37signals

Sell your byproduct (37signals' books, Ford's charcoal)

Sam's reframe of portfolio income: sell the byproduct of your real work. 37signals (Basecamp) sold books explaining how they run their business to their own small-business customers, generating millions and new customers from a 'free' byproduct.

“sell your byproduct. This is an example from the 37signals guys in Chicago who, you know, they made a company that made Basecamp, and then they worked a certain way, and then they started selling books just explaining how they worked to the— basically their business, you know, served a bunch of small businesses, small business owners,. And so then they sold the book to those business owners about like, hey, here's how we run our business. And just selling their byproduct generated millions of dollars and even more in new customers who like to hear how they worked.”

Steal thisPackage the process or content you already produce as a byproduct and sell it back to your own customer base.

Sam predicts Hey.com will be a huge business

Discussing the 37signals email product Hey.com, Sam predicts it is going to be a huge business, even though both he and Shaan were unimpressed by the early onboarding experience.

“I am, am interested in all those, particularly the Scott Galloway one and the hey.com thing, which I think is actually gonna be a huge business.”