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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
This is a guest post by Mike Rohde. We hired Mike to illustrate original art for REWORK. Each one of the 90 essays in REWORK is accompanied by an illustration that captures the key message of the essay. We asked Mike to share the illustration process with you here on Signal vs. Noise. This post is part 1 of a 2-part series. Part 2 will be posted within the next few weeks.
In September 2009, I began work with Jason Fried to create a series of 90 sketchnote illustrations and 10 chapter illustrations for the new 37signals business book, REWORK. In December 2009, I completed the illustration project, delivering final illustrations to the publisher for book production.
Photo of sketches in my Moleskine notebook, featuring “Everyone on the Front Lines” and “Take a Deep Breath” — two illustration concepts for REWORK that are ready for inking. –Photo by Mike Rohde
Project Background
I met Jason after he saw the sketchnotes I’d captured at his first SEED conference in 2007. Those sketchnotes were featured on Signal vs. Noise and led to an invitation to sketchnote the SEED 3 conference in June 2008. The SEED 3 sketchnotes led, in turn, to sketchnoting Jason’s talk on business at Milwaukee’s Discovery World in September 2008.
In “Life, below 600px,” Paddy Donnelly talks about “giving the fold the finger” (i.e. making visitors scroll isn’t really THAT bad) and uses the 37signals home page to support the cause. “What I’m proposing is for you to think twice about these ‘rules’ which are preached so often around the web and aim to create something original.”
It’s kind of pretty here. Shot from 
A look at the conference table during company wide meeting. Yes, even we meet once in a while.
Jamis brought peanut butter flavored marshmallows that he made at home.
Sam’s got one of the cool 
We’re recording it all for the one team member who couldn’t make it.
Lots of tea gets drunk.
