Signal vs. Noise

PHOTO: Sculptor Alex Queral carves up phonebooks

Matt — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 17:13:00 +0000

Sculptor Alex Queral carves up phonebooks to create portraits. Above: James Brown. [via TC]

Method picks a fight with the jug

Jason F. — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 19:21:00 +0000

There are two kinds of companies I really like. One that ignores the competition entirely. And one that picks a fight. Method, and their new laundry detergent line, is a great example of the latter.

The new Method laundry product eschews the standard awkward, heavy, messy jug for a svelte, light, one-handed, easily stored, pump-powered dispenser bottle. It’s so much better.

They claim it works better too, but I’m not concerned about that for this post. Even if it works just the same, the form factor is a huge win.

I’ve run out of laundry detergent so many times because I haven’t felt like lugging home one of those big jugs when I was at the store (I often walk home and one of these jugs weighs nearly as much as everything else I’m buying). I’m always like “I’ll get it another time” and then it’s too late. But the new Method bottle is just like a bottle of water. There’s no barrier to carry.

The pump dispenser is perfect fit for laundry detergent. My pour spout detergent bottles almost always leak, drip, or get dirty from dust and grime that is attracted to the gooey viscous liquid. The pump ends all that. Four pumps for a normal load and you’re good to go.

Yes, there are more important problems in the world than laundry detergent, but I’m still glad Method picked a fight and kicked ass. This is a wonderfully designed product with a form factor has been taken for granted for too long. Good for them.

Zappos pranks itself for new ads

Ryan — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 18:33:00 +0000

Ad agency Mullen chose to focus on Zappos’ famous customer service for their new ad campaign. The twist is, behind the puppets and comedy are recordings of actual customer service calls. Mullen’s making of video explains how they basically pranked Zappos to get the audio for the ads. The results are funny, fresh, and true to the experience of calling Zappos. Awesome stuff.

There is an inverse relationship between level of anonymity and quality of conversation

Matt — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 18:01:00 +0000

37signals Answers (recently launched) is our first new app built with 37signals ID integration. That means everyone involved is using real names and avatars.

And wow, what a difference it makes. Trading anonymity for accountability has led to radically improved conversations.

I’d point to a specific example but it’s more what’s missing now. A lot less antagonism and a lot more thoughtfulness and general politeness. Great to see.

QUOTE: A perfectionist is someone who finishes the

Jason F. — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:24:00 +0000

A perfectionist is someone who finishes the backside of a drawer, which I consider completely unnecessary.

—An interview with Helmut Krone.

"Now, Elvis, look, you get up there, you sing your song, but don’t move too much"

Matt — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 20:35:00 +0000

The First of Elvis [Vanity Fair] is an interesting profile of photographer Al Wertheimer’s days of shadowing Elvis Presley in 1956, the year Elvis-mania hit. Wertheimer describes what made Elvis different:

“He dared to move,” says Wertheimer. “Singers just did not move onstage in those days. You stood there like Frank Sinatra or Perry Como, and you sang from the waist up. Elvis broke all the rules. He moved his hips. He charged the microphone. He was introducing something that was just not acceptable to grown-ups and the more conservative groups. I have the William Morris guys getting him into a corner, and they’re giving him advice: ‘Now, Elvis, look, you get up there, you sing your song, but don’t move too much.’ Elvis dutifully listened. He wouldn’t argue with them. But once he got onstage he did what he wanted. And it created such a sensation. Not because you could hear him sing—there was too much screaming going on. The kids loved it. And the kids were the ones who bought the 45s.”

Funny to imagine those experts sitting Elvis down and telling him that he’s got to stop moving onstage. Shows you the problem with blindly following experts: They’re experts on the past. No one is an expert on the future.

Often, people “in the know” try to fit you into a mold of what’s come before. If it’s foreign, strange, or new from how they’re used to working, they’ll tell you it’s wrong. But innovators know to follow the screams, not the William Morris guys.

"Why You Aren't Done Yet" and REWORK book signings at SXSW

David — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 20:11:00 +0000

37signals is going to be at SXSW in full force. We’re showing up eight strong. Jason will be doing a reading from REWORK and a book signing on Saturday at 10AM on the Day Stage. Yours truly will be talking about Why You Aren’t Done Yet on Sunday at 11AM in Ballroom A with a book signing following that.

We hope to meet a ton of customers, readers, and anyone else who wants to chat at SXSW. If you see anyone at the conference with a 37signals badge, please walk up and say hi. And please do bring your copy of REWORK if you want it signed too.

Looking forward to seeing ya’all in Austin.

REWORK is now in stores

Matt — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:01:00 +0000

Alright, the big day is finally here! REWORK is now available in stores. You can order the US version online from the following booksellers:

International versions are either out already or coming soon. Check with your local retailer. There’s also an audiobook version read by Mike Chamberlain (listen to a sample).

At the book site, you’ll now find a PDF that includes five essays and illustrations from the book:

Download PDF excerpt (1.7 MB)

And here’s the copy from the inside flap of the book, also a good primer on what you’ll find:

Most business books give you the same old advice: Write a business plan, study the competition, seek investors, yadda yadda. If you’re looking for a book like that, put this one back on the shelf.

REWORK shows you a better, faster, easier way to succeed in business. Read it and you’ll know why plans are actually harmful, why you don’t need outside investors, and why you’re better off ignoring the competition.

The truth is you need less than you think. You don’t need to be a workaholic. You don’t need to staff up. You don’t need to waste time on paperwork or meetings. You don’t even need an office. Those are all just excuses.

What you really need to do is stop talking and start working. This book shows you the way. You’ll learn how to be more productive, how to get exposure without breaking the bank, and tons more counterintuitive ideas that will inspire and provoke you.

With its straightforward language and easy-is-better approach, REWORK is the perfect playbook for anyone who’s ever dreamed of doing it on their own. Hardcore entrepreneurs, small-business owners, people stuck in day jobs they hate, victims of “downsizing,” and artists who don’t want to starve anymore will all find valuable guidance in these pages.

Press
Reviews are starting to pour in. Inc Magazine’s review of Rework:

Fried and Hansson are the Henry David Thoreaus of entrepreneurship. They preach doing less and embracing constraints…Written with genuine voice — a sometimes cranky and profane voice at that.

800-CEO-READ did a brief Q&A with Jason in advance of the book. Here’s what the site’s Jon Mueller had to say about the book:

This isn’t just a book about changing your business, it’s about changing how you think about business, and is, perhaps, one of the most important books you’ll read this year. Whether you’re admin or CEO, there are many things to learn, and this book offers some great insight into how we all can waste less time, offer people more value, and accomplish things we’ve not yet imagined.

More...

QUOTE: The competitor to be feared is one who never

Jason F. — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 05:15:00 +0000

The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all, but goes on making his own business better all the time.

—Henry Ford

VIDEO: Our new office, pre-construction. Lease signed

Jason F. — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 03:42:00 +0000

Our new office, pre-construction. Lease signed today. Move in scheduled sometime in July. Full story, floor plans, and vision shortly.

[Lingo] Slack, YAGNI, and low ceremony

Matt — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 17:38:00 +0000

Three terms that came up repeatedly during our San Diego retreat:

Slack
All the stuff that doesn’t fit neatly into bigger, concept-driven iterations. We save one of our programmer/designer teams for slack work — small scope things that build up, a bug that needs to be fixed, a quick support assist, etc.

YAGNI
You ain’t gonna need it. It’s easy to get carried away discussing how you could possibly do this, that, or the other thing. It’s harder to step back and ask “Are we really gonna need this?” The answer is usually no.

Low ceremony
When it comes to workflow or policies, stay away from posturing. Just stick loosely to a few guidelines and let good judgement lead you the rest of the way.

Product Blog update: Basecamp email improvements, Highrise case studies, etc.

37signals — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 18:37:00 +0000

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

Basecamp
New in Basecamp: Stylized email notifications
We created new email designs for milestones (and 48-hour milestone reminders), file uploads, messages, to-dos, and comments.

New in Basecamp: Post a message via email
You can now email a message directly to a project. This means you can post messages without even being logged in. Just send a message via email from your desktop, web-based email client, or mobile phone, and it’ll post right to Basecamp as a message.

“Sams Teach Yourself Basecamp in 10 Minutes” is a comprehensive guide to Basecamp
Sams Teach Yourself Basecamp in 10 Minutes by Patrice-Anne Rutledge is a new book that’s the most comprehensive guide to Basecamp we’ve ever seen. If you want to know everything there is to know about Basecamp, this is the book for you.

More...

PHOTO: I ran some statistics on the last few years

Jeremy — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 22:32:00 +0000

I ran some statistics on the last few years of Basecamp activity and uncovered this strange, recurring anomaly.

The long take

Matt — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 17:43:00 +0000

A long take is a single, unbroken camera shot that lasts much longer than a typical shot. While the idea’s been around for a long time, it feels like it has extra impact in today’s world of hyper-editing and constant angle changes. Some examples below.

It feels almost cliché to be linking up an Ok Go video at this point, but ya gotta hand it to the band; They have really mastered the art of making “event” videos. Check out this amazing long take video featuring the Notre Dame marching band:

Film directors have long known the power of the long take (Daily Film Dose offers up this list of “The Greatest Long Tracking Shots in Cinema”). One of the best is this scene from “Goodfellas,” where Ray Liotta and Lorraine Bracco walk through the Copacabana.

More music video examples after the jump.

More...

Two different worlds

Ryan — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 00:23:00 +0000

I walked into a Sprint store today to check out the Palm Pixi. AT&T has been bad enough lately that, while I’m not ready to chuck the iPhone, I’m at least growing curious. Unfortunately “walking in” is about all I could do.

Every smartphone in the Sprint store was locked under glass cabinets. The untouchable phone displays were covered in fake screenshot stickers. Two weary looking gentlemen in polo shirts manned the back counter and a queue of six customers (shoppers?) aimlessly paced the floor, waiting for something to happen.

It took about 30 seconds to realize there was nothing to gain from my store visit. After a quick round to be sure I didn’t miss a demo unit somewhere, I turned back to the street. Is this typical of Sprint stores?

Compare this experience to the Apple store. iPhones and iPods are less than six feet away from the entrance door. All you have to do is reach out and grab one. Salespeople meander around you, instead of you around them. A total Apple newbie can go from curious to salivating in about 90 seconds in that environment.

Can you imagine if Apple locked their products under glass cabinets? Or put stickers with screenshots over their displays? Who makes these decisions?

Milton Friedman on the four ways you can spend money

Jason F. — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 17:33:00 +0000

You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you’re doing, and you try to get the most for your money.
You can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I’m not so careful about the content of the present, but I’m very careful about the cost.
I can spend somebody else’s money on myself. And if I spend somebody else’s money on myself, then I’m sure going to have a good lunch!
I can spend somebody else’s money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get.

Via Joshua Kaufman.

See Ryan talk about Christopher Alexander in NYC

Ryan — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 04:22:00 +0000

I’m excited to give a talk at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. I’m going to walk through Christopher Alexander’s design theory and explain how to apply it to everyday web app UI work. Alexander’s book Notes on the Synthesis of Form had a huge influence on me early in my career at 37signals. It’s going to be a lot of fun to share key points from that book with an audience for the first time. I hope you can come out to see it.

Where:
MFA Interaction Design Department
132 W 21st Street, 6 Floor
New York City

When:
Wednesday, April 7
6:30-8:30PM

See the event page at the SVA’s MFA in Interaction Design program to RSVP.

UPDATE: The talk is now sold-out.

There's no room for The Idea Guy

David — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 20:09:00 +0000

Startups need people able and willing of doing the actual work. They need programmers, designers, and eventually folks to do marketing, support, and more. What they don’t need, though, is someone who’s just going to be The Idea Guy.

You know the type. It’s the “this thing is going to be Facebook meets Flickr, but for dogs! If we can just get 1% of the online dog market, we’ll be rich!” spiel. All idea, usually no money, and hardly any functional skills that’ll help build or launch the damn thing.

On the face and the facts of it, it’d be easy to turn down The Idea Guy. He wants you to work for very little or free in return for a smaller-than-his slice of the pie in the end. That end very rarely happens. But the energy and the big dreams can be dangerously alluring. I know, I fell for it more than once.

The truth is that most everyone has plenty of ideas that could work out to be great businesses. The kicker is most often the right execution, that they’d be responsible for anyway, at the right time, which is almost impossible to predict. The value of The Perfect Idea is very small indeed.

That doesn’t mean it’s useless to have big ideas and plenty of enthusiasm. If you’re that guy, you’ve got a great start. Now pick up a functional skill and help build it your damn self.

[Podcast] Episode #9: All about REWORK

Matt — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 18:30:00 +0000

Time: 41:20 | 03/02/2010 | Download MP3

Like this episode? Please share it with your friends:

The new business book from 37signals
REWORK hits stores on March 9. This episode features an extended conversation all about the book. We discuss why we wrote it, what it was like working with our publisher, the writing process, the illustrations, the cover, and more.

Related links and previous episodes available at 37signals.com/podcast. Subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or RSS.

A New Way of Working: A Two-Month Recap

Jason F. — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 16:41:00 +0000

Back in early January I posted about our new way of working in 2010. Instead of working individually in isolation as we had in the past, we’re breaking into small teams of three (two programmers, one designer). We’re keeping the teams intact for two months at a time. During those two months, the teams will work on four separate iterations, two weeks each. The goal is to drastically cut down scope, set short fixed deadlines, and focus on improving our products.

How’d it go?

Now that January and February are behind us, and March is upon us, we can reflect on the first two month term. So how’d it go?

It went incredibly well. It was the most productive two month period we’ve had in a long time. It wasn’t all perfect, and some adjustments were required, but all in all we definitely feel like we made the right call switching to this new way of working.

The results

Here’s some of what we accomplished:

HIGHRISE: A major redesign of the “stream” in Highrise.
HIGHRISE: Jump to a case or deal from the sidebar search.
HIGHRISE: Merge companies to help deal with duplicates.
HIGHRISE: Email notifications, daily digests, and vCards for your Highrise Dropboxes.
BASECAMP: Stylized HTML email notifications for messages, comments, to-dos, files, and milestones.
BASECAMP: Post new messages via email.
BASECAMP: Redesigned message section with active threads highlighted.
BASECAMP: Replies to assignment emails are posted as comments.
CAMPFIRE: Formatted tweets in Campfire chats.
CAMPFIRE: Image thumbnails in chat transcripts, redesigned transcript view, starring chat highlights for easy future access.
LAUNCHPAD: Jump deep inside an app right from the Launchpad.
37id: New help section.
ANSWERS: Launched 37signals Answers.

Plus a variety of bug fixes, minor updates, infrastructure improvements, and design and language tweaks.

What did we learn?

More...

REWORK Trailer 3: The Hallway

Jason F. — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 15:32:00 +0000

We’re just a week away! REWORK is in stores March 9, 2010. Pre-order today from Amazon, Borders, Barnes & Noble, Indie Bound, and 800-CEO-READ.

This is the last video trailer for REWORK. We wanted to thank the following people for making these trailers possible:

Coudal Partners for filming, editing, and production. Special thanks to Steve Delahoyde.
Mark Greenberg for the custom music at the end of each clip.
Williams Labadie for lending us their conference room for the day for the Conference Call. Special thanks to Molly Connolly, Jeff Pazen, and Jason Dittmer.
Sandy Marshall for his passive-aggressive acting in Staying Late and irritating voiceover on the Conference Call.
Jamie, Michelle, and Dawson for their “give us your best annoyed hallway walk” acting skills.
And Nick Campbell for the crumple, drop, and slide motion graphics that close out each clip.

We had a blast putting these together. We hope you liked them.

marchFIRST

Jason F. — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 23:01:00 +0000

On March 1 it’s always a good reminder to look back at marchFIRST — an example of what big money and power thought was a good idea just 10 years ago.

The original USWeb was founded in 1995 by a group of former Novell executives (Joe Firmage, Toby Corey, and Sheldon Laube)
USWeb went public with an IPO in 1997
USWeb agreed to buy the offline advertising agency, CKS Group, in a stock transaction in September 1998
Whitman-Hart acquired Four Points Digital LLC, Fulcrum Solutions Ltd., and BALR Corp in 1999.
USWeb/CKS and Whittman-Hart merged in March 2000 to form marchFIRST, Inc.
John Guynn, a copywriter at Mckinney & Silver, thought of the name marchFIRST.
Bernard resigned in March, and marchFIRST went bankrupt in April 2001
Two companies (Avenue A and Divine) acquired several offices in April 2001
Whittman-Hart re-emerged as a separate company under Bernard
USWeb is currently an Internet services firm copying the name of the original USWeb
Divine purchased several companies that struggled after the dot com bust, including some remnants of marchFIRST
Divine went bankrupt in Feb 2003 (in April 2003, Divine’s assets were sold at auction)
Gus Mueller received his final paycheck from marchFIRST, 6 years late in the summer of 2007.

Are we smarter today?

PHOTO: Jason told me about hobo signs last week

Jamie — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 20:26:00 +0000

Jason told me about hobo signs last week. Lots of really cool glyphs and pictograms here.

PHOTO: Top notch UI copywriting from Wufoo.

Ryan — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 19:52:00 +0000

Top notch UI copywriting from Wufoo.

Feature checklist dysfunction: Twitter vs. Google Buzz

Matt — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 16:16:00 +0000

Speaking of “feature checklist dysfunction,” this piece compares Twitter to Google Buzz.

There’s so much Twitter can’t do…

That simplicity has made Twitter a huge hit. But “simple” usually means “limited,” and Twitter is no exception. Your messages can’t be longer than 140 characters. There’s no text formatting. You can’t paste in photos or videos. There’s no filtering of messages. No way to rank or rate people or their utterances. No way to send messages out to canned groups of people, like Family or Co-workers.

There’s so much Google Buzz can do…

Google Buzz overcomes all of that. It’s a lot like Twitter (with huge helpings of FriendFeed.com thrown in), but there’s no length limit on your messages. You can search for messages, give certain ones a “thumbs up” (you click a button labeled Like as you do in Facebook). You can forward messages by e-mail. Comments and replies to a certain post remain attached to it, clumped together as a conversation. You can link to your Flickr, Picasa or YouTube accounts, making it easy to drop a photo or a video link into a Buzz posting.

You can also post messages to your Buzz account by e-mail, which is great when you’re on the move.

So a traditional feature checklist comparison would lead you to say Buzz is the clear winner. But then there’s the problem that comes with doing all that stuff: confusion.

In eliminating the Twitterish bare-bones simplicity, Google stepped right splat into the opposite problem: dizzying complexity. At the moment, it’s not so much Google Buzz as Google “Huh?”s.

Sometimes all that stuff your product does NOT do is exactly why people want it.