Haegwan Kim: Can I ask about your definition of success?
Jason Fried: To me success is something that you want to do again.
HK: Interesting. For you what are the things you want to do again?
JF: Well, I want to do tomorrow what I’m doing today. So, running the business, building products, working with the people that I work with, all those things are things I’d like to keep doing. So if I want to keep doing them, then I consider it to be successful.
HK: You have been in the software industry for a long time, can you tell me what was the biggest lesson you learned from that?
JF: That the basics are what’s most important. People really just want the basics done really well and they don’t care about all the extra stuff that software could do. They just want the basics done well. Every time I learn something from somebody, it all comes back to people just want the basics done well. They’re very busy, they have a lot going on in their lives and they don’t need all the bells and whistles, they just want the basics.
HK: Do you have any opinion on the key element to be successful in this industry, in the industry of software?
JF: You have to build something useful. So, it’s not about building something cool, it’s about building something useful. If you build something useful you’re in a pretty good position, if you build something cool, what’s cool today may not be cool tomorrow. Then you’re not really in a good spot. Usefulness is always most important.
HK: Is usefulness the same as solving problems or identifying problems or anything like that?
JF: Yes, I think it’s important to actually solve real problems and not imaginary problems. People try and solve imaginary problems that people don’t actually have, and that’s going to be a problem. But if you can solve problems that people actually do have, then you’re in a pretty good position.
HK: Can you tell me how we can identify the real problem, and avoid the imaginary ones?
JF: Well, the way we do it is we solve our own problems. So, we know what we need, what our problem is and we build software to solve our problems. Then we recognize that if we have this problem, a lot of other people probably have the same problem. That’s how we do it.
HK: So, you don’t try to solve others’ problems?
JF: Not really, we try and solve our own first and then we recognize that other people have the same ones that we have. If we can solve ours we’re probably solving problems for hundreds and thousands and millions of other people too at the same time.
HK: I’m so impressed by your book recently published, “Rework”. I have so many questions, but we don’t have time. So, one question; why are there so many people who are struggling with finding their business model, or struggling with the conventional business model? What is the pitfall for them?
JF: I think the problem most people have in our industry is that they actually don’t have a business model at all. It’s not about conventional or unconventional, they just don’t know how they’re going to make money. That to me is a bigger problem, it’s not about a specific model, it’s really about figuring it out from the beginning, from the first day how you’re going to be making money. I think that’s the really important thing that everyone needs to come to terms with before they move on.
HK: Do you measure whether your business is going well or not by the amount of money you earn?
JF: That has something to do with it for sure. I look at our profits every single day, and that’s definitely one way to measure financial success, for sure. But there’s more to it than that, and that’s a very important one, because that means you can stay in business and you can pay your employees and you can have profits and whatever. But another part of it is simply doing things that you like to do. If we were making a lot of money, but I didn’t like the work I was doing, I wouldn’t be happy with it, I wouldn’t consider it successful. And there’s a lot of ways to make money on things you don’t like to do, and for me that wouldn’t be a definition of success. A definition of success is like I said, something I want to do again and making money at it is great as well.
HK: You’re also working as an internationally renowned speaker, can you tell me your intention through the activity?
JF: Sure. There are a variety of reasons. One is I think it’s important information that I think that people can benefit from it. If I have something that’s useful to other people, it would be selfish of me to keep it to myself. I think part of it is simply just sharing what I think is good information. And another thing is it’s very good marketing. When you get out there and share your ideas people start to pay attention to you, and when they pay attention to you, they might find out about your products or your business or something else. So that’s a great way to get the word out, especially when you don’t spend money on it. We don’t really spend money on advertising or anything like that. Promotion through education is a great thing for us.
HK: What is the most important thing for you in terms of a business? What are you pursuing?
JF: For me quality is really important. You’ve got to make money, so you’ve got to have a profitable business; that’s a given question. But after that quality is really important to me. I can’t stand things that aren’t well built and that I can’t get excited about. I only get excited about things that are really well done and especially an important driving force for me is to make great things.
HK: As a final question, could you tell me your advice to achieve success in a general sense?
JF: I think the most important thing is not to compare yourself to other people, because if you look to somebody like Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos who are billionaires, and you think you have to be a billionaire to be successful, very few people ever achieve that. You’re setting yourself up to not be successful that way. I think you’ve got to be happy with yourself, not with what other people are doing and how you stack up to them. I really think that success is something that you have to define inside of you and not look externally to figure out where you match up. I think that’s really important.
Haegwan Kim is a writer who was born in Osaka, Japan in 1989 and grew up near Tokyo where went to a Korean school for 12 years.
