I'm like, well, what if you can make an ad that is the product? What if ads could be the product? How could you get people to look at these things as if that's the only thing they're there for? Now, great advertising is one thing, but you know, they're very few great ads. So anyway, here's the idea. So I think it could make a ton of money and literally there'd be almost nothing to do to make this thing happen, except getting the word out. And I think the word would spread so rapidly.
How much do you think about marketing when you think about it in idea? How much do you think about how am I going to get the first 100,000 people to download this? I don't think about that at all. For me, it's like, is the idea any good? I don't, I think it is. I don't know, let's build something and see. And then it's like a goose bumps feeling. Like, I think we're on to something. That to me is the best feeling in product development.
It's the feeling of, I think we're on to something here. But a lot of the, a lot of it is, the software industry is too serious. It takes itself too seriously. And I just would like to see some more playing. I'll say this, it feels like this idea of cozy software that you're talking about feels like one and one and a hundred, not 50 and a hundred. You know, most software feels a bit boring right now. I'd like to see more weird in software again.
Yeah, let's, let's make the internet weird again. Yeah. I am so excited to have Jason free. Someone I've looked up to for a very long time. On the pod, Jason could be anywhere, but he has chosen to spend his time with us. Thousands of people who love startup ideas and builders and thanks for being here, man. Yeah, it's great to be a Greg. Thanks for having me on. And I said, you can only come on if you have an idea. Yeah. Yeah. And your response was,
I've got something I can't get out of my head. And so what's going through your head? So I have had this idea for a number of years, which I don't like actually. I don't like it because I think it's good, but it's ugly in a sense in that like I actually don't, in a sense, I don't want to see this idea in the world. But there's something about it that seems so simple and that it would be so popular that I can't get out of my head.
So here's the idea. First of all, it's advertising based, which I don't like to begin with. So the whole premise of this I don't like. Okay. You know scratch off tickets, right? You know, lottery tickets, whatever, right? My kid, my son loves, though we get him every once in a while, five bucks worth and scratch him off, right? And so it kind of hit me a number of years ago. Like that whole act of scratching something off is a very fun thing.
It's one of the few like cheap mysteries in the world. Like for a buck, you can like, you don't know what's going to happen. It's very rare to find that these days. So I like this idea of scratching something off. So I thought that you could make an app. Okay. That is basically actually let me step back for a second. I don't like ads and I don't like ads typically because they tend to be in the way. They're always like in the way
of what you actually want. But I'm like, well, what if what if you can make an ad that is the product? What if ads could be the product? Like, how could you get people to look at these things as as if that's the only thing they're there for? Now great advertising is one thing, but you know, they're very few great ads. So anyway, here's the idea. Every day, let's say at noon GMT, this would be a global phenomenon, perhaps it could be
geolocated. There could be different things in different places. But the idea would be once a day, you load up this app anytime you want during the day, but only resets one today. And there's an ad. So you load it up and there's a full screen ad, like a tastefully done full screen ad could be video probably still just to start. And it's sort of printed on
this sort of gray substrate like a scratch off ticket, right? And you have to scratch it off, you know, with your finger, you got to scratch off the screen with your finger. And the whole thing has to be scratched off before the next thing happens. Now what would be fun is the scratch off part, like whenever you scratch off a real ticket, there's always
like these little remnants of like crumbs of the silvery powdery, whatever it is. So I thought it'd be fun that you have to go like this into your microphone, basically it would pick up the sound and it would like blow off the dust. So you have to scratch it off and then go, and this would be a thing like everybody in the world could do once a day, right? Once you do that, once it's all gone, there would be some sort of a pause and there would
either be a coupon for the company that sponsored the ad or there'd be nothing. Just like when you scratch off a ticket, like the chances of the odds are very low, but sometimes you get a free ticket, sometimes you get a buck or a dollar or three out, whatever it would be. The company would decide what they would give to a maximum of 5% of the people who used it. So this has to remain a long shot and a bit of a mystery and a bit of a, I don't
know what's going to happen today, but and you only get to do it once a day. But I think you could get, you could build something as simple as that and that would, that kind of be it. Now you could have special interests, you could have geographical things. So in the United States, you get a certain ad, if you're somewhere else, you get a different ad,
if you're into bikes, you could get just bike advertisers. Like there's a whole bunch of things you could do here, but it would be like in my opinion, the simplest possible way to get the most people to look at one thing a day because they might get something behind the scenes and it's kind of also a fun mystery and the ad is the product and the blowing into the thing is sort of a fun thing and like that is it. Now I think this could be huge,
actually. I think a lot of people would do it. I think it could be like an international phenomenon kind of thing because it's so stupid and simple and like, why not? Shh. Don't tell anyone, but I've got 30 plus startup ideas that could make you millions and I'm giving them away for free. These aren't just random guesses. They're validated concepts from entrepreneurs who've built $100 million plus businesses. I've compiled them into
a one simple database. Compiled from hundreds of conversations I've had on my podcast, but the main thing is most of these ideas don't need a single investor. Some cost nothing to start. I'm pretty much handing you a cheat sheet. The idea bank is your startup shortcut. Just click below to get access. Your next cash flowing business is waiting for you. I don't know what the legal implications are of doing a scratch offy kind of thing, but
I like this idea that the phone, it has all the elements. It's touch screen. You can move your finger. You can blow into it and then it's a full screen ad and there's maybe something about like a prize behind it. Again, I kind of don't want this to exist because I just don't like the idea of selling ads. I think someone who didn't mind that could make this into something quite big and interesting and there's probably a lot of other things
you could do with it. That's my idea. Jason, you came on the wrong pod to share an idea because these people will eat up this idea. All of a sudden, there's going to be 25 seed funded startup founders who are just going to go after this. Think about if I'm making things up, 100 million people launch this app every day. I could totally imagine that happening because there's nothing to do but scratch something off and
see if you want something. You can see this becoming this massive way to get people all to focus on their phone on this one ad for 25, 30 seconds a day every day. You can imagine the ad inventory you could have and how it could line up. People could buy certain days that were special days that are coming up. You could just imagine a whole ad sales team
backfilling this with tons and tons of inventory. I think it could make a ton of money and literally there'd be almost nothing to do to make this thing happen except getting the word out. I think the word would spread so rapidly. All I'm asking for is 1%. That's all you're asking. Just loop me in somehow. Please. What do you think of this? Do you remember HQ trivia? Yes, I do. Ross, who's the fan of HQ trivia, is a good friend
of mine, is a genius. He was the co-founder of Vine before, which essentially was TikTok. He was the host of trivia as well, right? He was never the host. He was the product co-founder and CEO. The host was a guy named Scott Regauski, I think. I know what you're talking about. I know the thing. What was brilliant about HQ trivia? The fact that to your point, it happened at the same time every day. People felt like they were a part of something bigger than
themselves. The commitment was pretty low. It didn't take very long. You can do it with your friends. There was a variable reward to your point around maybe I can actually win whatever it is they're giving away. I think what you're saying in a lot of ways is you're taking a lot of the mechanics that, well, it actually came from scratch-offs, but that comes also from HQ trivia and you're applying it to a game where the problem with HQ trivia was, first they were giving away 10,000,
then 100,000, then a million. They're raising venture capital to subsidize it. You're saying, no, don't raise venture capital to subsidize it. You're saying get advertisers. Yeah, you don't need to have any cash. There wouldn't be any cash prizes. I think you can have all these creative prizes from the advertiser who's advertising. It could be a coupon off. I don't know what it could be. There could be things. You have to be very creative. I'd love to see it be
very creative. The advertiser who's going to get 100 million people or more to look at their ad. You have to start with a full screen ad and you have to get rid of it, which is also a weird thing. They are responsible for the price, for the distribution of the prize. There is no money to be given away. Whoever would make this app would just be selling the ads, basically. They'd be in charge of getting more people to look at this every day. The other thing I thought of would be your odds.
I like this idea. I HQ trivia did this. Live TV used to do this, which is like, I like that there'd be a schedule and that something would happen. You could imagine the whole planet stretching here, but picking up their phone at the same time doing this. My sense would be it'd be interesting to have time be a function of probability of winning. The closer you do it to the moment it goes live, the higher the chance
of you winning, perhaps. If you do it at 7 pm, it goes up at noon. You can imagine everyone doing it at noon because maybe they have a 3% better chance of winning or something like that. The further off you go, the less chance that you have. Just to create this moment for everybody across the world at the same time to do this thing together. There's another idea that my friend Scott Hyferman.
Scott and I talked about this idea a different idea, but similar years and years and years and years ago, which we talked about building what we didn't do, which is similar or not to this ad thing, but to this scheduled internet experience thing, which was, every day, let's pick noon GMT. You go to a web page. Now we had some weird ideas. I'll share those in a minute. But to make this weird, but the premise was everyone would go to the same web page and a video
would play. It would be a video that would teach you how to do something. It could be like candle-making. How to sketch a room and proportion. It could be a quick recipe. It would be a 3 minute max video. It would be on YouTube. It wouldn't be on YouTube actually. It wouldn't be on YouTube. It would just be in this platform. People could submit these and we'd have this admin in the background going, yeah, that's a good idea. No, that's really well done, whatever. We'd have this big, big thing.
It would play for three minutes and when you showed up, it would start playing and it would play from wherever you jumped in, like live TV. If you came in 45 seconds later, you're not seeing the beginning and there's no rewinding and there's no archive. There's no way to look at this later. If you missed it, you missed it. It's over. You show up at the same time. We serve this video out in real time and then it's over. The remaining 23 hours and 57 minutes of the day,
there's basically an ad and some brand could buy the ad at that URL for the whole day. They could have a whole website. They could do a whole thing. It could be an entire website, not just like a static ad, but this idea again that everyone shows up at the same time to learn something new together. Maybe already know how to do it, but it'd be kind of this fun thing. They're also it's an ad. The weirder thing was we were going to say, what if you did this in a new URL every single
day? You'd see the URL in different places and it'd be sort of a mystery in a game and an underground thing to figure out if you can find out where the URL is going to be for tomorrow's show essentially. We thought that would be fun. Anyway, it didn't do that either, but it's the same kind of like having fun with real time, making a little bit of a mystery, a little bit of a treasure hunt. It's not really known what's going to happen. I like that kind of stuff.
One of the things that you're saying, which I think is really the future of the internet, is adding opening hours and closed hours to apps. That's basically what you're saying. It's funny because when in the real world, you can't go to your grocery store at 230 in the morning. It's closed. Or you can't go to your favorite breakfast restaurant at 9 p.m. It's closed. But on the internet, everything is so readily available. It's funny because I was talking my
wife last night. We recently got linear television. I don't know what that is. Like tele-school TV? We got cable TV. They've got it. Things are on right now. Things are on. I was talking to my wife and I was like, wow, this is amazing. She's like, why is this amazing? I just put on comedy central. I think it was. I was like, I don't need to do anything. We're not going on to Netflix and then trying to figure out, within Netflix, what do I need to watch,
making all the decisions? I think what you're saying is really interesting, which is, you kind of have to be there. You kind of have to be there. It's like a great comedy show. You had to be there. It's all in the delivery. There's something about that moment. Tied to that would be neat to have. This is another stupid idea. There's something in it that I like, which is speaking about your point about TV. It'd be cool if there was a TV that you could buy. Maybe not cool. It'd be dumb.
Let's imagine there's a TV you could buy that just had an on and off switch and no channels at all. It just picked a random channel every time you turned it on or off or on, I should say. Turn it off. Turn it on. New channel. Turn it off. Turn on. New channel. You don't know what you're going to get, but there's one button. It's on or off. Each time it just serves up whatever
the hell it wants. In real time, it's a real legitimate cable channel. But you don't know if it's going to be history channel or some local public access or sports or whatever it's going to be. It's just going to be what it is. I think that while these are obviously novelties and not that interesting, there's something in itself would be people wouldn't really use that. It'd be a novelty, a gag-interesting side show. But given that everything is on-demand,
everything's available to you all the time. It'd be interesting, I think, for there to be a few things on the internet that are not that way, that are right now, only now, not archived, not saved. If you miss it, you miss it. I like that. I think that's kind of fun. There's probably a lot of other ideas that we could play with around that general idea. And free. It's a free. Totally free. This will be totally free. The whole thing would be launch the app, add, scratch it off, blow it off.
Do you win or not? Don't know. Tomorrow I'll try again. Like, free, obviously. But I think it could be one of those things that just takes off. It just has a virality to it that's irritates me, actually. But anyway, maybe something like this even exists. I don't even know. But I feel like if the right people did it the right way, it could definitely take off. Right. Well, I think it's you have to channel your inner russ. You need to be russ or you need
to channel your inner russ. So what's all right now? Is russ available? Honestly, probably. He has an incredible house and nature. He's got a few things going on, but I think that for the right idea, come on, come on, hibernation. He would, he would come. He's brilliant. I have another idea. Okay. Here we go. No, no, Jason, please. This is just opening up. So I started on this idea a number of years ago.
Never. I got somewhere and then just didn't go anywhere. I love drawing in the shower on a shower door or a glass shower door. The steam creates the shower creates the, it was interesting about drawing on a shower is that you're removing. Again, it's like, I like this idea of removing versus adding, you know, removing the scratch thing. So you're drawing and removing the steam and I draw interfaces all the time on
shower doors. That's where a lot of my like product interface ideas come from. I play up with it on the door. And the reason I like it is because it's so ephemeral that you sketch this thing and then 45 seconds later, the steam car is gone. It's like, it's not there anymore. So it's like this perpetual idea board where I don't have to erase anything. It doesn't matter. There's nothing that's that's precious about it. It's just temporary. Just like the shower. I'm not in there that long
in 10 minutes, 15 minutes, whatever, screwing around. Like, great. So I'm like, how can I, but there's something about the white noise and the, the temp, the temporal or temporary nature of it that that I like and the removal. So I had this idea to basically have an iPad app. You launch it, steamy shower. Immediately, it just steams up. Okay. It doesn't launch steamed up. It launches clear and then steams up within a second or two to kind of have the effect. If you put on headphones,
you're going to hear shower noise. So you're going to hear like water. You don't have to have headphones. You don't have to use the audio part. But if you do, you're in the shower, very relaxing, and you just draw. And it fogs back up. Perhaps now I wouldn't V1 would be that's it. You're done. If you like something, you drew, take a screenshot. There's no like save. That's it. It's a perpetual refreshing sketch board, basically made of fake steam. Now, you could imagine there's a setting
somewhere where you could change the, you know, the steam, re-steam duration or whatever. But no, don't want any of that. I love like what's the simplest possible version of this? Let it up, steam, draw, goes away. You're done. Like it, screenshot it, whatever, put on headphones. They're sound. If you don't, there's no sound. Maybe they're sound without headphones. I think it'd be cool though. If it only worked with headphones, like you, it wouldn't just play through the speaker.
I don't know if that's even possible, but it'd be kind of interesting to really have to feel like you're really in it. So that's another idea. Again, based on these like the simplest possible version of something is always really interesting and entertaining. The reason, I started building this with someone I'd hired an iOS developer. And frankly, I'd like to still do this. So if someone out there wants to do this with me, let's do it. I'd like to do it. The thing we ran into was
simulating, it gets has to be good. The steam part and the feel of running your finger over it. And sometimes you get a few drips and sometimes you don't. Like I want that to be so realistic. And I feel like I need to work with someone who knows how to render stuff realistically in that way. And personal's working with shoes great, but we didn't really get far enough and that was it just kind of faded away. But I'd love to do this. I'd love to do this because I want this to
exist in the world. It'd be free again. I'd call it like shower door. I don't know what that would call it. Shower sketch steam steam wand. I don't know what it would be, but that's what it would be. So if you're out there and you want to do this, show me that you can. Some of you. I was going to say that's what I was going to say. I don't want a bunch of emails from people like because that happens. You have to be world class at this. But I feel it. Yeah. Sorry, go ahead.
No, it's going to say you have to be this needs to be a problem that you a inherently understand. And you could you can picture it. And you have the skill set to and have ideally done something similar before so that you're not spending a year trying to figure this out. Yeah, there's like so little to it, but there's a lot to it. The app does like nothing basically, but the the nothing that it does needs to be just so right to feel as natural as it would to really draw
on a steamy shower door. I know someone could pull this off. I'd love to support it and make it happen. I would use it all the time. One of the things that bugs me about sketching apps is how permanent they are. I know you can delete in the whole thing, but like there's just tools. There's tools everywhere. I don't want any of that. I just want a surface and I want to go away. And if I like
what I did, I'll save it with the screenshot. That's enough. Yeah. What I'm picking up on, well, actually before I say what I'm picking up on, what you're describing to me is what I call the margarita pizza problem, which is a margarita pizza. Of course, it's so simple. It's just dough and tomato sauce and cheese, but the difference between the best margarita slice you've had and dominoes pizza, not hating on dominoes because dominoes has its place in society as well, but
it's not like you're eating a slice in Naples. That's what you're saying with your product. It needs to be Naples, not dominoes. By the way, in the comment section, I know what we're going to get people saying, why are you talking smack about dominoes pizza? Dominoes at the right time is the perfect choice. There you go. As this thing would be the perfect thing to reach for, when you want to be in that mode. There'll be many times when I would use a sketching app for
other reasons. This is all about the dominoes moment, the shower door moment, this idea at least. I think it's actually surprisingly hard to pull off well. Quick ad break. Let me tell you about a business I invested in. It's called boringmarketing.com. A few years ago, I met this group of people that were some of the best SEO experts in the world.
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They're so confident in their approach that they offer a 30-day sprint with 100% money back guarantee. Who does that nowadays? So check it out. Highly recommend boringmarketing.com. That's what we realized as we got into it. And part of it is even just the finger dynamics of the hand. There's something in the analog world, things do what they do. You put your fingertip on something and the drawing is going to be the same exact thickness as your fingertip.
Because it's analog. It's your fingertip that's literally removing. So whatever contact point, if you press harder, it's thicker, if you press lighter, it's less. If you use your fingernail, you can get a thinner line. We couldn't quite get there with the touch screen dynamics at the time. Maybe we didn't know how. Maybe we weren't able to. Maybe this
has been a number of years now. Maybe it's changed. But it'd be really nice to have pressure sensitivity and have it really, truly detect the outline of your finger and make sure that that would make the removal of the steam precisely that much. So there's just no uncanny valley here. It's like it behaves exactly as the real thing would. If anyone out there goes, I love that kind of thing and I know I can absolutely do that. Please reach out. Maybe I'll regret
saying that. But I'd love to see this work. How much do you think about marketing when you think about an idea? How much do you think about how am I going to get the first 100,000 people to download this? I don't think about that at all. For me, it's like, is the idea any good? I think it is. I don't know. Let's build something and see. And then it's like a goose bumps feeling. I think we're on to something. That to me is the best feeling in product development.
It's the feeling of, I think we're on to something here. We're working on a current product right now, which I can't share many details about. But we just played with an idea. It's so hard to be so abstract here. But we play with an idea around images that in this category of product, this is not an invention of a new category. It's an existing category. But in this category, images are not typically part of the vernacular. We found a way to make
images like first-class citizens in this category. And it's super unusual and weird. But like, when you do it, you're like, oh, we're on to something here. There's something here. That's what I think about. It's finding those. There's something here, moments. And then I always feel like I've managed to build up a large audience on Twitter and LinkedIn, let's say, and maybe a few other places. I feel like I can get the word out. And I feel like if
it's any good, other people will then get the word out. So my interest is not in how do I market this. It's how do I make this really good that it will market itself as best it can. Not everything can do that. Something's spike and then die. So you have to have some sort of something that's going to carry it over the long term. And these kind of ideas, I think that the scratch-off one, I think, could carry itself. Because it's one of those things like people would tell
other people about. And there might be some other ways to make it more viral. Like, hey, if you tell someone else about this, we're going to increase your odds by, you know, 1%. Like, there's a million ways you could game that, which is, again, why I kind of don't like it. It's like pure gaming, in a sense. It's like pushing every gaming lever button switch you could. And I'm sure you could do that. The shower door thing is more like, maybe a very niche, super
niche thing. I don't care if 600 people use it. I don't care if 18 people use it. I want it. I'd be happy if I'm the only one who finds it interesting at all. And so I don't really care about that. You know, that's like a personal passion project for me. That actually just got me thinking of a whole other idea, which is, okay, what if there were limited, limited edition apps? So just like how there's vintage cars and there's only like a thousand of this one model of
Porsche, I'll say. This shower app could be like one of a thousand and it just could be an expensive app. You know, it's funny. I think someone tried to do this though years ago. It was like a fart app. It was like a thousand bucks or something. And it was like, that was the novelty. You know, an apple like said, no, you can't charge a thousand bucks for this or something like that.
But I do, I don't know. I know with with test flight, I think you can of course limit the number of downloads or however it looks, but I don't think you can do that with the app store in general. So I don't know how you do that, but I like, I like this idea. And there's things you could say, well, you'd have to enter a code, but Apple would not allow you. There's a lot of things Apple wouldn't let you do there. Maybe on Android, you could do that. I like that. I like the spirit of that.
People are are not Android realistically. Like the person, you know, I think it had, it would have to be iOS. I mean, some apps are just going to naturally be limited by their demand. That's like most people are like, I'm not what a sketch thing that's like steam and good. I can't say everything goes away. Like what? That's like so that might naturally, you know, maybe there are
900 people in the world who find that interesting. But no, I like, I like the idea of, I mean, it's kind of what we've been talking about at a different level, which is this idea of limits. Like the real time limit, like you're either there when it happens, you had to be there or it didn't happen. And this would be, you know, either got it, or, I mean, one thing you could do, actually, you can put something in the app store, I believe, and then discontinue it.
And then it would just stand people's phones. I don't think that it's deleted. I know we, I think almost certainly that's how that works. Unless Apple's changed those rules. But I think there was a time when that was true. Maybe it's still true. So you could like, this is how like high end watch brands create a collector's market. They'll make a limited number of watches. They won't necessarily be a limited edition. Sometimes there are limited editions. There's many of
those. But like, Patek Philippe, for example, will make a watch for six years or for four years. And then just discontinuing it. So it wasn't, it wasn't like we're going to make a thousand and just it's like, we're going to make this and we're going to side at some point that there's enough out there. And we're going to support the collector community by making sure that this
will never be made again. And then it will hold value or whatever. So you could just discontinue things, not go into them with limited edition ideas, but just discontinue when you're done. Got enough people have grabbed this enough people have downloaded this. We're done. It'd be cool though if there was like some sort of second hand market trading market for for apps you can't get anymore. I don't know how that would work. I don't think you could do that.
But there's some fun stuff in there. In 2014 or 15, we had a really popular app, but it got acquired and got shut down. There was this video discovery app. It was called Five Buy. And it was shut down and our team, this is around the time when Flappy Bird was really. Yeah, yeah, yeah, really popular. So we skinned Flappy Bird so that when you open up the Five Buy app post it closing down. It turned into Flappy Bird. But with our logos and our branding and
yeah, so you didn't have to download a new version of that. Yeah, it just wow. And people like Ryan Hoover and all these people were going into the app and Ryan wrote like a whole blog post about it. Yeah. And it was so funny. It went viral. Millions of people, millions of impressions, people were trying to get their hold on apps. There's something here. And I think like the genius of everything you're saying to summarize is the real world has a lot of ideas
for how to develop a product that's going to work. Because you mentioned time, you mentioned surprise, treasure hunts, a lot of this stuff you're saying, if I'm morality, a lot of stuff you're saying is, hey, this is happening in the real world and I wonder if this could happen in software. Yeah, I think there's, I mean, you might say, well, it happens in the real world. That's great. The internet's different or software's different. It shouldn't happen here. It's not fit to
happen here. But I think, I think there's, I think there's some sort of deeper universal things to tap into here. Like mystery, surprise, uncertainty, moments, like this is happening in this moment. And then it's not happening anymore. This is what makes things valuable in a lot of ways. Like that they're not always on demand that like, you know, you go somewhere and then you leave and like, you're not there anymore. And they could only experience the thing when you were there. You can take
a video and pictures, but you know, they're never the same. They remind you to some degree, but you can never really be there. It's like, it's like being, you know, I don't know, the grand canyon. Like there is no photograph that actually represents the grand canyon. Every photograph, the best photograph is purely an abstraction because when you're there, the volume, the size, the, the, the, the, the scope of the thing leaves an impression that is impossible to capture in pixels.
It's just you cannot. And there's other things like that. I mean, like love is like that. Like there's all these other things that were, these are feelings that can't be captured. And that's kind of partially what makes them really, really special. And you can't, we're not suggesting that we that you can do that necessarily digitally. But there's, there's some variations of that that I think would be fun to play with. And I'd also just like to see, and this is not fair because
there are there's plenty of like fun software. But a lot of the, a lot of it is, the software industry is too serious. It takes itself too seriously. And I just would like to see some more good playing with software playing with ideas in these ways. Not like creating games games are fun, obviously. But not about the game mechanics so much, but just like conceptual ideas, like the,
like the, the, um, shower door stuff is like more about playing with something. It's, it's, it's, it's an idea that you're trying to simulate that sort of not like a flight simulator where it's like you're trying to do something very complicated in a sense, but just trying to actually simulate something very simple. Um, I don't know. And maybe there are plenty of things like that. There might be just like even sound apps or something that just like recreates the sound of nature. These things
exist to whatever. So it's not like I'm, I'm not saying anything super novel here, but I'd like to see more of those kinds of things out there in the world. What have you seen recently of a piece of software that has had a little bit of fun that you're like, whoa, these people, they're on, you know, this is interesting. Like have you had a lot of, you know, it's software boring now or, or, or, or are you seeing stuff that's exciting you?
I'm trying to find an app. Um, I think I may have deleted it. There's some company, um, maybe you'll know who they are. They make like timers and like really fun typographical things that are like super simple things that just look really fun and look really cool. I can't
remember what they're called now. Um, there's also, there was some company called like something saw, gosh, like it was like simple software or like, unnecessary, or I forget what the name of the company was, but they're making really cool apps that really are just like, you already have a timer, but this timer is like more fun. You know, that kind of thing.
You know, to be honest, I think, um, this is maybe not where you're going with the question, but we recently bought, um, we actually traded, so we had a Jeep Wrangler and we traded it for a, a Land Rover. And so I had a very traditional experience at a car dealership, which was like a bad experience. It's like four hours of sitting around and paperwork and going to the finance office. And it's like, there was nothing fun about that except getting the car was fun, but the
rest of it was just bad experience. And then we recently just traded, um, we had an Audi E-Tron, which we're trading for Tesla. That experience has been fun. And actually, it's, there are few, very, very few things in this world. I think that are truly like night and day within the same industry. I don't know if you've bought a Tesla or been through the experience, but it is a night
and day fundamentally different experience. You do everything through your phone. It's actually fun and interesting to see like where you're at and when your car's going to be delivered and you don't really know and they give you a day and then you fill out some more stuff and someone text you and there's excitement and it's like, it's actually a fun thing and there's no paperwork. It's all digital. It's super simple. Uh, there's no like finance guy trying to sell you, you know, the
upsells and the wheel and tire pack. It's like, it's just actually a fun experience. And it's not like the software is fun, but the experience is actually fun, especially in contrast to what else exists. This is something that I, I really admire about them and something we've tried to do in our products is to try to make them feel cozy and comfortable in a way that I find a lot of software to be very clinical and cold, especially like modern design aesthetics. A lot of stuff just feels
very cold and clinical. So I think you can bring a little bit of like this feels warm. So it's not necessarily fun, but there's a warmth to it, which I think is cool to see. There was that one app or that one game years ago, maybe it still exists. It's like that sort of skiing game where you kind of hold your finger down and yep, I figured what it's called. Beautiful, absolutely beautiful, simple, artfully done. The whole thing is just was so wonderful and maybe still is. That's one of the
last experience I've had using software. And this is a number of years ago where I felt like one person made this just to delight people. Anyway, I'd love to see more of that. And less like how big could this be? Even though the idea I was sharing earlier, I feel like it could be big and gained in the whole thing. I think it says something that we can't come up with like 100 apps quickly. Both you and I create software involved in software. I've been in it for a while, but we can't
off the top of our head be like, here's the 20 different things. I think it feels like I'll say this, it feels like this idea of cozy software that you're talking about feels like one in one in a hundred, not 50 in a hundred. Most software feels a bit boring right now. I think boring is a good word for a lot of stuff. Actually, and it's unfortunate. You have these incredible little hand computers and laptops wherever like wherever. What I feel like is missing
and again, this is maybe like the old guy coming back and talking about how it used to be right. I don't want to be that, but there does seem to be a hobbyist ethos which seems to be missing in a lot of software. It used to be more of the hobbyist like almost surprising themselves with the fact that they made something that works. It was like awesome and it's in that that this thing works. This is great. Like it's totally quirky and weird and I made it for myself and maybe you can use it.
Vibre which was like the vibe like shareware and all the stuff that happened before the internet. It early does the internet too. In early websites and early personal blogs, that kind of stuff, there was definitely an era of hobbyists, fun, exploration. We don't know what this thing is yet. And I think what ends up happening is that as you begin to understand what something is, some of that fun leaks out of the bottom. It's just like you know it too well now and there's
less of an explorer's mentality. It'd probably be like if you were to go to a piece of land in the mountains that you've never been to, the first time is like wow, you go back three or four more times. There's more wow because you discover new parts to it. But if you've been back 15, 20, 30 times, you know it too well now and there's no more surprises left. I mean there could be a like an owl could fly by or some like whatever. There could be other things. But you go there with a
sense of like I know this now. And because I know this, I'm not expecting to be surprised. There's that awe is sort of missing and I feel like the software industry is sort of in some ways become that. And I would say you know in our minds at 37 signals we're actually we've been pretty conscious lately last few months specifically actually been talking about this more internally and we're trying to make some really sort of weirder things. So I'd like to see more weird in software
again. Yeah let's let's make the internet weird again. Yeah. Or let's make the internet weird period not even in again. You know. Yeah it's funny like when you run into the yeah true it doesn't need to be again. It can be I mean it is weird like there are of course our corners where it's like super. I saw a link yesterday someone sent me I don't know like I think I saw Jason cockies blog
or something which is there's a website that you can only visit once. Of course you can clear your cookies and like but but basically you can't it sort of sets a cookie that's like you've already seen this. And I think that's kind of interesting. You know again like it's not commercial. Who cares like enough with the everything has to be an asset like everything's become an asset class
versus like just it's quirky and weird. So I like that a day like you visit a website once or you know again the website only works for three minutes a day or or that kind of stuff I'd love to see more of that and I'm sure there's a lot of that in the edges of the internet but it'd be neat to have more people run into that so it doesn't have to be so super esoteric and only handful of people maybe absolutely. Yeah absolutely. Yeah Jason I know what I'm doing this weekend.
Making things weird. Making things weird. I make things weird. I this is inspired me to to look through to yeah just to put out some weirder stuff and see what happens. I'd love this idea around. Affembrality and time-based apps. I think the idea I actually really love your scratch-off idea and the blowing you know the blowing idea on top of it. Yeah come on that was awesome. That's the extra spirit of it that I think's important also. I'm actually been surprised frankly
that there's not more done in that way. I think there's of course there's like you know motion sensing and you know and game controllers or some of that but like blowing into it or shaking it or like tapping it in a way that I don't know like what I don't know enough about what's possible but I know certainly you can pick up audio on the microphone and you could probably pick up a decibel levels perhaps. So like a harder blow would blow things harder that kind of thing.
I'd like to see some more experimentation there it'd be really fun to see that so yeah please make some stuff and if anyone want to make any of this stuff and like you really want to do it let me know. You don't need my permission by the way obviously these are ideas we're sharing openly here but I'm gonna I'm gonna call these guys out because I'm actually going for dinner at the co-founders house in a few hours. There is a fun software studio in Paris that are called
AMO AMO and they will put on YouTube what their apps are but they have some motion apps. It's a it's I don't know if you remember this app called Zen Lee it was like a location based tracker kind of like I find your friends but you can like send stickers and there was messaging on top of it
they sold to Snapchat for like two two hundred fifty three hundred million dollars and now they've gone in same team basically have gone and created a social studio where they they're iterating on three or four social apps and a lot of them one is like a photo app that as you move it you can
the photos different and you can see you know different parts of it that's cool and they're pushing the edge on a bunch of different things there and they've also recreated their Zen Lee app and it's starting to get traction so I think um yeah I guess it's coming out of Paris it's coming
out of probably you know these things exist there is some weird stuff it's just at the edges absolutely and one of the mistakes you don't everyone to make is like making this mistake that if I don't know what it doesn't exist like that's such an ego-centered
way of looking at the world like all I know is what I know there's so much more I don't know so many of these ideas we might be talking about someone else is sitting there in the another corner of the world going I already made this don't you know about this there's like a billion people using this
thing so all the stuff could already happen and already exist and if it does wonderful I'm so glad to hear I'd love to hear about what it is I'd love to be exposed to it so yeah our own world everyone's world are quite small so maybe maybe the internet is still very very weird in a lot of ways and maybe there are all sorts of fun apps and things that we don't know about that would be cool to explore but
I have not seen the shower door app I want to make that and and and the scratch off thing would be fun to do I just don't want to build a sales team it's like not my not my thing totally Jason where could people learn more about 37 signals and and and you well you can go to 37 signals.com that's the number three seven signals.com basecamp.com hey hui.com our products we make once is another thing we're doing now o n c e.com which is another like kind of playful idea maybe in software these
days and then I'm mostly on on Twitter slash exit my name at Jason free of R I D or on LinkedIn you can find me there that's pretty much it and my email address is public you can find it you can email me and let's see what happens amazing thanks Jason this is great great thanks so much this is really fun later