don’t need to take theirs.
What’s our market share? Don’t know, don’t care. It’s irrelevant. Do we have enough customers paying us enough money to cover our costs and generate a profit? Yes. Is that number increasing every year? Yes. That’s good enough for us. Doesn’t matter if we’re 2 percent of the market or 4 percent or 75 percent. What matters is that we have a healthy business with sound economics that work for us. Costs under control, profitable sales.
Further, as far as market share goes, you’d need to define the market size accurately to define your share of it. As of the printing of this book, we have more than 100,000 companies that pay on a monthly basis for Basecamp. And that generates tens of millions of dollars in annual profit for us. We’re pretty sure that’s barely a blip of the overall market and that’s just fine with us. We’re serving our customers well, and they’re serving us well. That’s what matters. Doubling, tripling, quadrupling our market share doesn’t matter.
Lots of companies are driven by comparisons in general. Not just whether they’re first, second, or third in their industry, but how they stack up feature for feature with their closest competitors. Who’s getting which awards? Who’s raising more money? Who’s getting all the press? Why are they sponsoring that conference and not us?
Mark Twain nailed it: “Comparison is the death of joy.” We’re with Mark.
We don’t compare. What others do has no bearing on what we’re able to do, what we want to do, or what we choose to do. There’s no chase at Basecamp, no rabbit to pursue. Just a deep satisfaction with doing our very best work as measured by our happiness and our customers’ purchases.
The only things we’re out to destroy are outmoded ideas.
The opposite of conquering the world isn’t failure, it’s participation. Being one of many options in a market is a virtue that allows customers to have a real choice. If you can embrace that, then the war metaphors of business can more easily be buried, as they should be.
Because at the end of the day, would you rather win an imaginary contest by throwing sand in your competitors’ faces or by simply forgetting about them and making the best damn product you know how?
Quarterly goals. Yearly goals. Big Hairy Audacious Goals.
“We grew 14 percent last quarter, so let’s aim for 25 percent growth this time.”
“Let’s hire our one hundredth employee this year.”
“Let’s get that cover story so they’ll finally take us seriously.”
The wisdom of setting business goals—always striving for bigger and better—is so established that it seems like the only thing left to debate is whether the goals are ambitious enough.
So imagine the response when we tell people that we don’t do goals. At all. No customer-count goals, no sales goals, no retention goals, no revenue goals, no specific profitability goals (other than to be profitable). Seriously.
This anti-goal mindset definitely makes Basecamp an outcast in the business world. Part of the minority, the ones who simply “don’t get how it works.”
We get how it works—we just don’t care. We don’t mind leaving some money on the table and we don’t need to squeeze every drop out of the lemon. Those final drops usually taste sour, anyway.
Are we interested in increasing profits? Yes. Revenues? Yes. Being more effective? Yes. Making our products easier, faster, and more useful? Yes. Making our customers and employees happier? Yes, absolutely. Do we love iterating and improving? Yup!
Do we want to make things better? All the time. But do we want to maximize “better” through constantly chasing goals? No thanks.
That’s why we don’t have goals at Basecamp. We didn’t when we started, and now, nearly 20 years later, we still don’t. We simply do the best work we can on a daily basis.
But there was a brief moment when we changed our mind. We pinned up a big round revenue target—one of those fat nine-digit numbers. “Why not?” we thought. “We can do it!” But after chasing that goal for a while, we thought again. And the answer to “Why not?” became a very clear “Because (1) it’s disingenuous for us to pretend we care about a number we just made up, and (2) because we aren’t willing to make the cultural compromises it’ll take to get there.”
Because let’s face it: Goals are fake. Nearly all of them are artificial targets set for the sake of setting targets. These made-up numbers then function as a source of unnecessary stress until they’re either achieved or abandoned. And when that happens, you’re supposed to pick new ones and start stressing again. Nothing ever stops at the quarterly win. There are four quarters to a year. Forty to a decade. Every one of them has to produce, exceed, and beat EXPECTATIONS.
Why would you do that to yourself and your business? Doing great, creative work is hard enough. So is building a long-lasting sustainable business with happy employees. So why impose some arbitrary number to loom over your job, salary, bonus, and kid’s college fund?
Plus, there’s an even darker side to goal setting. Chasing goals often leads companies to compromise their morals, honesty, and integrity to reach those fake numbers. The best intentions slip when you’re behind. Need to improve margins by a few points? Let’s turn a blind eye to quality for a while. Need to find another $800,000 this quarter to hit that number? Let’s make it harder for customers to request refunds.
Ever try to cancel an account with your cell phone company? It’s not an inherently complicated act. But many phone companies make it so difficult to do because they have retention goals to hit. They want to make it hard for you to cancel so it’s easier for them to hit their numbers.
Even we weren’t immune to those pressures. In the few months that we tried reaching for the big nine-digit goal, we ended up launching several projects that at best we had misgivings about and at worst made us feel a little dirty. Like spending big bucks with Facebook, Twitter, and Google to juice our signups. Cutting checks like that to further the erosion of privacy and splintering of attention just made us feel icky, but we closed our eyes for a while because, hey, we were reaching for that big number. Fuck that.
How about something really audacious: No targets, no goals?
You can absolutely run a great business without a single goal. You don’t need something fake to do something real. And if you must have a goal, how about just staying in business? Or serving your customers well? Or being a delightful place to work? Just because these goals are harder to quantify does not make them any less important.
The business world is suffering from ambition hyperinflation. It’s no longer about simply making a great product or providing a great service. No, now it’s all about how this BRAND-NEW THING CHANGES EVERYTHING. A thousand revolutions promised all at once. Come on.
Nothing
