Jason FriedModify

At its best, marketing is a transfer of enthusiasm.

When you're truly pumped about what you're doing, when you're truly driven by the vision, when you absolutely must make something that you need and want, your enthusiasm leaves a mark. It's a brand. Not the noun, but the verb.

At its worst, marketing is a transfer of everything else. Your worst fears, your biggest insecurities, the charades you play. False enthusiasm on display, empty promises, and sloganeering no one believes. It quickly makes you a liar.

Just like you can't not communicate, you can't not market. Everything is marketing.

The best, and the worst, is always on display, like it or not. You can't hide from your own presence, however it shows up. Marketing casts, like a shadow casts. Attached to every move.

Think about what someone else is doing that you're enthused about. Where did that come from? What transferred it?

Of course many things that are great simply work. Nothing more, nothing less. No stories, no excitement, just the snick of a perfect fit. But somewhere down the chain, someone cared enough to make that thing right. And that's a transfer too.

-Jason

One of the great privileges of owning an independent company is that you get to try all sorts of stuff no one else would ever give you permission to do.

And you get to greenlight other people's oddball ideas too. You can — and should — provide cover for weird attempts, strange ideas, and "I mean this will probably never work but..." stuff. Often!

If you are in this position, and you aren't helping unusual things happen, you're missing out on one of life's true pleasures.

Public companies worth billions can't do the kinds of things you can. Businesses that need to justify every move can't do the things you can.

Very few get to do this, and you can. So please make the universe happy and see if that weird, unusual, not-like-everyone-else idea catches fire.

-Jason

From time to time we get criticized for making "yet another to-do list" product. Or a chat product. Or a messaging product. Or something we've kinda sorta already made before, just in a different form, combination, or approach. "How about something else? How about something bigger? How about something completely different?"

David even reflected on it personally in his recent Lex Fridman interview.

So it's not just other people levying the charge — it's us too! I've given it similar time and similar thought.

But then I step outside tech for a moment, ground myself in other professions, and realize how odd it would be to ask the same kind of question to a knife maker. "Hey master bladesmith, you’ve made a dozen knives this year. Same as last year. Same as the last 20. If you love metal so much, why not help build a battleship? Think of all that metal!"

Or a cabinet maker. "Hey, ok I get it — you take raw wood and you turn it into beautiful furniture. Again and again and again. Don't you think a wood addict like you should consider getting into forestry? Imagine!"

That would be a ridiculous line of questioning. So why is it persuasive in tech?

I think part of it is that we're talking about software. An endlessly malleable medium that can truly be anything. With no conceptual limits, it’s easy to think you should keep expanding. But why?

There's nothing at all wrong with honing in, developing your craft, making variations of things you're good at, and getting better each time. Nothing small about it. Nothing unfulfilling about it.

So instead of looking sideways at what others are building — or upward toward the mythical “next level” — we focus ahead on what we're good at. We like to make useful, straightforward things we need. Specific tools and familiar ingredients combined in different ratios, different molds, for different purposes. Like a baker working from the same tight set of pantry ingredients to make a hundred distinct recipes. You wouldn't turn to them and say "enough with the butter, flour, sugar, baking powder, and eggs already!"

Getting the same few things right in different ways is a career's worth of work.

-Jason

There was a tiny fly right by the drain, and I was about to wash my hands.

Turning on the water would have sent it right down the hole. A quick end, or an eventual struggled drowning, hard to know. But that would be that, there was no getting out.

Somehow, for a moment, I slipped into contemplation. I could just turn on the water, I could rescue it, I could use a different sink. Had I not even seen the fly, the water would already been on, its invisible fate secured.

But in that moment of maybe, the fly launched and flew away.

Since it didn't know what I was about to do, and what that would do to it, it had absolutely no idea how lucky it was.

And then I wondered. How often am I in that same position? No idea how lucky I am.

Often, probably always.

-Jason

"Years of experience" has been a gold standard hiring requirement since forever.

It's a terrible one.

Someone can do something for years and have nothing to show for it.

Seek people with "Years of evidence" instead.

People with deep examples of work. Piles of stuff they've made. An overflowing collection of output they're proud to share.

If someone's brand new in their formal career, they might have little traditional experience, but if someone's been loving this kind of work for a long time, there's a good chance they already have a collection of hobby projects or other literal examples of their work they can't wait to show off.

Titles, tenure, and paths don’t matter. The work does. Always look at the work. It's the truth.

-Jason

When you encounter a simpler system, a simpler idea, or a simpler implementation, you have an opportunity.

You can say "it's not enough, it doesn't have, it wouldn't work". That’s the common reflexive response.

Or you can reflect. “What is it about how we work that prevents us from using such a simple, succinct system?” “How did we get so twisted, so tangled, so dependent on so much that we can’t seem to get anywhere otherwise?”

Depending on more can often mean being able to do less.

Turning back can be getting ahead.

Downshift.

-Jason