Neat profile of Great Lake, a small Chicago pizza shop that is very opinionated. The couple that runs it wanted to start a business that reflected their values: a neighborhood shop that purchases top-quality ingredients directly from farmers, makes every pizza by hand and serves great food at affordable prices. No substitutions allowed either. “When we put options together, they’re put together for a reason. We have such an edited menu, and it’s shocking how much people still want to manipulate it,” says co-owner Lydia Esparza. [thx MG]
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37signals ID launch Start time: 0:26
We recently launched 37signals ID which gives customers one username and password for all their Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack, and Campfire accounts. In this segment, Jason and David talk about 37signals ID, what it means for customers, and what was surprising about the launch. Related links:
A new way of working Start time: 7:05
Jason and David discuss how 37signals is now working in teams. A team is made of three people: One designer and two programmers. A system administrator will also assist the team when necessary. Each team will stay together for two months (a “term”). When two months are up, the teams split up and form again with different people.
David Simon, creator of The Wire, talks about why merely chasing eyeballs is the wrong path:
You better have something to say. That sounds really simple, but it’s actually a conversation that I don’t think happens on a lot of serialized drama. Certainly not on American television. I think that a lot of people believe that our job as TV writers is to get the show up as a franchise and get as many viewers, as many eyeballs, as we can, and keep them. So if they like x, give them more of x. If they don’t like y, don’t do as much y. We never had that dynamic in our heads. What we were asking was, “What should we spend 12 hours of television saying?”
He’s talking TV. But when launching a business, there’s a lot to be said for starting from a point of view and knowing what you want to say too. When you do that, you have an anchor for everything you do moving forward.
What do you have to say? What’s your purpose? What do you stand for? Where do you draw the line? Where do you want to lead people? What do you want to spend your days doing?
For example, Whole Foods stands for selling the highest quality natural and organic products available. They’re not selling the x that most people want. They’re saying, “We don’t do x. We do y.”
That approach lets you spend your days building something you actually care about.
Plus it gives you a hook. Everyone else is doing “give them more of x” so that winds up being generic. Avoid that and you get to pitch something different: It’s not TV, it’s HBO. It’s not a regular grocery store, it’s Whole Foods. It’s not [generic category], it’s [your product].
Reader Daniel Nitsche suggests checking out this lecture by Don Watson (MP4 file: 139MB / 41 minutes) on the absurdity of corporate speak.
There are some great points in there, sprinkled with humour.
Powerpoint is the ultimate in the depletion of English. It just doesn’t approve of sentences. It makes them into dot points.
On politicians: we’re now more interested in the questions being asked by the interviewer because we know the interviewee won’t answer the questions anyway.
On private organisation speak: “Dear Valued Customer”—would you write to your mother that way? (Dear Valued Mother).
The invention of a mission statement is too late. The worst companies in the world are using mission statements.
Fun example from the lecture: Someone wrote a letter to Watson’s 90 year old mother that began “Dear Applicant.” Unclear what it was all about, she passed the letter to him. He wound up responding with a letter that started “Dear Bureaucrat.”
The language I think is poisoned, generally. And it’s poisoned in the name of efficiency for some strange reason. It’s as if the whole culture has been corporatised in one way or another. Does it really matter? Well I think it does. I think language is how we know each other. Speak that I may see thee.
Therefore … I mean, If you talk like this to your friend down the pub you won’t see him there next week.
Watson’s Weasel Words site collects awful yet funny examples of managerial language. Why Weasel Words?
‘In 1916 Theodore Roosevelt declared that the ‘tendency to use what have been called weasel words was “one of the defects of our nation”.’ ‘You can have universal training or you can have voluntary training, but when you use the word “voluntary” to qualify the word “universal”, you are using a weasel word,’ he said: ‘it has sucked all the meaning out of “universal”.’
Words that suck all the meaning out. Good way to put it.
It’s all a reminder to give anything you write a decent bullshit test before sending it out. Would you ever talk to your mother or your friend that way? If not, why is it ok to talk to a customer that way?
We’ve updated our collection of 37signals presentations, keynotes, and interviews. Watch Ryan at Windy City Rails 2009, Jeremy at Ruby en Rails 2009, Jason at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Mark at the Erlang Factory Conference, and lots more.
2009 was definitely the year of infrastructure at 37signals. We put in a lot of work behind the scenes to improve our hardware, software, and security setup. We also launched our biggest infrastructure project to date: 37signals ID. Infrastructure improvements are never over — we’ve got at least one big one brewing right now — but 2009 saw big progress on that front.
2010 is going to be the year of our products. With some of the big infrastructure projects behind us, we can focus more of our energy on improving our products. We’ve got some great ideas for new features, integrations, UI design/redesigns, streamlining common flows, etc. We have some new product ideas we may explore as well.
A new way of working
At the heart of the product renaissance is a new way of working. In the past each person at 37s has been pretty isolated. Everyone pretty much worked on their own own project. There was some overlap in a few spots, and occasionally a small team might come together to tackle something big, but most of the time it was every man for themselves.
We also had a tendency to pull people in different directions. We might ask someone to work on A, but then a few days later ask them to pitch in on project B, and then also ask them to help fix bug C. That makes settling into a focused zone really difficult.
Fixed-scheduled productivity: “Fix your ideal schedule, then work backwards to make everything fit — ruthlessly culling obligations, turning people down, becoming hard to reach, and shedding marginally useful tasks along the way.”
A big part of this: saying no. The author gives Jim Collins as an example:
Even though Collins demands over $60,000 per speech, for example, he gives fewer than 18 per year, and a third of these are donated for free to non-profit groups. He doesn’t do book tours. His web site is mediocre. He keeps his living expenses in check so that he’s not dependent on drumming up income (he and his wife have lived in the same California bungalow for the past 14 years), and he keeps only a small staff, preferring to bring on volunteers as needed.
Also shows the freedom you get from having low overhead. The less you owe, the less you have to do things you don’t want to do.
We’ve added “Newer posts | Older posts” links to Signal vs. Noise so you can page through posts without using the archives. (Scroll down to the end of 37signals.com/svn to find link for the next page of posts.) This allows visitors to read the backlog with minimal clicking as opposed to having to select individual posts in the archives.
You know that old saw about a plane flying from California to Hawaii being off course 99% of the time—but constantly correcting? The same is true of successful startups—except they may start out heading toward Alaska. Many dot-com bubble companies that died could have eventually been successful had they been able to adjust and change their plans instead of running as fast as they could until they burned out, based on their initial assumptions. Pyra was started to build a project-management app, not Blogger. Flickr’s company was building a game. Ebay was going to sell auction software. Initial assumptions are almost always wrong.
The official REWORK book site is now up at 37signals.com/rework. There you’ll find the full list of essays included in the book, a look at the front and back covers, six of Mike Rohde’s illustrations from the book, pre-order links at major retailers, and early reviews from folks like Tony Hsieh, Tom Peters, Chris Anderson, and Kathy Sierra. The book comes out on March 9, 2010.
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David’s 2008 Startup School talk
Another trip to the archives. This time we listen to one of David’s most popular talks. At a conference largely dedicated to talk of venture capitalism, he discusses how you can grow a company without looking for funding. Along the way, he explains the story of Basecamp and how 37signals has grown as a company. (We’ll be back with brand new content on the next episode.)
Pick a fight
Sometimes the best way to know what your app should be is to know what it shouldn’t be. Figure out your app’s enemy and you’ll shine a light on where you need to go.
I was reminded of this idea while watching It Might Get Loud, a neat documentary that brings together Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, U2’s The Edge and the White Stripes’ Jack White for a jam session and discussion. Along the way, it reveals how each developed his style of guitar playing.
Starting with the enemy
As each of these guys talked about how they came up with their trademark sound, it became clear that they began defining themselves by what they didn’t want to sound like. They started out by having an enemy.
Jimmy Page was a session guy playing on other people’s records and he was sick of it. Everything was too strict. Tempos were rigid. There were no dynamics. Everything sounded homogenous. It was limp muzak.
And that’s why he created Led Zeppelin. He wanted a band that could use both light and dark shades. He wanted to be able to speed up and/or get louder in the middle of a song. He wanted to stretch out on tracks for a long time. He wanted to use a bow and get crazy.
When U2 formed, The Edge wanted to be the opposite of the noodly, self-indulgent prog bands that were ruling the day. He wanted to play as little as possible. He used echoes to do most of the heavy lifting. He figured out ways to play chords with as few notes as possible.
The White Stripes came out of Jack White’s view that technology is the enemy of creativity. He didn’t want to use lots of effects pedals, brand new guitars, or tons of studio tracks. He wanted to create something raw and in-the-moment.
Each one of these guys succeeded in creating a unique, soulful sound by first defining what they did NOT want to sound like. That enemy told them where to go.
What are you sick of?
Embedded in all this is a reminder of how there’s fashion everywhere. It’s not just clothing, it’s also there in music, business, and tons of other things. People flock to whatever the hot trend of the day is. And when everyone chases the same thing, that means there’s an opportunity if you go in a different direction.
What’s everyone doing right now that you think sucks? What’s in fashion in your arena that you think is stupid? What do you think has outlived its place in the spotlight? Then start defining yourself by opposing that thing.
Yesterday we alluded to a new Sortfolio promotion we’ll be running across The Deck Network. The promotion started yesterday and will run for at least the next 60 days.
How it works
We purchased a slot on The Deck for Sortfolio. That gives us somewhere between 2,500,000 and 3,000,000 ad impressions across over a 30 day period. We used to run a static ad in that spot, but what we’re doing now is splitting the ad display 25% static and 75% dynamic. The dynamic ads feature our Sortfolio Pro customers.
25% static
25% of the time, our ad will look like this:
75% dynamic
75% of the time, our ad will be generated dynamically and feature a Sortfolio Pro listing ($99/month). Currently about 140 companies have Pro listings. The ad will feature a crop of their primary screenshot as well as a link directly to their Sortfolio page. Here are a few examples:
This means the companies paying $99/month to be highlighted on Sortfolio are also getting roughly 15,000 highlighted ad impressions across The Deck Network too.
This means your web design company could get prime exposure on sites like Daring Fireball, A List Apart, 43 Folders, Kottke.org, The Morning News, Ze Frank, Twitteriffic (in app), Design Observer, etc. There are currently 40 high profile sites that run Deck ads.
More exposure = more potential business
We hope this added high-profile exposure leads to more business for your web design firm. If you aren’t listed on Sortfolio yet, get listed today. It’s free to list your company, but if you want have a chance at having a featured ad run across The Deck Network, you’ll need to upgrade to the Pro plan.
