry is sort of in some ways become that. Um, and I would say, you know, in our minds at 37 signals, we're actually, we've been pretty conscious of this lately, last few months specifically, actually been talking about this more internally and we're trying to make some really sort of weirder things.
Um, so, um, I, I'd like to see more weird in software again.
Yeah. Let's, let's make the internet weird again.
Yeah.
Or let's make the internet weird period. Not even an again. you know?
Yeah. It's funny. Like when you run into the, yeah, true. It doesn't need to be again. It can just be, I mean, it is weird. Like there are, of course are corners where it's like super weird. I saw a link yesterday. Someone sent me, I don't know, like, I think I saw it on Jason Kaki's blog or something, which is, there's a website that you can only visit once.
Of course you can clear your cookies and like, but, but basically you can't, it sort of sets a cookie. It's like, you've already seen this. And I think that's kind of interesting. You know, again, like it's not commercial. Who cares? Like enough with the everything has to be an asset. Like everything's become an asset class versus like just it's quirky and weird. So I like that idea.
Like you visit a website once or again, the website only works for three minutes a day or that kind of stuff. I'd love to see more of that. And I'm sure there's a lot of that in the edges of the Internet. But it'd be neat to have more people run into that so it doesn't have to be so super esoteric and only a handful of people maybe. Absolutely. Yeah.
Absolutely. Yeah. Jason, I know what I'm doing this weekend. Making things weird? Making things weird. I'm making things weird. This has inspired me to look through... So yeah, just to put out some weirder stuff and see what happens. I love this idea around ephemerality and time-based apps. I think the idea... I actually really love your scratch-off idea.
And the blowing... That blowing idea on top of it. Come on. That was awesome.
That's the extra spirit of it that I think is important also. I've actually been surprised, frankly... that there's not more done in that way.
I think there's, of course, there's like, you know, motion sensing and, you know, and game controllers or some of that, but like blowing into it or shaking it or like tapping it in a way that I don't know, like what, I don't know enough about what's possible, but I know certainly you can pick up audio on the microphone and you could probably pick up decibel levels perhaps.
So like a harder blow would blow things harder, that kind of thing. I'd like to see some more experimentation there. It'd be really fun to see that. So yeah, please make some stuff. And if anyone wants to make any of this stuff and you really want to do it, let me know. You don't need my permission, by the way, obviously. These are ideas we're sharing openly here.
I'm going to call these guys out because I'm actually going for dinner at the co-founder's house in a few hours. There is a fun software studio in Paris that are called Ammo. A-M-O. A-M-O. Okay. They will put on YouTube what their apps are, but they have some motion apps. I don't know if you remember this app called Zenly.
It was like a location-based tracker, kind of like a find your friends, but you can send stickers and there was messaging on top of it. They sold to Snapchat for like $250, $300 million. And now they've gone in, same team basically, have gone and created a social studio where they're iterating on three or four social apps
And a lot of them, one is like a photo app that as you move it, the photo is different and you can see different parts of it. That's cool. And they're pushing the edge on a bunch of different things there. And they've also recreated their Zenly app. And it's starting to get traction. So I think, yeah, I guess it's coming out of Paris. It's coming out of probably, you know, these things exist.
There is some weird stuff. It's just at the edges.
Absolutely. And one of the mistakes you don't ever want to make is like making this mistake that if I don't know what it doesn't exist, like that's such an ego centered way of looking at the world. Like all I know is what I know. There's so much more I don't know.
So many of these ideas we might be talking about, someone else is sitting there in another corner of the world going, I already made this. Don't you know about this? There's like a billion people using this thing. So all this stuff could already happen and already exist. And if it does, wonderful. I'm so glad to hear it. I'd love to hear about what it is. I'd love to be exposed to it.
So yeah, our own world, everyone's world are quite small. So maybe the internet is still very, very weird in a lot of ways. And maybe there are all sorts of fun apps and things that we don't know about that would be cool to explore. But I have not seen the shower door app. I want to make that. And the scratch off thing would be fun to do. I just don't want to build a sales team.
It's like not my thing.
Totally. Jason, where could people learn more about 37signals instead And you?
Well, you can go to 37signals.com. That's the number 37signals.com. Basecamp.com. Hey, H-E-Y.com. Our products we make once is another thing we're doing now. O-N-C-E.com, which is another kind of playful idea maybe in software these days. And then I'm mostly on Twitter slash exit. My name at Jason Freed, F-R-I-E-D, or on LinkedIn. You can find me there. That's pretty much it.
And my email address is public. You can find it. You can email me. And let's see what happens. Amazing.
Thanks, Jason. This is great, Greg. Thanks so much. This is really fun. Later.