Can A Company Be Built Entirely From The Heart

The whole point of FameMS is to build a company entirely from the heart. Unitethesefuckers, my other wild app, just oozes heart.

FameMS, along with having a heart, will also need to be practical as it is a SAAS app used to get things done.

Here is the problem though: When we think of ideas for the very first time there is a lot of heart in them. There is a purity to them. It’s not personal. It could have been you who thought of them or anybody else really. It’s like the universe thought if them. So there is a lot of excitement, a natural joy, a spirit of adventure, care and love for it even. It’s all so very self-less.

But slowly, as we build on it, the greedy, scared part of the mind takes over and whispers in a lot of measures to secure the idea, milk it, make it the best, eliminate competition, maximise profits, optimise conversions and be metric driven.

This seems all fine and there is a lot of books and blogs to validate this type of thinking with lots of techniques, secret tips et all. So its easy to get carried away.

But one fine day, you come to office and you realise, the joy is gone out of it.

The heart is dead.

You also have accumulated all the wrong, nasty people around you just because they are good at their job. Everything is about consolidation, optimisation, excel sheet driven rubbish. Now suddenly you need to read books on motivation and learns life hacks of how you can trick yourself into working because you sure as hell aren’t going to do it naturally.

This is not what you set out to do. What happened?

I think when a company starts to utter the words — “We will now be a metric driven company” or something to that effect, thats the moment its lost its soul.

Think about it, would you want Apple to be metric driven? Or just enjoy themselves and create the best and the most adventurous products they possible can? Do you want Spielberg to make a metric driven movie or do something fresh from his heart.

If the heart is gone out of the founders, it will go out of the employees, the sales team, the product itself, and eventually the customers.

If we don’t enjoy going to work everyday, it is directly linked to how much our customers like our product.

I have a policy,

Only take the kind of money where I get to keep my heart. Leave the rest on the table.

I love how everything about Basecamp as a company resonates with this. Reading their blog, you get a sense they are first of all real people, who take pride in their company, their work and their craft. You get a sense that they are easily satisfied and not optimising every bit of juice that can be squeezed out of their customers which reflects even in their pricing strategy.

I would love to build a company like that. So far i have kept the spirit up at FameMS but it is a long, long journey ahead and it does look like a great deal of fun from here.