Quotes from Jason Fried

If you care about your product, you should care just as much about how you describe it.

I know plenty of entrepreneurs who are numbers first. They tend to be highly analytical people, and before they pull the trigger, all the numbers have to line up just right.

A lot of people relate leadership to formalities. They believe that leadership is about being professional and strong and always right and being a booming voice. I just don't buy that. I think that leadership is a soft skill; it's a people skill.

Deadlines are great for customers because having one means they get a product, not just a promise that someday they'll get a product.

These two staples of work life - meetings and managers - are actually the greatest causes of work not getting done at the office. In fact, the further away you are from both meetings and managers, the more work gets done.

The risk of relying on a handful of customers is not just financial. Your product also is at risk when you're at the mercy of a few big spenders. When any one customer pays you significantly more than the others, your product inevitably ends up catering mostly to that customer's specific needs.

I'm not sure a lot of companies know their story, or can explain why they exist and who they are, without just spewing just corporate speech.

Practice quality, and you get better at quality. But quality takes time, so by working solely on quality, you end up losing something else that's important - speed.

Nearly every boss has said it. And just about every employee has heard it. Yet it's one of the most meaningless lines ever spoken in the office: 'My door is always open.'

To say that the grocery business is cutthroat would be a major understatement.

You have to live with your decisions every day. Why live with one you're uneasy with? 'Because it'll make you money' is a common reply. But I don't think that's good enough.

As businesses grow, all sorts of things that once were done on the fly - including creating new products - have a way of becoming bureaucratized.

Statistics rarely drive me. Feelings, intuition, and gut instinct do.

By rationing in-person meetings, their stature is elevated to that of a rare treat. They become something to be savored, something special.

I used to think that deadlines should be ignored until the product was ready: that they were a nuisance, a hurdle in front of quality, a forced measure to get something out the door for the good of the schedule, not the customer.

Whenever I speak at a conference, I try to catch a few of the other presentations. I tend to stand in the back and listen, observe, and get a general sense of the room.

Unlike a goldfish, a computer can't really do anything without you telling it exactly what you want it to do.

The reality is that companies are full of things that are left unspoken. And even when they are out in the open, the CEO is almost always the last to know.

I've found that nurturing untapped potential is far more exhilarating than finding someone who has already peaked.

Many of the things we do at Basecamp would be considered unusual at most companies: paying for employees' hobbies, allowing our team to work from anywhere, even footing the bill for fresh fruits and veggies in our staff members' homes.

I'd love to see more businesses take this approach - intentionally rightsizing themselves. Hit a number that feels good and say, 'Let's stick around here.'

The office during the day has become the last place people want to be when they really want to get work done. In fact, offices have become interruption factories.

We've never much liked the idea of charging a participation tax, a phrase we coined to represent what it feels like when a software company charges you more money for each additional user. Participation taxes discourage usage across a company.

A large user base helps shield us from things we can't control. You can spend years catering to a major corporation, for example, only to see your contact there move on.