Author: 37signals.com

Campfire just got snappier. Pratik treated the lobby, room sidebar, and guest invitations to a course of intensive performance therapy, shaving a good 30% from our average response time.

We would rather suffer the visible costs of a few bad decisions than incur the many invisible costs that come from decisions made too slowly – or not at all – because of a stifling bureaucracy.

—Warren Buffett excerpted in “Startup lessons learned from Warren Buffett” [thx Derick]

“Up in the Air” director Jason Reitman is talking about directing in this clip from KPCS, but a lot of his advice (put actors in the room and see what happens, plans can be a waste of time because you don’t know what you need until you edit, the “perfect science” approach taught in grad school ignores the chaos of reality, etc.) applies to creating a product or business too. Also, interesting to hear how he filmed/edited the entire airport security scene from “Up in the Air” on a camcorder first and then brought in the real crew to recreate it.

Related: Stanley Kubrick quotes [SvN]

David Christiansen, Founder of TroopTrack, sent us an email about apologizing well:

Over the weekend I broke the single sign on integration between my SaaS boy scout troop management software and ZenDesk, my help desk. It was broken for three days while I was sick, working on my regular job, and trying to enjoy some portion of Easter. I got about 30 emails from exception notifier, letting me know how my mistake was impacting users.

This morning I read your chapter on how to say you’re sorry. I already knew I needed to apologize, but it helped me to be human about it rather than corporate. Here’s what I sent:

Over the weekend I attempted to improve the single-sign-on feature between TroopTrack.com and TroopTrack Help Desk. Sadly, I didn’t do it right and caused two problems:
1) A brief outage over the weekend that impacted some of you.
2) Many of you are now unable to access the help desk.

The first problem was fixed within a few minutes, but it was still a pain for those of you who were online when it happened. I’m sorry about that.

I’m still working on the second problem. Hopefully it will be fixed soon. In the meantime, if you are having trouble accessing the help desk and need support, please email me directly or call me.

Thanks for understanding. Software is hard – I learn something new every day. Unfortunately sometimes I’m learning from my mistakes!

I appreciate the reminder REWORK gave me this morning to be myself.

Also, there was discussion in our Campfire room about how well done this was: Atlassian update on a security breach.

In summary — we’ve made mistakes, we’re sorry and we’re fixing them — and we’re going to be honest about what those mistakes are. Half of being a reliable and trustworthy vendor from a security perspective is the technical bits, and even though we erred here, we ultimately pride ourselves on how we handle security. The other half is being open and honest, which we’ll never fail at.

Related SvN posts on apologizing:
Hulu CEO: “We screwed up royally”
The bullshit of outage language
The goal is to apologize sincerely and be taken seriously
ThinkGeek: “We’d never get away with taking advantage of you guys, so why would we try?”
How to S.A.V.E. Customer Service

Time: 22:50 | 04/13/2010 | Download MP3

Mark, Joshua, and John on life as a 37signals Sys Admin
The Sys Admin team discusses hosting the 37signals apps, working with programmers, helping support, telecommuting, dealing with vendors, improving speeds in Europe, and more.

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Some interesting excerpts from Derek Sivers’ notes on “Business Stripped Bare” by Richard Branson [Amazon].

I had never been interested in being “in business”. I’ve been interested in creating things.

Although the combined Virgin Group is the largest group of private companies in Europe, each individual company is generally relatively small in its sector. And so we have the advantage of being the nimble ‘underdog’ player in most markets.

The first law of entrepreneurial business: there is no reverse gear.
No one in business can unmake anything, any more than a band can unmake a song.

The Virgin brand is about irreverence and cheek. It values plain speaking. It is not miserly, or mercenary. It has a newcomer’s voice – and in a world of constant technical innovation, the voice of a company that’s coming fresh to things is a voice people find oddly reassuring. It’s a brand that says, ‘We’re in this together.’

Don’t waste your precious time. Phone calls and emails can eat your day. Don’t let them. No one will think less of you for getting to the point. Because there are so many calls to make every day, I generally keep them very brief. And a short note to somebody is often quicker than a phone call. As the business has got bigger and spread across the globe, a lot is dealt with by short notes.

Engage your emotions at work. Your instincts and emotions are there to help you. They are there to make things easier. For me, business is a ‘gut feeling’, and if it ever ceased to be so, I think I would give it up tomorrow. By ‘gut feeling’, I mean that I believe I’ve developed a natural aptitude, tempered by huge amounts of experience, that tends to point me in the right direction.

Creative, responsive, flexible business comes easier to you the smaller your operation.

Even in a big business like the Virgin Group, I sit down now and again and sign every single cheque that goes out, and I ask my managing directors to do the same. For a month. Sign everything for a month every six months and suddenly you’re asking: ‘What on earth is this for?’ You’ll be able to cut out unnecessary expenditure quite dramatically when you do that.
As a small-business person, you must immerse yourself 100 per cent in everything and learn about the ins and outs of every single department.
As you get bigger, you will be able to delegate, and when people come to you with their problems, they’ll be surprised how knowledgeable you are and how much practical advice you can offer.
The reason you’re knowledgeable is because in the early days of the business, you learned all about it.
This is how business leadership is achieved. There are no short cuts.

Money’s only interesting for what it lets you do.

More of Sivers’ detailed book notes.

Whenever someone promises “exposure” instead of payment, run.

While editing a reply to Kiran’s tweet, I accidentally backspaced right into his Twitter handle. Twitterrific for iPad smartly noticed this and offered to restore the @reply. Nice!

Construction on the new office has begun.

The Opposite of Fitts’ Law [via Berserk’s comment at the spiky button post] asks:

“What should we do with UI elements we don’t want users to click on? Like, say, the ‘delete all my work’ button?”

The possible answers given: Make the button hard to click, offer an undo, and/or show a confirmation alert dialog before proceeding.

The piece also highlights Alan Cooper’s interesting “ejector seat lever” analogy:

Certainly gets the point across.

Here’s an example of separating a dangerous element from a harmless one in Backpack: The recently added add/edit an event box that pops up in your features a trash can icon that deletes a post. It’s located far away from the Save/Close actions.

In Basecamp, the Delete/Edit message links are close to each other. But if you do click on Delete accidentally, you have to confirm it:

We go the dialog route when the action does irreversible damage to something you might care about a lot. Loss of a calendar event is unfortunate but easily reparable. But loss of a message with comments can cause significant pain.

(Btw, one thing about the examples used in the Fitts’ Law post: There’s actually a setting in Gmail that lets you undo email sends up to 5 seconds after a message is sent.)

More on selling your by-products: The Dum Dum mystery pop is a mixture of two flavors (the end of one batch of candy meets the beginning of the next batch). Our candy lines are continuous and the switch over from one flavor to another results in some pops containing both flavors. Source: Dum Dum FAQs

A giggling Charlie Rose plays a racing game on the iPad. “This is fun, even at my age.” Hulu clip not working? You can view the show at CharlieRose.com (this clip starts at 8:25 in).

David Omoyele of Ink Audio read REWORK and had a beef with a passage in the book that suggests big companies don’t teach. He sent an email pointing out three examples to prove his point: 1) Apple offers free workshops at its retail stores. 2) Microsoft teaches via online lessons. 3) Gibson, one of the largest guitar sellers, offers “tone tips” like this one on how types of finishes affect the guitar’s tone.

More examples come to mind too: Nikon offers digital tutorials on its cameras. Dove conducts free Self-Esteem Workshop for Girls 8-12 years old designed to “promote new ways of thinking about beauty, body image and self-esteem.

So David’s got a point that big companies can and do teach.

Still, what percentage of these big co. budgets are going toward teaching vs. traditional marketing/advertising that hypes features? Big companies may be dipping their toes in these teaching waters but small businesses have a unique chance to dive in all the way and deliver more direct, personal lessons. And that can be a great way to turn customers into superfans. It remains one of those areas where small definitely has an advantage.

The line here in Southlake, TX was pretty pathetic, which was just fine by me. Once I was through the doors I tried out an iPad for few seconds and then was quickly moved on to the purchasing process. Here’s a video of the experience.

How do you test the way an app works on a piece of hardware no one can actually use yet? Omni Group made a fake iPad in order to try out UI designs before the release of the real device.

I don’t commute. I work from home. And I love it. I think of it as getting an extra hour a day. Add that up over the years and it’s a huge chunk of my life that’s given back to me. Not to mention the emotional toll that’s saved from not doing a rush hour commute, especially one on public transportation. (I still have flashbacks to the #66 Chicago Avenue bus I used to take to our office, including the one time – at 10am – a guy started snorting coke off his bus pass while sitting next to me.)

The toll that commuting can have on you is discussed in this article at BusinessWeek. It mentions “the commuting paradox” and why the trade-off of a long distance commute is rarely worth it.

Most people travel long distances with the idea that they’ll accept the burden for something better, be it a house, salary, or school. They presume the trade-off is worth the agony. But studies show that commuters are on average much less satisfied with their lives than noncommuters. A commuter who travels one hour, one way, would have to make 40% more than his current salary to be as fully satisfied with his life as a noncommuter, say economists Bruno S. Frey and Alois Stutzer of the University of Zurich’s Institute for Empirical Research in Economics. People usually overestimate the value of the things they’ll obtain by commuting – more money, more material goods, more prestige – and underestimate the benefit of what they are losing: social connections, hobbies, and health. “Commuting is a stress that doesn’t pay off,” says Stutzer…Commuting is also associated with raised blood pressure, musculoskeletal disorders, increased hostility, lateness, absenteeism, and adverse effects on cognitive performance.

Seems like yet another reason to consider remote workers. Who wouldn’t want a team that’s filled with folks who are less stressed and more satisfied with their lives?

Re: the discussion of if/when to sell a company…

Incessantly maximizing profits and/or selling out doesn’t have to be the ultimate end goal. Sure, you want to get to a point where you’re profitable and comfortable. But then things get a bit more nuanced. Then it depends on what your priorities are.

What if you could make money, maybe not crazy numbers but still a healthy profit, selling a product that people really love? How much of a turn-on would that be to you (even if it means less profits than you’d make churning out a mediocre product)? How much would you be willing to shave off your bottom line to feel like you’re making something that genuinely makes a difference in people’s lives? How much is it worth to you to get emails from customers that tell you how much they love what you make?

Ego and pride can matter too. Can you put a price on the thrill you get from becoming a master at something and seeing the results in your efforts? What’s it worth to you to be able to proudly show your child what you work on every day? How much would someone have to pay you to walk away from that?

And what if you feel like you keep getting better at what you do every day? Even masters will tell you, you never have it all figured out. You’re always learning more. Refining. Getting better. And that can be intoxicating. When you feel like you keep building a better version of what you sell, it’s tough to walk away.

There are all different kinds of currency in life. Numbers in a bank account are just one of them.

Investor see, founder do.