Things David Says on Podcasts

I also think it's interesting that I've seen so many unattractive products, unattractive apps. And yes, it could be programmed by AI, but there is a design element of taste that I don't think we've gotten to quite yet.

I think that's actually the main charge against slob, which is this framing for AI just producing a bunch of stuff. No, no, the slob is not coming from the agents. It's coming from you. It's coming from you, the instructor of the agents that you don't

Okay, let's go to this question. It's an email from Alex. Hi, Jason and David. It seems that the two of you promote your business through your own personal brands, most notably on X, although I'm sure you're also probably on LinkedIn. I'm starting a business soon, and I always thought that I wanted to keep my personal social accounts like X, Instagram, and TikTok completely separate from my business. But seeing that you two are using your personal brands to promote your company makes me wonder if this is the right play. Would love to hear your thoughts from Alex.

I mean, I don't think there's such a thing as a personal brand, by the way. I've always been bugged by that whole thing. It's just me talking on the internet. Where do I work? I work here. What do I talk about? I mean, that is your brand.

Like your style of writing, your personality, the things you're saying.

have customers who leave every day. We have customers who come back. We have customers who leave other products and come to us. There's a constant churn of people moving around anyway, regardless of AI. AI is another option. If someone wants to build their own tools, it's another way for someone to leave your product, but the other reasons are already there. So let's start there. Second, like David mentioned, I wrote this piece on, I just. Don't think people are going to want to build bespoke software. Most businesses are not going to want to build bespoke software. Building software takes a lot of work, even if it's become way easier. Someone still has to maintain it. Someone has to think about it. Someone has to think about the workflows. Someone has to adjust things. If that person leaves, then what happens? And people are busy already with their own things. It's understandable that, like, online on X, on places like that, where everyone's talking about software, people think everyone in the world is talking about software. Most people just don't care about software. They care about the plumbing business they run, the electric business they run, the whatever business they run. And yeah, could they build their own thing? They probably could, but why would they? Now, this also gets back to David's point about price. So, like David said, most of the stories I've been hearing are when people are trying to like potentially save a million bucks a year or whatever on something they didn't like to begin with. So, when I look at our business, you know, a lot of people pay us 50 bucks a month. That's 600 bucks a year. Okay. If you look at how much it would take to build Basecamp, even if you're using AI and you took one or two or three employees to kind of do it and mess around with it, whatever, it's going to cost you thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars anyway in opportunity costs and things they could have been doing otherwise to save 600 bucks a year. And then, like, you don't have something that's quite right. And then you've got to keep maintaining it and things might break. And then, who do you blame? A lot of buying products is about actually ultimately being able to blame someone and put someone else on the hook to take care of you. That's why you pay them money. So, you know, there's all these reasons why it doesn't make sense, especially on the low end. But again, as David said, like, we'd be foolish to think that everything is safe and nothing's going to change. Of course, things are going to change, but also we're going to change and we are changing. We're able to build things faster and better. And we have 25 plus years of experience understanding what software is about. It's not just about compiling code and having software do things. It's about what do people actually want to do? Why do they want to do it? How do they want to do it? How do these things all work together? How do these pieces fit together? You can dream up all sorts of things, but that's not what software has ever been about. Great software, I should say. Great software is still about a cohesive concept, an idea, a product, borders, boundaries. That's what this is all about. So, no, are we all immune? No. Are things going to change? Yes, absolutely. But you got to think about where you are. This is not a monolithic thing. Software is not a monolithic thing. There's different levels of different prices, and the kinds of companies and customers you have may or may not be interested in getting involved in doing their own stuff at all. We all hire contractors. We all hire vendors. We all hire people to do things for us that we could do ourselves, but we don't want to because it makes more sense to hire them to do those things. I have a housekeeper that comes once a week to clean her house. I could clean my house that day too, but like, what does it cost me to take a day off of work from doing that? Or my wife and I doing that? Or a kid, whatever. Like, we keep the house kind of clean, but we also have someone who comes by and cleans the house. Like, it just makes sense to do that, right? So, if you just pile up all the things in your world that you do or you kind of have other people do or whatever, it just makes sense sometimes to buy something off the shelf or from a company that you like that makes a great product that supports what you do. So, you don't have to do it yourself. These things remain true, will always remain true. But yes, of course, things are changing.

I think a great illustration of this is the episode of The Simpsons, where Homer is given the opportunity by GM to design his own car. And

I also think it's interesting that I've seen so many unattractive products, unattractive apps. And yes, it could be programmed by AI, but there is a design element of taste that I don't think we've gotten to quite yet.

I think that's actually the main charge against slob, which is this framing for AI just producing a bunch of stuff. No, no, the slob is not coming from the agents. It's coming from you. It's coming from you, the instructor of the agents that you don't

have the vision and the eye for developing something good. And why would it be otherwise, right? Like, this is why you have product designers sit down and think carefully about building things. It's not just about making something happen. That is the big change that has happened. And I do think that that's perhaps also the other flank of this that's very interesting. There are actually quite a few people in this world who are quite good at having some taste and some vision and an eye for where things should go, but did not have the talent or competence to do implementation, did not have the funds to do implementation. So at least for the foreseeable future, I think that's the bigger threat to anyone running a software company is that someone else, another human out there is suddenly capable of making their ideas come true. I'm actually quite certain that if AI had been around in, say, 2000, when Jason put the post out for a programming question that I answered and we started working together, I'm not so sure I would have ended up moving to Chicago because Jason would have been able to build a lot of things by himself. Because at that time, that was the constraint on his ability to create software. He had all these ideas and the designs and how it should go, but was lacking the mechanism of turning those into software. Now a lot of people have suddenly gotten a really good mechanism for that.