Jason Fried launches Fizzy: a colorful, open-source Kanban tool at $20/month unlimited

have

94 last night. John, I think I smoked you again. Lost my phone. Lost your phone. Well, we have Jason Freed in the ream waiting for bring to the TV. There he is. Jason, how are you doing? Good to see you.

Good. And you?

Congratulations. Massive news today. Break it down for us. What's up?

Was there big news today? I I missed the news. What was the news?

Oh, your news.

You're you're just calling out every news.

Trello naming names. He's [clears throat] naming names. A lot of a lot of people don't do that. A lot of people say, "Oh, the competitors, the best-in-class solutions, the Gartner hype cycle." No, you called them out. You you put them on the map.

We had some fun. Yes. So, we launched a new product today called Fizzy, which is kind of a a fresh take on Conbon. An old idea. obviously been around for a long time,

but we, you know, we have a different spin on things, different take on things and felt like it was time to do something new and kind of bring it back to the basics and also add some fun and color and vibrancy, which is missing in the software industry. I feel like um the people might be colorful in a sense, but the products are very much the same and so we wanted to do something different and um that was uh that was what we did today.

Why new name? Why not uh you know a new new tab in an existing product,

right? Well, Base Camp, which is our biggest product, has uh conbon in it. We call it card table there. But, you know, the thing is is that um Base Camp is very popular, but it's, you know, let's say there's 100,000 accounts, right? 100,000 companies use it. It's a small number in the end.

And um there's a lot of people who can use something like Fizzy that are not going to use Base Camp. Base Camp is a much bigger system. It's for bigger projects and there's a lot of small things that people need to do and organize and track. And so building a small standalone thing just feels like it makes more sense frankly for for this kind of thing.

So do I mean do you have an idea of like who is the target market startups individuals like like you use this to plan your Thanksgiving dinner?

Yeah I mean the target market is me and us basically we build things for ourselves. I don't think about who we're making things for because we're making things for us always. And um the idea is that you know

well actually let me just say this. I I find the best products in the world are made by the person who's making them for themselves. That's been my experience, like enthusiast products.

And then other people find them and other people discover them and you find out that you're like other people and other people are like you and they kind of

dig it, you know? And so

I I always think about I said to someone this morning that that I feel like TVPN is that way where sometimes when I'm driving home, I want to watch I want to I want to watch TVPN, but I'm like, we just we just made it. I just lived it. I should probably, you know, watch something else. So, I I never I never watch watch the show myself, but I

just call me and say, "Hey, we

just make we do a podcast on the fly.

We just talk about tech news more." Uh I'd love to I'd love to know about uh the actual process for building the product. Uh who who was staffed on the team? How many people? What time period? When did you start? Do you have a designer, developer? Is it all just what's the prompt? I imagine you just use one prompt for this. What prompt was all all was

all you needed. [laughter]

Yeah. Um so you know it's what's interesting is we actually also open sourced this. So this is fully open source. It's a SAS product and fully open source. So you can run it yourself for free which means you can go into GitHub actually and look back at the very first commit about 18 months ago

and see everything we did along the way. All the changes we made, all the dead ends, all the starts and stops, exactly who was involved on our team over time. And it's changed. So we had typically we have two designers, one or two designers on something. Then there's other people who chime in here and there who jump in here and there. Different programmers jump in at different times. But it's fully documented, which is very rare. You'll almost never ever see this in commercial soft. Basically almost never. Sometimes, but almost never, especially going back to day one. What ends up happening is you can do this thing where you can basically on launch day you can clear the log basically and then from that point on people can see what you're doing. But we opened it up from day one about 18 months ago. So, it's actually all in there. Um, the team sized in total probably about six people worked on it here and there over 18 months, but for the most part, it's usually two or three people working on something at a time.

How do you think about pricing these?

Yeah, I feel like as as in in uh 37 signals fashion, pricing will be opinionated. So, I'm excited to hear uh how you how you guys approach this one. I you know we don't really well we have a price but I don't know if it's the right price never do um it's 20 bucks a month unlimited users unlimited usage one price no chart no table no contact us just a price tag like if you went and bought a pair of jeans or peanut butter it'd be like talk to the sales rep they're going to look you up and down they're going to say well how much how much should this person pay

right what watch are you wearing all the things right so it's 20 bucks but we give you a th000 cards for free so there's There's no time limit on the trial. You get a,000 cards for free. And if you never use a card is like a, you know, like a to-do item or something.

Sure.

If you never use them up, it's free forever.

Okay.

And you can also run it for free if you want to run it yourself.

Open source. Yeah.

Yeah. So, we're basically just serving as a host. If you want

to just turn it on, sign up, and be going. We'll host it for 20 bucks currently. Look, this is an introductory price. We could change the price 6 months from now. If we do, we'll let people lock in where they were. We're not going to change prices on them, but we might raise it. We I don't even know what we'll do, but we wanted to pick a number that was fair. The other thing I want to do is I want to price this more like an accessory.

This is not the only tool. Like, you know, the software industry is interesting because it thinks that whatever it makes, it's the only thing anyone ever needs, right? The thing is is people need a lot of different things. And so,

Fizzy is not going to be the only thing you have. It might be one of the many things you might use. And so, we kind of price it that way. It's like an accessory. 20 bucks a month, kind of a no-brainer. unlimited users,

uh, cancel any time, no upfront anything, and it just feels like that's the right place to start. We'll see where we end up, but that feels good for now.

If you if I pay you to host it, where is it hosted?

Um, China. [laughter]

No, so it's hosted. We have we have we have a few different data centers, so it's not in the Well, it's in it's in our

Yeah. What I'm getting at is like is like it would be easy to just throw this on AWS, but like you're the one company that doesn't just do that, right? That's right. So, we have a data center in [laughter] in Chicago. We have one in in Amsterdam. We have one in uh North Carolina.

Uh so, we have in a few different spots. Um and uh it's all on our hardware and other people's data centers where we rent space and data centers.

Yeah.

That said, again, um you can also if you just don't trust us, don't want us to do it, you can put on your own stuff, including like a simple droplet like a digital ocean something, whatever you can find that that will host something basic will work for for this as well. I mean, you actually can host it in Alibaba cloud if you want. It's open source. That's the whole point of open source. I could put it on

I hope someone does.

There's a AI company that uh recently had a code red. Uh have you ever had a code red ever once?

Not like that. Uh not like a competitive pressure code red. Let's make sure we kind of focus on this competitor, but we've like screwed up

and had all hands on deck to fix something. I mean there was a moment I think probably

did you learn did you ever learn the the like did you ever get overly fixated on a competitor and sort of like learn that because because there's there's like that's like YC like uh uh just law right like don't overly focus on competitors like you're probably not going to die as a company because of your competitor you die because of I think they say like indigestion or something like that

right most wounds are self-inflicted I mean but but sometimes you have to to actually have a a lesson be fully ingrained, you you have to learn it the hard way. I'm curious if if that was ever the case.

Um I I think there was one time when way back when um we used to have a product, we still have a new product now called Campfire, but way back in 2006, we launched Campfire, which is a real-time chat, group chat.

Yeah.

And back then, we could not shove this down people's throats. Like nobody understood group chat for a business. It just was very very hard to sell and to move and was a very small product for us.

And then Slack came out

and I saw it. I remember oh [ __ ] like yeah

they nailed it. Like we we just

Yeah.

It was crazy because them nailing it was it was IRC. Like I used IRC back in the day and the hashtag channels like everything like there were all the primitives had been like battle tested in IRC. The other thing is Slack doesn't feel like that outside of the world in ter even from a I'm sure you have opinions on Slack's like design, but it it it doesn't even feel that like you guys probably could see that and be like, "Oh, that that's like

like the the design was opinionated and you know, fun.

It felt fun. Slack felt fun." Um I mean IRC of course was is very geeky and whatever, but yeah, the fundamentals were there, but Slack had a wonderful onboarding experience. It felt fun. They had great integrations. they just kind of like totally leaprogged us in that world and and that was like fine, but it it did it was the first time I felt like I felt that sort of nervousness in my stomach. Um, now I didn't feel it against our business because Base Camp is very different kind of product and it was fine, but it was Campfire specifically cuz I was frustrated. I was trying to figure out how to make it better and then I saw them come out like oh [ __ ] like yeah that that that's how you do it. So, that was one time, but but I I just don't think there's any reason to focus on competitors. I I just don't You can't control them. You don't know what they're going to do. You don't know if they're going to be around in 3 months or 3 years. You don't have the same economics as they do.

Yeah.

Um so, it doesn't really make sense. Like, for example, I'll take Hey, our email service, hey.com.

Um we have 40 some odd thousand paying customers for Hey, right. Which is

if if we if you were Gmail, it'd be an absolute abject failure to only have 40,000 paying customers if you're the Google shut down years ago

in seconds, right? But for us, it's a multi-million dollar business cuz we have 60 people here. So for us, it's a great business. So like I can't go, well, Gmail is killing us. They're not killing us. They're doing their thing. We're doing our thing. So I think

you've got to, in my opinion, the only person you actually compete with are your own economics. Like that's not a person, but the only thing you compete with are your own economics. If you can make it work, you can make it viable, you're fine. You can't

your cost. You compete with your cost.

Competing with your costs. Yeah. Every business needs an AI noteaker. What are your opinions on AI notetakers? If they join the call, are you admitting them or are you letting them sit?

I'm pretty harsh. I always let them sit out in the cold. I never let them in. [laughter]

We don't we don't have meetings. We don't So, I don't I don't even I couldn't even invite one in if I wanted to. We just we don't we don't do that. But I have I will say I have been in a few calls recently that other people have set up and there's been like an AI transcript and it has been quite handy. It's really pretty impressive when it works really well. Strangely, Apple can't seem to get voicemail transcriptions to work at all. Have you

I mean, Apple is is just struggling with all the all the basics on transcription. Even just talking to your phone and like whisper works. It works in the Chat GBD app. It works everywhere else. Apple just has not implemented it properly. And it's and it's not it's not crazy AI god. Like it's literally just take the words that I'm saying and write them down verbatim. And that is a huge and that's a huge benefit because if you're in a business call sometimes I just want to search the actual transcript. I don't even need you to summarize it or put action items or go do things for me. Not agentic none of that. Just actually write down exactly what I said so that when I say you know uh you know we had you know when I say AWS or whatever I can go search for when that happened in the transcript. And a lot of a lot of companies just haven't even been able to implement that. It's been weird.

I agree. I think I think frankly that is one of the best use cases of I don't even know it's not even AI though it's just it's trans great transcription software is is very very handy and I think like this is the thing like it's it's transcription software has been around for a long time it's gotten better and better and better but it's not like AI really you know in other ways it has been AI for 20 years it's been the original AI in many ways you know throw a bunch of data at it and and try and estimate what things are even like OCR these similar things they're just per they're not AGI, they're AI in the sense they're narrow. It's it's the recommendation algorithm on YouTube or Tik Tok or in Netflix or you know this specific you upload a you take a picture of a receipt. Does it understand the text in there? Even if it's kind of a dark photo, yes, that's specific narrow AI and that's great, but we need to actually get those things working on our phones. [laughter]

We left out busy by the way. We made a conscious effort. We actually had some for a while and pulled it out and had it back in and pulled it out.

I'm just like I want to remove from this. I don't want to add intelligence. I want to remove from the software. So it's just so straightforward that it just works and you don't even feel like god I wish I had AI for this or for that. So V1, no AI. We'll see what happens down the road. Again, it's open source.

So the really interesting thing with with Fizzy is that there is a world where you can just actually sit back and do nothing on AI. And if AI is real and valuable to your users, they will get it stuff down their throats via their OS, via their browser, because Atlas is going to be trying to jump up. Perplexity Comet is going to be trying puppeteering their their fizzy uh and and the rest of the the rest of the system that they're using, whether it's their phone or their laptop or their desktop, like it's going to bring the AI to bear with computer use. And so you might never have to build it.

Yeah,

I think so. In fact, this is actually interesting really quick. Um, recently OpenAI added a basecam connector to chat GBT and we didn't we didn't even do anything. So, they did all the work

and they just sent us an email saying, "Hey, we're launching this base cam connector like in a few weeks." Like, great. I'm like, "This is fantastic. We don't have an MCP server. They just did it." And so, I just think more to your point, I think more and more of that's going to happen, which is it's going to be available in the OS or someone else is going to do it or whatever. and to to spend all this time to build it into the product specifically. I just don't feel like it's the right the best use of initial an initial V1 should be focused on the product itself and not the other things that it could possibly do. Again, later on maybe there's stuff that comes in. Maybe people via the open source version submit some PRs that have some AI stuff. I we'll see where it goes, but we didn't need it for V1.

Yeah, there's just always a question of where the AI lives. like do you need to go and pre-train your own model to answer questions or if you set up a good knowledge base will you just get sucked into the next pre-train automatically and you can just go to chatbt and ask about you and you'll be there anyway

I want to I want to keep hanging out for an hour but we we do we do have to wrap the show because we're going to look at a a studio

we have one last question

yeah one last question from our mutual friend David

Cra we get a could we get a wrist check what are you rocking on launch day

I might be the only person that coordinates their watch with their software. It's It's possible.

So, I'm wearing today I'm just wearing a um I'll take it off cuz I I don't know how to quite hold it up otherwise. Um

this is a vint just a vintage Hoyer from 1974, which is birth a birth year watch. Let's see. Hang on.

Whoa.

Oh, birthier watch. Hang on. Hang on. I love the Yeah, hang on. Let me see. The focus is hard, but there you go. There you go. There you go.

There we go. Love the I love the orange. It's colorful. Fizzy is colorful. Fizzy is full of color. It's the most colorful watch I own for the most colorful product we've ever made.

I knew I knew you literally said I knew you were going to match. I knew I knew it was going to be intentional.

This is so good.

It's a little sad. A little bit. It's a little bit sad. Sad. It's fun.

It's joy. This is joy.

It's joy.

This is amazing.

I didn't I didn't have like a what? Like a green What? Why were you guys wearing a green jacket a few days ago? What was that about?

It was Shopify Black Friday. We did. We were celebrating commerce online and so we wore just green solid green suit. No, it's Shopify. Signature color is is green.

Oh, shop. I didn't even know that. Yeah, green. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

It is a little confusing because we use a dark green in our brand theme and so it actually paired up pretty nicely. We also have yellow suits for when we uh for when there's big ramp news. We will wear solid yellow. Yeah, you probably seen those. Those are fun.

I've seen that.

Hard to hard to miss. Uh, well, Jason, uh, open invite to the studio. We'd love to hang out for like a full hour. Everybody

loving it. Everyone's having

everybody. Uh,

let's do it sometime. I'd love to. I think I got an email about about that. So, we'll figure that out.

Amazing. Awesome.

Appreciate it.

All right. Thanks for having me on to the whole team on the line. Talk to you soon. Very exciting.

Thank you. See you.

Bye.

Getbzzle.com. Shop over 26,500 luxury watches that you're not going to you're not going to believe it, but this was actually the next ad read up. Uh, fully authenticated inhouse by Bezel's team of experts. And uh we got to close out the show. So I'm going to tell you about wanderer.com. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dreaming beds, top tier cleaning, 24/7 concier service. There are so many more posts that I want to get to. Uh there's a lot to them.

There's a new Arena Mag out. You got to go to Arena Mag. Check it out. We are featured in this Arena Mag issue 006, the three martini launch. We had Julia on the show, of course, to talk about it, but now it's it's in print. Uh there's a lot else going on

and we will be back tomorrow. Yes. Sorry to cut it off. A lot of fun.

I would be in a very bad place if we weren't podcasting tomorrow, but fortunately we are. So, we'll see you tomorrow.

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