The Stay-Up Scorecard
One number (profit) and one question (would I do it again) instead of OKRs, KPIs and a five-year plan
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- 92%
37signals runs with no OKRs, no KPIs, no revenue targets, no growth targets, no per-product P&Ls, and no plan beyond the next six weeks. The scorecard is two things: collectively did we make more than we spent, and would we want to do this again. The underlying mental model is the infinite game — a 'stay-up' rather than a startup, where the point is to keep playing, not to exit.
Origin
Jason Fried at 37signals. He credits the infinite-games framing to James Carse's book Finite and Infinite Games (raised by Lenny Rachitsky in the episode; Fried had not read it but recognized his own philosophy in it), and coined 'stay-up' as the counter to 'startup'.
Core principles
- 01Revenue is vanity — you can go broke generating a lot of it. Profit is the only score.
- 02Judge the portfolio collectively; you cannot honestly attribute outcomes to individual initiatives.
- 03Starting is easy. Staying is the hard part, and the plateau is where you find out if you actually like the thing.
- 04Planning far out means deciding with the least information you will ever have, then feeling obligated to honor it.
- 05Independence is the root: without investors or a board, nobody can tell you no.
- 06Have desires and hopes; do not have expectations about outcomes you do not control.
How to run it
- 1
Delete the metric apparatus
Drop OKRs, KPIs, revenue targets, growth targets, and per-product P&Ls. Replace them with one collective question: across everything we did, did we make more money than we spent?
Pro tip Some things you do have no measurable return and shouldn't. What's the value of saying thank you? You wouldn't A/B test it — you'd do it because it's right.
Watch out This only works if you are independent. Investors and boards impose expectations and timeframes that make it impossible.
- 2
Add the personal scorecard: would I do this again?
At the level of the work itself, the success test is whether you'd want to do it again. 'That was worthwhile, let's do that again' versus 'that was a pain, took too long, let's not.'
- 3
Plan no further than the next cycle
Hold no multi-year, one-year, or even six-month plan. Every six weeks, rethink what to do next. Stay close to now and make it up as you go, informed by how things feel rather than a roadmap you wrote when you knew less.
Watch out Future obligations are dangerous: people end up doing things they no longer want to do purely because they said they would.
- 4
Track energy as a real input
Notice whether the business is giving you energy or sapping it. Fried treats this consciously — he was unexcited a year ago, is energized now — and treats sustained energy drain as a signal worth acting on.
- 5
Play for the plateau, not the spike
Expect flat and down years. Profits vary; margin varies. Ask 'do we want to keep doing this' rather than comparing yourself to last year, which mostly just demoralizes you.
Pro tip If you only liked the growth, you'll quit at the plateau. You have to like the thing itself.
- 6
Accept the opportunities you're leaving on the table
Run the thought experiment of what a growth-focused outside CEO would do with your business — more products, heavy ad spend, five pricing tiers, vertical editions. Then consciously decline them because you are optimizing for playing on, not for maximizing.
In the wild
37signals has never set a revenue, growth, or customer-count target and does not maintain separate P&Ls per product. It looks only at whether the whole company made more than it spent.
→ Profitable every year for 24 years, double-digit-million-dollar annual profits over the last decade, 100,000+ paying customers, ~75 employees, and no obligation to sell or go public.
37signals launched Basecamp, then HEY, and now ONCE with no stated bar like '20,000 users means success'. They ship what they are proud of and let the market answer.
→ Fried says he has no idea what will happen with the HEY calendar and is at peace with it — being proud of the work is the deliverable; acceptance is a hope, not an expectation.
Common mistakes
Confusing revenue with a business
You can go broke generating a lot of money. Fried's father's line — no one ever went broke making a profit — is the whole scorecard. Many companies optimize the number that can kill them.
Being high on growth rather than liking the work
Newsletters, podcasts and products all hit a plateau after the initial word-of-mouth spike. If the growth was the motivation, you quit there. Staying requires actually liking the thing.
Taking money and inheriting someone else's clock
The moment you take outside capital or big obligations, you work for someone else's timeframe and expectations. Every downstream freedom in this framework depends on independence.
Is it for you?
Best for
Independent founders of profitable, cash-generating businesses who want to keep operating them indefinitely rather than exit
Not ideal for
Venture-backed companies, any business with a board or investor expectations, or teams that genuinely need coordinated multi-quarter commitments
From the transcript
“I've just never like we don't have we don't have financial goals we don't have okrs or kpis I don't have Revenue targets”
“in total collectively are we making more money than we spend”
“for me you know it's really about would I want to do this again if the answer is yeah”
“staying is harder than starting and so I'm here to celebrate stayups”
“we don't have a multi-year plan I don't even a one- year plan”
From the episode
Jason Fried challenges your thinking on fundraising, goals, growth, and more