This is Signal vs. Noise, a weblog by 37signals about design, business, experience, simplicity, the web, culture, and more. Established 1999 in Chicago. Visit the Product Blog for more information on our products.
When people ask me what I do all day I have a hard time summing it up. I design, I edit, I think, I review, I suggest, I teach. Some things I mess up, some things I fix up.
But what I really do most of the time is trim, tuck, iron, cut, press, and fit. I’m a software tailor.
And I’m starting to think that’s my perfect role. My team is incredible. I don’t need to tell them what to do. If there was a fantasy software league, I wouldn’t trade my team for anyone.
But there are times during the development and design process where the things we make just don’t fit as well as they could. That sentence could be slimmed down. That design element could be trimmed off. We could cut a step out of that process. And the overall experience could use a good press to iron out any stubborn wrinkles.
So while a tailor can make bespoke clothes, most of the time they’re fitting clothes other people made. And most of the time that’s exactly what I’m doing — fitting software my team made.
Some people may call this process editing, but I think it’s more akin to tailoring. So that’s how I’m going to explain my job from now on.
“Off the Chart” talks about how recent unemployment rate predictions turned out to be way off the mark. The reason: “Reality has produced numbers of its own.”
And that’s the problem with projections. Reality is a terrible collaborator. No matter how much you try to work with it, it has a mind of its own. And it never listens to you.
Plus, it’s easier to be a cheerleader than a doomsayer — especially when you have a vested interest in the outcome. That’s how people wind up in an overly optimistic fantasy world. No one ever submits a business plan to an investor that says, “This probably isn’t going to work.”
Next time you see someone with a plan or chart with made up projections, imagine it also contains unicorns and dragons. It might as well.
We’ve just posted another article in our series of Design Explorations. This installment shows our process for adding a new feature to Basecamp: Add due dates to to-dos.
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37signals worth $100 billion? Start time: 0:37 The story behind the mock press release claiming 37signals is worth $100 billion. The press should be more critical in covering valuation stories. Eyeballs aren’t the only thing that matter.
The valuation dance Start time: 8:45 Was the press release a shot at Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube? Why was the sale of Mint to Intuit disappointing? Where will the next great generation of companies come from if they keep selling early? Also, VC money is a time bomb.
Mojito Island is a mirage Start time: 15:23 The idea of selling a company for a big pot of money and living happily ever after doesn’t actually happen. People who make great companies are inherently driven and don’t want to live a life of leisure. If you’re succeeding on something now, stick with it. Otherwise, you may wind up looking backwards “for the love of the game.”
Signal vs. Noise reader and JobChoy founder Mark Meeus writes:
I’m not sure if you know Rodrigo and Gabriela and their story, if you do you can stop reading right now ;-)
I want to tell you briefly their story because it is a good example of Getting Real applied to something else than webapps.
Rodrigo and Gabriela started out as heavy-metal guitarists in a band in Mexico City. Their goal in life was to do nothing but music, but it didn’t went well. They both failed to enter the conservatory in Mexico City and their band wasn’t going where they wanted it to go.
So they decided to sell all of their stuff and just keep their acoustic guitars. They moved to Dublin where they started to play in bars and busking on the streets and in metro stations.
In the beginning they played Metallica covers, but soon enough they got bored and started to write their own songs.
They needed the money so they had to ‘optimize’ their music. They would write a song, tested it live to see how much money they got, rewrote it a bit, see how much they got, rewrote it a bit, …. (A/B testing on music.)
After a while they managed to save some money and started to move to other cities, along the way they gained a bigger audience and became ‘known’ in those cities.
In 2006 they released an album (Rodrigo y Gabriela) which took the Irish hit charts by storm, the first instrumental band ever to do that.
Now what’s so ‘real’ about this story?
They didn’t listen to all those people telling them ‘just 2 guitars’ will never work
A team of 2!
No outside money (with todays technology that’s not so uncommon, but they did it before 2000).
Just 2 guitars, underdoing the competition
Passion
Constraints: no money, no other instruments
They hired the right audience and focused solely on them
Their music is opinionated
Race to live music/testing in the wild, composing a song and immediately playing it at the street.
Apart from all this, their music is really great, but that’s a matter of taste isn’t it?
It’s interesting how many of Google’s expanded listings have become even more useful than the home page behind the link.
For example, take these two examples. One is the Google listing for Grub & Ellis. The second is the Grub & Ellis home page you get when you click the search result link.
The Google listing
The actual home page
I find the expanded Google listing more useful. It cuts right to what I want to know 95% of the time.
And it’s not just this example site — I’ve found the expanded Google listings more useful than just about any home page I’ve visited lately. What does that say about the state of web design?
The dirty little secret about simple: It’s actually hard to do. That’s why most people make complex stuff. Simple requires deep thought, discipline, and patience – things that many companies lack. That leaves room for you. Do something simpler than your competitors and you’ll win over a lot of people.
There are only three major items on Chipotle’s menu: burritos, tacos, and salads. In Chipotle’s Secret Salsa, Founder and CEO Steve Ells sums up its business model in a single sentence: “Focus on just a few things, and do them better than anybody else.”
One thing you won’t find at Chipotle is dessert. Restaurant analysts say a cookie or other dessert at the end of the food line could instantly boost sales by 10 percent or more there. Ells doesn’t care. “We’ve had 10 years of double-digit comps in a row, and we’ve done that without cookies,” he says. “So why start now? I see only the downside to adding cookies.”
The yogurt chain Pinkberry started off by selling only two flavors of yogurt: original and green tea. That meant fewer worries about inventory, machinery, recipes, and other complications that would have resulted from selling a variety of products. Instead the company focused on flavor. It’s now a chain with dozens of stores and devout fans who refer to the yogurt as “Crackberry.” (Ever think about how your product would sound with “crack” as a prefix?)
You can try to win a features arms race by offering everything under the sun. Or you can just focus on a couple of things and do ‘em really well and get people who really love those things to love your product. For little guys, that’s a smarter route.
When you choose that path, you get clarity. Everything is simpler. It’s simpler to explain your product. It’s simpler for people to understand. It’s simpler to change it. It’s simpler to maintain it. It’s simpler to start using it. The ingredients are simpler. The packaging is simpler. Supporting it is simpler. The manual is simpler. Figuring out your message is simpler. And most importantly, succeeding is simpler.
Highrise Why Highrise is the best way for real estate agents to manage leads
“Before Highrise, I’d used a variety of real estate specific CRMS, plugins for outlook, and everything else I could find. After I spent half a day installing, syncing, etc, the novelty would wear off and I wouldn’t use them consistently. Highrise is simple and speedy enough that it’s painless to use consistently.”
Bungalow lets you manage your Highrise task list on your iPhone
“Bungalow brings your Highrise task list to your iPhone so you can manage them on the go. Even if you are not connected to the internet you can tick tasks off, edit them and create new tasks with seamless background syncing when you’re back online.”
New Voxtopia extra lets you track your calls through your Highrise account
“With Voxtopia’s integration, you can now track all incoming & outgoing calls through your Highrise account. Voxtopia will automatically add a note to your contacts when you make a call to or receive a call by one of your contacts through Voxtopia.”
Prefinery manages software betas and integrates with Highrise
Prefinery manages betas (for webapps and desktop software) — and it integrates with Highrise. It allows customers to create a splash page, supports a sign-up form with fields and survey questions, and handles incrementally inviting users. Customers can sync their list of testers (early adopters, best customers) with Highrise via the API to track leads, conversations, etc for further down the road. Prefinery also integrates with MailChimp.
Some beautiful 1950s railroad posters from the cover of Railway Age Magazine. Illustrations by Bern Hill. You can check out the collection on Antiques Roadshow.
Fear: “I’m going to lose because someone else is going to beat me to market (or is already there).”
Truth: In business, there can be lots of winners in any niche. Look at how many shoe makers, Italian restaurants, and furniture manufacturers succeed. You can do well in a crowded field as long as you’re doing something that sets you apart from the pack. It can be price, style, substance, personality, positioning, or storytelling. There are tons of ways to establish your company as unique.
Don’t obsess over being first-to-market either. Successful businesses show up to the party late all the time. Google wasn’t the first search engine. VHS toppled Betamax even though it was later to market. There are plenty of things that are more important than being first.
Ken Burn’s documentary on Frank Lloyd Wright shows Wright did the actual drawings for the famous Falling Water house in less than three hours! [via TSY]
Haystack is off to a great start. We launched two weeks ago on October 21st, and so far over over 2,500 web designers have been listed. Lots are finding clients as well. That’s exciting.
We’ve been hard at work improving Haystack. Here are some of the improvements we’ve made since launch:
Call to action footer
At the bottom of each company page, we’ve added a call to action after their portfolio shots. This way it’s easier to scroll through someone’s work and then get in touch with them. It says “Like what you see? Contact via email or web.” Here’s what it looks like:
Updated and New flags
We wanted to call out new listings and listings that were recently updated. So for the first 48 hours, a listing card gets a “NEW” badge. Any listings with updated descriptions or new portfolio images get an “UPDATED” badge. Here’s what they look like close up and also in context.
Car companies go to great lengths to hide new models from from the public (or car paparazzi) during road testing. They’ve gotta drive the cars, but they don’t want to give away their designs too early.
Car camouflage used to be handled with wraps, fake bodies, or fake pieces attached to the actual body. Like:
But lately I’ve noticed more companies using swirly decals or geometric stickers to mask the shape. Check these out:
I would assume once cars get deeper into the testing phase, and aerodynamics, wind noise, and overall ride quality need to be fined tuned, the bulky camp comes off and the swirly surface decals come on. But it does seem like the swirls are new in the last few years.
I wonder who’s behind them (since the same patterns are apparently used by different brands). Which company or inventor is the king of car camo?
Jay Shafer of Tumbleweed Tiny House Company designs and builds small houses ranging from 65 to 837 square feet. He’s spent the last 10 years living in his tiny houses. In this video he gives a tour of a 96 square foot house.
Facebook sucks you in because everyone you know is using it. You go to eBay to find something because you know someone is selling what you want to buy. Oracle wins in the enterprise because there are tons of experts and plenty of auxiliary software available. All these business rely heavily on the network effect: Their product is more attractive than the competition because of their market share.
Do you know what kind of software doesn’t have the advantages of the network effect? Ours. One Highrise user doesn’t give a hoot whether we have 10,000 or 100,000 customers. Jane Doe doesn’t benefit if we sign up any other customers this year. As long as there’s a sound business behind the product, she doesn’t care about anyone else. In other words, there are no network effects.
Bug tracking has no network effects
Do you know what other kind of software isn’t affected by the network effect? Bug tracking. I don’t care who else is using Trac as long as it’s great software. It doesn’t benefit us to know that the Shopify guys are using it too (short of just sharing tips and tricks). Again, no network effects.
I don’t think Spolsky notices a difference. In Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death, he’s freaking out that a competitor (Atlassian, it seems) is growing faster than Fog Bugz and decides he has to get into market-share mode or face extinction. That unless he puts the turbo on growth, he’s going to be WordPerfect.
Bad decisions come from fear
Fear is ugly because it makes you irrational. Fear makes you jump to conclusions. Fear makes you reactionary. Spolsky’s reaction to the imaginary threat of extinction is all fear:
1) Build every feature any customer would ever want: Apparently, by having all the features anyone can ever imagine, Fog Bugz will “eliminate any possible reason that customers might buy our competitors’ junk”. That’s a faulty conclusion and a terrible idea. Software that tries to be everything to everyone generally sucks. It becomes bloated, hard to use, and in need of big up-front training. (Actually, that’s a pretty good definition of enterprise software right there).
2) Become a sales force-driven company: Hire a bunch of sales people and make them convince people to buy our software. This is even more enterprisey thinking. Side step the actual users, the developers, and go straight to management with steak and strippers. I’ve worked at sales force-driven software companies and they suck. The sales people will invariably promise more than you have and drive you even deeper into “build everything for everyone”.
Stay strong
Companies in non-network-effects businesses don’t become extinct because they only have 50% y/y growth. They become extinct because they fuck up a good thing and become their own worst enemy. They take a successful product and ruin it trying to reach for the moon. Joel, please don’t do that.
I have seen so many young entrepreneurs and intelligent, experienced engineers come through the door with “great products that will change the way people and businesses function” and most of them fail. They fail because the mentality towards what a business should be and how it should be run is different now. Years ago when you opened a business you had fixed costs and you hustled each month to cover bills and grow so that you could do more than just cover bills soon. Technology is not an industry, in my opinion, it is a tool that is used to make an industry more efficient and effective… now I know this means that the production of these tools is an industry, but how many companies today really create tools and how many create cool crap that is dead in 6 months?
Investors use terms like “sexy” and “viral” and 22 year old CEOs use buzz terms like scalable, robust and enterprise but there is no meat to anything anyone is saying. No one asks “how do you make money, how quickly, how much, what are your CPCA…” oh and 22 and you are a CEO… really… get over yourself…
The illusion of success, the delusion of being the next Zuckerberg… are we fostering great minds or setting the next generation up for failure and disappointment?
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In this episode: Jason discusses his new CEO office hours and the most surprising call he’s received so far. David takes us behind the scenes of Haystack, the recently launched 37signals site that brings together web designers and clients. The discussion touches on why the site was created, how it works, and changes made to initial feedback. Then Jason discusses how nature can make you a better designer.
When’s the last time you read your site or web app aloud? Not just the big text blocks and the about page, but the headlines, field labels, buttons, error messages, and confirmation emails?
Kelly Flatley and Brendan Synnott were two high school friends who wanted to sell their homemade nutty granola. So they launched Bear Naked in 2002. Here’s the story of how they landed their first big account:
Our first big retail break was landing an account with Stew Leonard’s, the four-store Connecticut grocery chain. For months we bugged the buyer via phone. He ignored us. To get his attention, we decided to bring him breakfast one day.
We woke up at 6 a.m. and dressed in Bear Naked T-shirts. We borrowed china from Kelly’s mom, which we used to display fresh fruit, our granola, and Stew Leonard’s brand of yogurt. We were the first car in the lot at the chain’s headquarters. After we climbed the stairs to the office, the receptionist told us the buyer was on vacation. We were deflated!
But then, as we were walking away, we recognized Stew Leonard Jr. “Stew!” we yelled. “We brought you breakfast!”
He seemed impressed by our youth and enthusiasm and asked us into his office. He said he was used to brokers pitching 55 products at a time and that it was refreshing to meet young kids so eager to sell a bag of granola. After talking with us for two hours, he said he wanted to help us out. He decided to place our granola in his stores.
The article provides good inspiration for how you have to DIY it starting out. For the first few years, the duo ran the company out of Kelly’s parents’ home, bought ingredients at CostCo when distributors wouldn’t fill their undersized orders, crashed triathlons to give out samples, and worked as the company’s distributors, producers, and kitchen cleaners.
A great way to figure out the weak spots in your product is to demo it live in front of an audience (not just a couple people at an office). Talk through it and read the UI out loud as you click around and do stuff. You’ll notice all sorts of little things that can be improved.
Lately I’ve been seeing more speakers hop up on stage at a conference and say “I didn’t prepare anything so I’m just gonna wing it.” Or they’ll let you know that they’re “Sorry about the quality of the slides – I put them together quickly on the flight over here this morning.”
I’m all for winging it, but when you say “I’m not really prepared” in front of an audience you’re showing them the ultimate disrespect.
People take days off of work, spend hundreds on a conference ticket, travel for thousands of miles, and pay hefty rates for flights and hotels to come hear you speak, and you tell them you didn’t have time to prepare a talk? What’s cool about that? The audience is busy too, but they found time to come to the conference. You can’t find time to properly prepare a presentation for them?
Now… Some of these unprepared talks have been wonderful. The spontaneity is great, and if a speaker knows their topic they don’t really have to prepare in the traditional sense. So it’s not the quality of the talks, it’s the qualifier. If you aren’t prepared, or if you hastily put together your presentation, just don’t tell the audience. Just perform at your best and keep the pity and embarrassment to yourself.
UI that looked sexy in Photoshop almost always looks overdesigned when we try it for real in the browser. Here’s a hypothesis. Simple and useful designs just don’t seem good enough when they are dead pixels. They need to be brought to life before they can be appreciated. Until that happens we overcompensate with garnish.
Danish designer Jens Risom, who designed the first-ever Knoll chair, built a gorgeous weekend getaway home that was profiled years ago in Life Magazine. Check out the shots of the interior too (starts halfway down at linked page).
Last week we launched Haystack, a new way for clients and web designers to find each other. We designed early concepts for Haystack this past spring/summer. I thought you’d be interested to see some of the designs that we didn’t use, but helped get us to the final launch.
The Webdev Pages
Initially the idea was to base Haystack on the Yellow Pages. Designers, Programmers, and Agencies could create a free text-only listing. There would be multiple tiers of ad space that would sit prominently above those free listings. The consensus: Too broad: let’s focus on Web Designers. Not visual enough.
Company Cards
The design started to gel once we decided to focus on Web Designers. We created the company card. A quick glance gives you an idea about the designer’s work, location, and typical budget range. The company cards in a grid looked great, but all the cards were the same. We needed a way to differentiate Pro accounts from Free accounts.
Most of the people I know who are money-making-machines got started really early. Lemonade stands, car washes, lawn mowing, baseball card trading. I think the reason they are money-making-machines today is because they started early. They learned the skills of negotiation, pricing, selling, and market-reading early. They have more practice selling than most people. That’s one of the reasons they’re better at it than most people.
Making money takes practice, just like playing the piano takes practice. No one expects anyone to be any good at the piano unless they’ve put in lots practice. Same with making money. The more you practice the better you get. Eventually making money is as easy for you as piano is for someone who’s been playing for 10 years.
This is one of the reasons I encourage entrepreneurs to bootstrap instead of taking outside money. On day one, a bootstrapped company sets out to make money. They have no choice, really. On day one a funded company sets out to spend money. They hire, they buy, they invest, they spend. Making money isn’t important yet. They practice spending, not making.
Bootstrapping puts you in the right mindset as an entrepreneur. You think of money more as something you make than something you spend. That’s the right lesson, that’s the right habit, the right imprint on your business brain. You’re better off as an entrepreneur if you have more practice making money than spending money. Bootstrapping gives you a head start.
So if you’re about to start a business, or if you already have a business and you’re thinking about taking funding, or if you’ve already taken funding and are considering going back for more, consider the alternative. Don’t raise money, raise prices. Sell sell sell. Get as much practice as you can. Force yourself to practice. Force yourself to learn how to make money as early as you can. You may hate it in the short-term, but it’ll make you a great businessperson in the long term.
Highrise New in Highrise: Filter tasks by category
We just added a new feature to Highrise. Now you can filter your tasks by category. To filter by category, go to the Tasks tab. If you have any categorized tasks, you’ll see a pulldown with the categories you have used in the header of the page.
New in Highrise: More storage, same price
Good news: We’ve just added more file storage to all paying Highrise accounts — at no additional charge. We hope this additional storage helps those who are already near the limit, and encourages others to attach even more files to their contacts without worrying as much about hitting their limit.
Now all Highrise accounts include SSL security
As of today, all Highrise plans — including the free plan — include SSL secure encryption. Prior to this update only Solo, Plus, Premium, and Max plans included SSL. To turn SSL on for your account, click the Settings link at the top of the screen and scroll down to the SSL section.
How GetFave.com uses Highrise to manage sales leads
Through a feature our programmers have developed, we can feed leads into highrise on demand. Then, these leads are randomly distributed to our sales reps (users/people) and tasks to call the leads are automatically created. The sales reps use HR to manage the entire sales process, from calling and setting meetings to taking meeting notes and referring back to them. We use tags to categorize the leads. I like the note taking and I also like the ability to create tasks.
Basecamp New in Basecamp: Thumbnail previews of images on the Files tab
Today we added a new feature to make organizing image files in Basecamp even better. Now files such as JPG, TIFF, PNG, and GIF images uploaded to Basecamp show a thumbnail preview on the Files tab. You can click the thumbnail to zoom-in for a larger preview. This makes finding files easier and brings image zooming available elsewhere in Basecamp to the Files tab.
Jonny Trunk’s Recommendations tip you off to music you haven’t heard without just handing it to you. For example, here’s something Jonny recommends:
A quick scroll through Amazon will show you which Mingus album he’s talking about. But that small effort on the part of the listener changes everything. It’s fun to get new music, but it’s even better to discover new music yourself. By leaving the legwork to the reader, Jonny also leaves some of the joy of discovery. Besides, good music is always better when you earn it.
It goes beyond music too. The best moments are those Kathy Sierra ones where we think “Aha! Yes! I kick ass”—and those usually happen not by following instructions but by connecting the dots between the instructions.
A few years ago we launched the 37signals Job Board to answer a question we heard all the time: “Do you know where we can find a programmer or a designer? We need to hire one but we don’t know where to find one.” Since then, over 5,700 jobs have been posted, and many positions have been filled.
Another question we hear a lot
So there’s another question we’ve been hearing a lot: “Can you recommend a web designer to help us with a project?” or “Do you know any good web design firms in Chicago? Or New York? Or Denver?” Now we’ll have an answer to that question as well: Haystack.
Here comes Haystack
Today we’re launching Haystack. Haystack is a site where web designers (firms and freelancers) can answer the three basic questions a client typically asks at the beginning of a search:
What does your work look like?
Where are you located?
What’s your typical budget range?
This is what clients want to know. Haystack lays it all out for them. Browsing on Haystack is like browsing dozens of web designers sites, but browsing them all on the same page. It makes finding the right web designer significantly easier than the old fashioned way (finding and browsing dozens of different designer’s sites). Clients can favorite firms they like and review them all on one page (that’s nicely printable and sharable, too).
What’s it look like to clients?
Here’s what Haystack looks like to a client who’s browsing to find a web design firm. They can filter by city and typical budget range. They’ll see pictures of matching designer’s work so they can hone in visually:
Adding yourself or your company to Haystack is a quick two step process. You upload a picture that best represents your work, you choose the major city that’s closest to you, and you select your typical budget range. We then create a Haystack listing card for your company. The card is created as you’re filling out the form so you can see exactly how it’s going to look.
Your card is then added to the mix so clients can spot it as they browse the site. Everyone who is listed also gets a dedicated page where they can describe their company in more detail and display their work at full size.
Does it cost anything to be listed on Haystack?
Nope. Any web designer can list themselves or their company for free. Free listings include one image, and a small Haystack listing card.
We also offer a Pro listing for $99/month. The Pro listing includes room for a 6-image slideshow, your logo, and a listing card that is four times as large as the free listing. Pro listings also appear above free listings.
We’ll be promoting Haystack through a variety of web-based ads, targeted local advertising (“Looking for a web designer in Boston?”), links on blogs, mentions in newsletters, and promotion to the 37signals customer base (which is made primarily of small/medium businesses). We’ll be bringing the traffic so you’ll be getting the exposure. All for far less than it would cost you to reach the same number of people.
If you’re a web designer, get listed today!
Get listed on Haystack today! We hope Haystack helps you land great clients. And if you’re a client, we hope Haystack helps you land a great web design firm.
Q: Do you need a $10,000 camera system to shoot like a pro? A: No, I don’t think you do. A camera is essentially a tool, just like a hammer. You can take pictures whether it’s just a simple point-and-shoot or a serious professional camera. It’s just a matter of knowing what to shoot, when to shoot and how to shoot it…Having better equipment can give you better control over how to take the photo, but I don’t think it necessarily makes you a better photographer. Someone who’s a good photographer can take a photo with their telephone nearly as good as they could with a professional camera.
Here’s an interview I did at Erlang Factory with Mark Imbriaco of 37signals about Campfire. Among the high end topics we discussed – how did Campfire come about, how was it written, how do the rest of 37signals regard it, what Mark is learning this year and, most importantly of all, who would win in a fight between Erlang and Rails!
Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson, Sarah Hatter, Ryan Singer, Sam Stephenson, Jamie Dihiansan, and Michael Berger in Chicago, Matt Linderman in NYC, Mark Imbriaco in Wake Forest, North Carolina, Jeremy Kemper in Pasadena, California, Jeffrey Hardy in Vineland, Ontario, Joshua Sierles in Granada, Spain, Jason Zimdars in Oklahoma City, Craig Davey in Ottawa, Ontario, and Mr. Jamis Buck in Caldwell, Idaho.
Today we’re launching 
