Why 37 signals

This adage is understood by many small business owners that have started and grown sustainable small business models. Many of the small business owners I work with share one thing in common and that is single minded focus. They do it by focusing intensely on their customers. Many small business owners vs.

Thanks to you and the 37Signals team for giving us some solid content here in the form of excerpts. This is all really useful and challenges my own thinking in some areas.

Again, glad I visited your blog Tim. Thanks for all you do to make us successful…no matter how we define it. Guys from 37signals are awesome. We saw the. This got me thinking. Stuff within the general themes covered on this blog. What has astonished me a lot with Basecamp is that they did not engaged yet a translation process … I would love to get Basecamp for my company but my clients are french, and I need it in French … If they hear me I would pe happy to help in the translation process ….

Sage advice. Wonderful post. Nice succinct examples and no one can argue with the success 37folders is having. I was just about to give up on you.

One month no posts then the last one which was good but not worth the month wait. This post made up for the hiatus and then some. I guess you also have been busy on the book so all is forgiven. I was a part of a great, well-envisioned, high-quality services startup then. We went from 7 to 15 to about 35 employees in two years, and leveled off there comfortably and profitably. Then we grew for the sake of growing. And we were acquired in The guys who had the most equity did pretty well, and the rest of us were left with a company that was just not as engaging as it used to be.

We stuck with it for a while and eventually all went our own way. I have been slogging it out in a market leader, taking orders, for several years now waiting for the right opportunity to come to run my own set of plays again.

This time, my thinking will be very aligned with this post. Nice work. I have followed 37signals for a while. May have to jump into BaseCamp too. Posts like that act like a kick in the butt. If your basic needs are covered and you have food to eat, water to drink, a shelter etc, then the needs of belonging to a group and of self-esteem Yeah, you are so cool for doing all this really complicated stuff to grow your business!

Tim, this is as usual great and interesting post. I think that most 37signals products are just overpriced basic versions of better products. I know that 37signals are very hip and trendy, but I think that simplicity should not come at expense of smart. I want to see products that are not just simple to use, but have simple solutions for complicated problems. I wish them the best but I really think they are much much better in marketing than in programming and solving problems. We saw the execs obsessed with quarterly results because it is how their performance is evaluated.

I have never thrilled by the sheer growth in terms of size or turnover. Why did we have to publish more books this year than last year only in pursuit of growth? Can we still appreciate some 3rd-generation ramen shop in the countryside of Japan, who insists only selling to a limited amount of customers every day? Do we really want to teach those charming little shops how to grow and become Starbucks? In the biological and physical sense, I agree we either grow or die. But growth for entrepreneurs comes in many forms besides profit or infrastructure.

We become more aware of what our values, strengths, dreams and desires along the way when building a business. We grow in the level of our awareness.

We try to find better ways to serve our customers and grow our ability to be compassionate with other human beings and the environment. The owner of the ramen shop grows every moment when he devotes his undivided attention to make the best bullion. When it comes to aggregate, there are different ways to grow as well. Comparing between Korea grew to modernity through the dominance of very few chaebols and the way Taiwan grew to modernity with ubiquity of tiny business everywhere.

Both countries have devised successful ways to grow, in a way that appealed more to their cultural sensitivities. I consider it a very good additional read to your book because it focuses on what in your book is referred to as the pasrt of muse creation. Worth looking into. I read their first book online…Just awesome. Great content as always, man! Great article. I am a guitarist. I had it in my head that I needed more than I really did.

And often a few well placed notes can speak volumes. PS the picture usage of the Kyoto shrine made me smile — one of the most fascinating places I have been to. Fantastic post, Tim. Coincidental how things like this tend to come in pairs. Highly suggested if you have time:. Similar to my battles with weight loss — I always thought if I tried this fad diet or that fancy exercise equipment then I would attain the body I want.

Excellent blog post. Thanks to all. Thank you for the great post. As always, great work. You have inspired me to change my life around in more than one way, thanks. Much of my work will be outsourced, maintaining a small, virtual workforce is a main driver. Thanks for posting this Tim. I have needed reinforcement both for myself and my clients along this line for a long time! One thing that is interesting to note in my experience is that so many entrepreneurs focus on growth at the expense of paying themselves.

The opportunity cost associated with this seems to make a lot of ventures not worthwhile if they are not making revenue. Most businesses will not get huge, so learning techniques such as Direct Response Marketing, learning how to build your presence in the local area, etc.

Excellent work from the team at 37 Signals too! So many gems here! This is fantastic, I love it. Great post Tim, and some great comments too. I really like how 37S just cuts to the point. I like how they advocate launching early, finding the friction, and improving on the fly. In my experience, this has been not only a low-cost model, but a great way to build quality relationships with customers.

I agree with all three of those excerpts above, especially scratching your own itch. I am my market. You can grow in your product types, in the types of services you offer. The type of audience you product has. Blogging is a very good example of that. The rest of us, however, do see it. And it annoys us. After attending one, Ryan Norbauer was inspired to tear down Lovetastic. Now Norbauer runs a Rails consultancy.

That kind of devotion is common. After Sean Tierney read Getting Real , he bought 10 copies for his employees at Grid7, an application development shop, and insisted they read it.

Tucked away on a grubby side street in a gentrifying loft-and-warehouse neighborhood about a mile west of downtown Chicago, 37signals' offices hew to the company's small-is-beautiful edict. Actually, offices is a strong word: Headquarters consists of four desks shoved up against a wall. There is no 37signals sign, no receptionist, no indication that 37signals even exists. The company has just 10 employees, five of whom telecommute and none of whom are expected to work more than 40 hours a week.

But 37signals hasn't remained small out of sloth or through lack of opportunity; indeed, it's taken some effort to keep it from growing. Fried says he has rebuffed numerous inquiries from venture capitalists looking to invest in his company.

The sole exception: Amazon. The company has said it accepted the deal because it offered access to Bezos, not because of the money. Neither will Fried entertain acquisition offers. I really don't understand why everyone's interested in Fortune customers. I just don't get that. In March , a Twitter engineer told an interviewer that he was having difficulty getting Rails to handle his company's massive spike in traffic.

Hansson responded by sending a heated email to Jack Dorsey, Twitter's CEO, and chastising the company on his blog for playing the "blame game" instead of solving its scaling problems itself. The two firms have since resolved the dispute.

In January, an executive from hosting provider Dreamhost mused about the difficulty some of his clients were having running Rails applications. Again, Hansson responded on his blog: "Wipe the wah-wah tears off your chin and retract the threats of imminent calamity if we don't drop everything we're doing to pursue your needs. This sort of hostility can't come as a surprise to anyone who has followed Hansson or Fried, but there are signs that their churlishness is beginning to generate some backlash.

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Either way, thanks for visiting Basecamp. We the Basecamp! When we talk about who we are and what we do, we'll be saying the same thing. Basecamp the product, Basecamp the company. We talked about pros and cons. What about the brand equity we've built into the name 37signals over 15 years?

A lot of people, mostly in the tech community, value the name. But when you zoom out, far more people in the world know Basecamp.

So while we were attached to the old name, we knew that Basecamp was the bigger bet. We talked about how focusing on Basecamp would allow us to do more things with fewer people. We started riffing on all the things we would be able to do.

We were getting fired up.