Basecamp

Andrew bootstrapped Flow vs billionaire-backed Asana and lost $10M

Andrew built productivity software Flow, choosing to bootstrap like Basecamp, but Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz's well-funded Asana out-built and out-marketed them; Andrew publicly revealed he lost $10 million on it.

“So the story was basically we started productivity software called Flow. I decided to bootstrap it like Basecamp, and we had a big competitor, Asana. And Asana was run by a billionaire, the co-founder of Facebook. He raised a shitload of money. And originally I was like, oh no, we've got a better product. And then they just made their product better and they outspent us on marketing and we got killed.”

Sell your byproduct (37signals' books, Ford's charcoal)

Sam's reframe of portfolio income: sell the byproduct of your real work. 37signals (Basecamp) sold books explaining how they run their business to their own small-business customers, generating millions and new customers from a 'free' byproduct.

“sell your byproduct. This is an example from the 37signals guys in Chicago who, you know, they made a company that made Basecamp, and then they worked a certain way, and then they started selling books just explaining how they worked to the— basically their business, you know, served a bunch of small businesses, small business owners,. And so then they sold the book to those business owners about like, hey, here's how we run our business. And just selling their byproduct generated millions of dollars and even more in new customers who like to hear how they worked.”

Steal thisPackage the process or content you already produce as a byproduct and sell it back to your own customer base.