Jason Fried’s teenaged software company
Before Basecamp and 37signals, Jason started making software at age 13
“People are happy to pay for things that are good. Don’t be afraid to charge for your services.”
— Jason Fried, Basecamp
Have you always been making products? Did you make anything before 37signals?
Jason Fried: When I first got started in computers I was in junior high school. I’m 38 now, so I guess that was, I don’t know, 25 years ago or something that I got a computer. I started messing around with it. One of the things I wanted to do was keep track of all the different tapes and CDs that I had.
Eventually, I got on AOL (this was before the formal Internet was around). I went to the file section and searched in the Mac area for music organizing tools. I found some stuff and downloaded those things. They were mostly based in FileMaker Pro, which is a database. I had FileMaker Pro so I could run them and I just didn’t like them. I don’t know what it was: they weren’t attractive, they weren’t easy to use, they were complicated, they were doing far more things than I needed.
I just needed this simple thing. I wanted to look good, and be fast. I ended up just figuring that I could figure out how to make this sort of thing myself. I had File Maker, I started screwing around, started learning how to do it, and I eventually made a product called Audiofile, which I started using to catalog my music collection.
“I just needed this simple thing. I wanted to look good, and be fast.”
I wrote a little text file, a readme file, and in there I said:
“Hey, if you like this it’s $20. Send me a check, or send me cash.”
Then I uploaded it to AOL to see what would happen. I had no idea.
Then one day I got an envelope in the mail from a guy in Germany. I didn’t know anybody in Germany; I had never been there. And so my parents gave me this envelope, and I open it, and there was a print out of that readme.txt file and $20.
That was the start for me of selling software. Audiofile started taking off. It didn’t put me through college or anything, but I had a nice amount of extra spending money in college just from this $20 shareware tool that I made. I probably made over $10,000 or more selling it over the next few years.
Wow. Did that seem significant to you?
Jason: Oh yeah. I’ve always had jobs too, so I’ve been working since I was 13 at grocery stores and shoe stores and gas stations and all this stuff. I had part time jobs anyway. I would have had spending money, but it was great to have extra money coming in, to have a significant amount, and for it to be sort of this passive money in that I didn’t feel like I was working for it. I had already done the work, making software.
Unlike my part time jobs, the money just kept coming in. It was great. It was killer. I bought a bunch of stuff I wanted like a stereo or whatever, just a bunch of garbage probably.
[laughter]
The thing I realized early on is people are happy to pay for things that are good. Don’t be afraid to charge for your services. Don’t be afraid to charge for what you produce. If those people who don’t want to pay for it want to complain about it, that’s fine. They don’t have to buy it.
There are plenty of people out there who appreciate something good and are happy to cough up some cash for it because they think it’s worth their time and it makes their life better.
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Originally published at justinjackson.ca on March 4, 2013.
