Jason Fried

October 13, 2025

The next product

New products don’t need to be revolutionary, life-changing, or disruptive breakthroughs to succeed.

Entire categories can roll downhill, gathering complexity as they go. Each product one-upping the next until more becomes too much. The cycle feeds itself, never satiated. Competitors locked in a loop of mutual destruction through perpetual over-improvement.

When that happens, the door cracks open for something new.

The newcomer doesn’t have to meet the others where they are. It just has to feel right — like someone opened the curtains and let the sun back in. The type of product that lets people exhale and say, “finally!”

Not groundbreaking. Just grounded. Standing where everyone else forgot to.

-Jason

About Jason Fried

Hey! I'm Jason, the Co-Founder and CEO at 37signals, makers of Basecamp and HEY. Subscribe below to follow my thinking on business, design, product development, and whatever else is on my mind. Thanks for visiting, thanks for reading.