What Jason Fried Learned From 26 Years of Building Great Products

TL;DR: Today we’re releasing a new episode of our podcast AI & I. Dan Shipper sits down with Jason Fried, the cofounder and CEO of 37signals. Watch on X or YouTube, or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Here’s a link to the episode transcript.

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Running a business is not that interesting to Jason Fried—even though his bootstrapped company earns tens of millions in profit every year, and he’s been at it for over two decades.

What lights him up—and has him waxing lyrical about architecture, watches, and cars—is making products, particularly the kind that are built around a single, coherent idea. The kind that leaves people with a near-spiritual sense of satisfaction.

Fried is the cofounder and CEO of 37signals, the makers of product management tool Basecamp and web application framework Ruby on Rails, and you can see his obsession with product reflected back by his loyal users. In this episode of AI & I, Dan Shipper and Fried talk about everything he’s learned about building something whole, from the way he designs software to his philosophy around running a company.

Here is a link to the episode transcript.

You can check out their full conversation here:

Here are some of the themes they touch on:

How Fried thinks about building new products

Fried treats making software—and the experience of using it—as something that should inspire a feeling of completeness. Here’s more nuance from him on this philosophy:

We can’t touch software, but it can move us

For the first 10 minutes of the episode, Fried is ostensibly talking about watches, cars, and architecture. But put your ear to the ground, and you’ll hear echoes of what he thinks about software.