Transcript: ‘What Jason Fried Learned from 26 Years of Building Great Products’

The transcript of AI & I with 37signals’s Jason Fried is below. Watch on X or YouTube, or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

Timestamps

1. Introduction: 00:00:32
2. What architecture, watches, and cars teach us about software: 00:02:06
3. How Jason thinks AI plays into product-building: 00:10:54
4. How developers at 37signals use AI: 00:20:58
5. Jason’s biggest realization after 26 years of running 37signals: 00:25:47
6. Where Jason thinks luck shaped his career: 00:29:58
7. What Jason would do if he were graduated into the AI boom: 00:32:41
8. Dan asks for advice on running a non-traditional company like Every: 00:37:22
9. Why staying true to yourself is the only way to build something lasting: 00:46:39
10. Wholeness as the north star for building products—and companies: 00:49:38

Transcript

(00:00:00)

Dan Shipper

Jason, welcome to the show.

Jason Fried

Good to be here, Dan.

Dan Shipper

So I have a very important question to start with. What watch are you wearing today?

Jason Fried

Are you a watch guy?

Dan Shipper

I am a watch guy.

Jason Fried

Alright, so today I’m wearing—I’m embarrassed because I don’t know the reference number. I don’t remember exactly. It’s a vintage Heuer. I think it’s called a 1163 or something like that, from 1974. And I dig it because I just—I like the color. I like the case. It’s kind of that seventies style, like oval case, and then just the really bright orange. It’s kind of a neat piece. It’s nothing remarkable, but really kind of cool. I’ve been enjoying it for a while.

Dan Shipper

It’s beautiful. And what about you? Well, I’m wearing a Sub, which I bought for my five-year Every anniversary.

Jason Fried

You buy a new watch?

Dan Shipper

I’ve been doing it for five years, right? I wanted to mark the occasion.

Jason Fried Nice. Nice job. Did you get it from an AD or did you have to get it pre-owned?

Dan Shipper

I got it pre-owned.

Jason Fried

They’re hard to find unfortunately.

Dan Shipper

So, but there’s something here which is like, I think you have this interesting aesthetic appreciation for things like watches and cars and stuff like that. I think you can also see it in the products that you make, and the products you make are so well-crafted on every level. I’m curious what the relationship is or what the overlaps are.

Jason Fried

The overlaps. I would say I’m inspired by a lot of things that are not software, so we could start there. I’m inspired by watches. One of the things I like about watches is that they’re basically all the exact same thing for the most part, yet there’s like a thousand different designs and I think that’s interesting. I mean there’s of course different versions, but really it’s like there’s a few hands pointing at a few numbers and some that can do a few other things, but for the most part it’s like a round base on your wrist to some degree and like, wow, there’s a lot of different ways to do that. And I think that’s always been interesting to me.

Cars are full of details—materials, how things come together, how things feel tactilely, the tactileness of something, the ergonomics of it. Where is everything? Is everything within reach? I’m just fascinated when I sit in a car that has really good ergonomics and you can tell someone really thought about it versus someone sort of drew it. There’s this sense of like, oh, someone drew this out. There’s a blueprint here, and then they put it together versus someone probably—I’m guessing, I don’t know—but like sat in the seat and thought about what it’d be like to drive this.

Same thing is true for great architecture. So I love architecture. It’s probably my—I’ve realized like my real true love in the arts, let’s say. And being in a great space, in a great room, in a great building of any sort is just kind of almost like a spiritual experience for me. Just the way the proportions are and the light comes in, and the colors and the textures and the way materials meet and the scale. It’s just all those things. I just love the feeling that it gives me, I would say.

Same thing is true for being in a car, like inside or outside, and then also like a watch. And I try to want to build products that give me a similar feeling, understanding that there are huge limitations. I mean, we’re talking about like a flat screen and pixels, so I can’t bring different materials to the table. But you can bring a sense of scale and you can think about it in terms of what if it was a physical object to some degree. And I just, I don’t know, I try to find that place where I feel a deep satisfaction with what I’m looking at and using in the same way I would if I was to stand in a nice building or be in a nice car or something like that. Trying to find that feeling. There’s not really an equivalency here, but there’s a sense of, yeah, that feels right. And that’s what we try to do with the products.

Dan Shipper

What’s the last building you were in that made you feel that way and why?

Jason Fried

I was in a building in Big Sur, California. Do you know where Esalen is? So I was at Esalen. I’d never been, first time I was ever there. And there’s this really beautiful circular meditation hut building, which is down by this river. And I’ve been in many, many buildings that I’ve really appreciated. And this is just maybe the last one I can think of that was like that, where I just walked into it and I said, oh, this just feels good. There’s something about the scale, the space, the materiality, the radius of things. I don’t know what it was. A lot of things and the location just made me feel good. This is the right building for right here.

Things I tend to like—just buildings made with very honest materials. So I actually also enjoy looking at modern architecture and being in some modern architecture, but I find most of it to be... oftentimes it looks good in pictures and not as good in person. Meanwhile, a lot of older buildings or buildings made of more natural materials feel better in person than they look in pictures. And so I like the in-person feeling. That’s what I kind of judge something by.

Dan Shipper

So that is really interesting. One of the things that you said just now about enjoying being in a car, for example, that someone had obviously sat in as they designed it—at least I think they did. I don’t know, but I think that you can kind of tell in a certain way. Did it come from a blueprint or did it come from experience? And the thing that it makes me think of is, I know you’re a big Christopher Alexander guy. And he has this book that I read in college when I first met you called The Timeless Way of Building.

Jason Fried

Great book.

Dan Shipper

It’s a great book. And I literally have not read this in 15 years, so I’m probably going to butcher it. But I do remember he makes this distinction between, I think what he calls self-conscious and unselfconscious design. And unselfconscious design is like where design starts. And he makes this analogy to the way that people in primitive societies might build their house. They’re literally just building a hut as they live in it, and they’re patching holes as they come up, and there’s a very direct feedback loop between the person living in a space and feeling the tensions in the space and then resolving them vs. we have specialized people, architects who are like making plans for a thing they’re not going to really be inside of and don’t necessarily understand the people who are in the buildings. And in many cases, is that where some of this comes from?

Jason Fried

I’m just trying to think. I do, so I have—I’ve been on this book kick for finding books. These are not the only two, but these are two that I bought recently, which are exactly what we’re kind of talking about. This is like a book of handmade buildings, non-architect designed buildings. Just spaces that people made themselves, you know, weird, neat things. You know, just like—and some of these things like, look at the inside of this crazy ass thing, and this is like a geodesic dome kind of thing. But you know, you can imagine you would love to be in a space like this. It would just, there’s something about the feeling of these spaces. And so, this is one of the books, this is another great book called Handmade Houses. And it’s similar style. Wonderful pictures of like, this is a crazy ass like kitchen sink set up here. But look at the panels, they’re like diagonal in the back and there’s just kind of stuff everywhere. And this is not about it being a mess. But like this is someone probably who was able to find like windows from other buildings and pieces of glass and they just made it all work, right?

And I’ve been in a number of buildings like this, not like these, not these specific buildings, but there is a real soul and character that comes through in a space when someone who wasn’t an architect designed it just for living for themselves. That’s not to say there aren’t great architects. And there are, and there are amazing buildings built by amazing architects. And I love many, many buildings built by many great architects. John Lautner is a great example of someone who I just love, love his houses. Number of great architects anyway. But there’s still, for me, a charm and a soul stepping into a space that was just put together by someone with like a crafty, creative vision. And even if they don’t even have that, but just kind of sewed it together essentially. And I don’t know what it is, but it’s similar to the Christopher Alexander point. I think his whole point is like, the best architects are essentially the people who need the spaces. And you know, again, there were incredibly important buildings built by great architects too. But I don’t know, I think there’s something to it and I know it’s an acquired taste. I’ve been through some of these spaces with people who don’t share my point of view and they’re like, what is this place, a fucking dump?

(00:10:00)

I mean, it is in a way, but it’s a good one. And there’s some, I don’t know. They really, and I don’t know what it is, but I really like them and I don’t know how to make things like this, but I really like them. And I pay more and more attention to things that are built that way than the things that the average person might look at and go, that’s amazing.

Dan Shipper

So we’ve made it 10 minutes into this podcast without talking about AI, which I think is probably right. But I’m going to bring up AI because there’s something about this that reminds me of some of the things that I’ve been noticing. So inside of Every, we incubate products and we have four that we run internally now, in addition to the newsletter that we run. And there’s something different about building products in AI. One, because the game board has been reset in a lot of ways. And so everything is new. So it’s this really, I think, unique time to build for yourself because anything that you want probably hasn’t been done. And then you also have all these tools that make it easy for anybody to build a thing. It’s way easier to just build a prototype than it ever used to be. And so all of our products are built by one person and they’re building for themselves first, and then building for everybody inside of Every. And then building for the audience after that. And there’s something about that. I mean, I think we aspire to have our products be a little bit more polished than some of the house examples. But there is something about that where it’s like, it’s a uniquely good time to be building things that you live inside of and can give to other people.

Jason Fried

Yeah, I mean, I think one of the differences, of course, like with these house parallels, like these people built these houses for themselves to live in their own lives. A product usually—you could build for yourself, to your point. And that’s what’s really wonderful about AI building right now. I think most tools that are going to come out of this are actually very personal tools. But generally a product, if you’re a product company and you make products to make a living, you make them for other people.

And so when you make things for other people, it’s a little bit different than like hobbling together something for yourself. And this is, I think, one of the really interesting things that I don’t really see, actually, frankly discussed enough. There’s a lot of bragging about how fast people can make things these days. And then I go, make things for who? And that’s where I think there’s a breakdown because I think you can make things quickly for yourself. And I think that’s incredibly valuable. And this is how I got started in software. I used to make FileMaker Pro databases. For those who don’t know what that is, this used to be, I mean, maybe FileMaker Pro still exists, but it’s like a graphical user interface to basically make a database and you could layer your own graphics on it to build an interface. And it’s essentially a product that you make for yourself to store things and look things up, which is essentially what most products are anyway. All the backend stuff was provided by FileMaker. You could drag in these tools and put your UI around it. And these are just tools I made for myself. And FileMaker was kind of—I didn’t know how to program, but I could figure out how to make FileMaker and do some scripting and stuff and kind of pull things together, which is essentially what people can do with AI now, even faster and better in a lot of ways.

So I think that’s incredibly good and wonderful. I am still currently skeptical but optimistic, but skeptical at the moment that people are going to be building really great tools for others purely with AI. While you can basically build a great tool for yourself purely with AI, but once you have multiple people involved and all the edge cases that come with multiple users and people who don’t know how a system works like you do or have different approaches, it can break down pretty quickly. And that’s really the art of product development—edge cases and conditions and all these little small things that you need to, all these little different pieces of fabric you need to sew together so you can’t see the seams. And it’s easy to do when it’s just for you because you can kind of live with things that don’t work so well, but it’s hard to do for others.

Dan Shipper

I mean, I definitely agree in one sense that, you know, I’ve seen everyone on our team, technical or non-technical, build things. If you’re non-technical, you can definitely build something and like get it working, but getting it to be something that we would launch or something that people, even people internally would use, is very hard. And usually at least at this point, unless it’s something like self-contained, so like something in a Claude artifact or something like that, it’s not going to be something that other people are going to use.

However, I definitely don’t agree in the—if you are a professional developer and you’re building with these tools, like no one inside of Every is looking at the code, is hand coding anything. Everybody is using these tools to build and deploy and like basically the entire product development lifecycle. And I think it helps with all of those specific things, like all the little edge cases and all the little seams, if you’re using—you have to obviously use it in a way that is conducive to that. But I just sort of see it as in the same way that, you know, when I was growing up, people were sort of pretty suspicious of scripting languages and Ruby and JavaScript, the same kind of thing with English. And it changes the substrate of what you’re programming on. You’re programming in English, but you’re writing in English about all of the different implementation details, almost like pseudocode. And that’s where the programming happens, which I think is a total change.

So I don’t know how much AI adoption inside of 37signals you have for this kind of thing, but it’s been really crazy to watch.