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.
Below: Q&A with Petr Palas, CEO and Co-Founder of Kentico Software (based in The Czech Republic). Petr will be answering reader questions today (Thu) here at Signal vs. Noise. If you have a question, leave it as a comment. This is part of our “Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud” series which profiles profitable companies that didn’t take VC and have over $1 million in annual revenues.
What does your company do? We help web developers have more fun creating websites. We have a single product called Kentico CMS for ASP.NET. Now you may think it’s just another boring CMS. Well, it may be. But we believe it’s different. Most CMS systems are either very simple and thus easy to use or they are extremely flexible and complex. We decided not to make decissions between simplicity and flexibility and mix both of them in a single product. So we built a CMS that makes web developers much more productive, but also allows them to design the website in the way they need.
How did the business get started?
I was building some websites and web applications and realized there’s a lot of routine work I hated. I believed there must be an easier way to do things. I worked in a company that created several .NET components for developers and then I saw there was no good CMS for ASP.NET developers. I suggested that to the employer, but they didn’t see that as an opportunity since there were many web agencies selling their own simple CMS products. So I decided to start my own company in 2004, just with my savings. I gave up my master studies of computer science and put all my efforts and time into my company.
And I was actually lucky, since my first client was Gibson Guitars who decided to use Kentico CMS for their website, although the product was very immature (and they’re still our client!). At that time, I didn’t have any strategy or big vision. I didn’t watch the market and competitors. I just followed what our clients were asking for and tried to add those features as quickly as possible. Thanks to that, we’ve had some features, such as friendly URLs and SEO optimized pages, years ahead of big CMS companies. As we implemented what the clients wanted, we were growing rapidly with every new release.
I didn’t have any strategy or big vision. I didn’t watch the market and competitors. I just followed what our clients were asking for and tried to add those features as quickly as possible.
Then I was lucky again and got a contract for some development based on Kentico CMS for T-Systems, a division of T-Mobile. It gave me some extra money and I immediately invested it into further growth of the company.
I hired three university students as developers to speed up the development. We used students a lot since they were much cheaper and easier to hire for a start up company. At some point, we had 25 employees, 20 of which were students. We still have students in our team, but the ratio is much lower, it’s about 15% now.
As they graduate, they continue as full-time employees. The stability of our team is actually something I’m proud of – we’ve never lost an employee who was excellent and for which the job was a good fit. Now, after 6 years, we have 62 employess, 4 of them in our U.S. office.
That leads me to one important part of the story: We’re not an American company. We’re not even in Western Europe. We are located in the Czech Republic, a former communist country in Central Europe. Still, we managed to grow our client base to 2,000 clients in 84 countries without ever meeting most of them.
At the beginning, I decided I wanted to make the product for the global market since the market size was enormous in comparison to our local market. So I started to sell the CMS online, without any sales staff and with a very small marketing budget that I spent mostly on Google Adwords. We ranked very high at Google because most of our big competitors didn’t bother with SEO at that time. It gave us lots of traffic. We’re constantly trying different approaches to marketing, but it seems to me that the return for every extra marketing dollar is smaller and smaller.
The UI we designed makes it simple to do. Just edit any message, milestone, to-do list or file in Basecamp, select the project you want to move it to, and click a button. Done.
It’s so simple that it’s easy to assume that adding the feature would be simple, too. Customers make this assumption and so do developers.
To put things in perspective here’s what you see after you click Move…
…and here’s what is happening behind the scenes:
Is the item being moved a message? We’ll need to move any attached files with it. Does it have any comments? Move those, too.
Do any of the comments being moved have their own attachments? Better move those as well.
Are any of the files images? If so, we’ll need to move the image’s thumbnail, too.
Are there multiple versions of the file? Bring those along.
Does the message or any of the files have a category? Create the category if it doesn’t exist in the destination project.
Is the moved file backed up on S3? We need to rename it there. If it’s not, we need to make sure it doesn’t get backed up with its old filename.
Is the item being moved a milestone? Moving a milestone needs to move any associated to-do lists and messages. And of course those to-do lists can have to-do items with comments, and attached files, and multiple versions of those files. Move all of that.
Is it a to-do list? It may contain to-do items that have associated time tracking entries. Move those time entries to the destination project too.
Was anyone subscribed to email notification for the message? We’ll need to make sure they still get them on the new project.
Similarly we need to make sure that when you follow a URL in an email notification for a moved message, comment or files, you are redirected to its new location.
Ok, we gathered everything up and it’s moving. Is it done yet? Did it fail? We’ll need to roll it back if somthing goes wrong.
Basecamp New in Basecamp: Move between projects
We just launched a new feature in Basecamp that allows you to move messages, to-do lists, milestones and files from one Basecamp project to another. Have you ever wished you could move a message that someone posted to the wrong project? Or split a to-do list and a couple of milestones into a brand new project? Now you can.
Spootnik synchronizes OmniFocus and Basecamp
“OmniFocus’ online synchronization feature gave me a broad hint to build a web application that connects these two worlds. You neither have to run a computer nor to install anything. If you, for example, update a task on your iPhone, it flows directly into your Basecamp account and your Mac’s OmniFocus database. Simple like that.”
Start using bcToolkit for Basecamp reporting and get a free copy of REWORK
“Here’s the deal, sign up for bcToolkit and you will automatically get a 30 day free trial to let you see how easy to use bcToolkit is for Basecamp reporting and the business-changing Basecamp reports you can get…As soon as we receive your first month’s payment we will post you a FREE paperback copy of REWORK from 37signals.”
International PR agency EIDO uses Basecamp to show progress to clients from around the world
“This system report (below) shows an example of a real-time report generated on demand from our admin system and delivered to the client via Basecamp. Clients never need to ask us for an update on any particular project because it is generated for them automatically from the data we ourselves are using.”
You can now upload larger files to Basecamp
Want to upload large files to Basecamp? Good news: We recently increased the maximum file size that you can upload to Basecamp from 100MB to 2GB.
I’m really liking Google’s design lately. Even though people would say, “It’s ugly and stripped down or whatever.” The decisions they’re making I think are really wise. Everything’s based on speed. And the more you use it, the more you realize speed trumps aesthetics in most cases. If you can be fast and good looking, that’s great. But I think I’d almost prefer fast.
And so, I like some of the decisions they’re making about that. And I think that’s starting to influence us a little bit in terms of picking up some speed here and there by maybe doing things that are a little bit less fancy than we might want to do, a little less arty than what we might want to do, but really just are better because they’re faster…
The way I tend to do it is I’ll design something the way I like it, and then I’ll figure out how I can pull stuff out of it. So, for me, it’s more an editing process. Speed is about editing for me. I want to get the idea out there first and then I can start peeling back.
Suggested formula for figuring out how long online videos should be: 1 minute of a web video = 1 hour of a feature film. So keep web videos under 2-3 minutes unless you’ve got a really compelling reason to go longer.
The Words episode of Radiolab (iTunes link) features an interesting segment on how Shakespeare behaved like a language chemist, combining words like elements. The relevant story starts at 22:00 in of the episode.
According to James Shapiro, a Shakespeare scholar at Columbia, the un- prefix is something Shakespeare created (at least he was the first to use it in print or on stage). That means he invented the words unaware, uncomfortable, undress, uneducated, unwillingness, unsolicited, and unreal. Also, words like madcap and eyeball. That’s right, the word eyeball didn’t actually exist until Shakespeare came up with it.
Plenty of Shakespeare phrases have stuck with us too. Some examples mentioned by Shapiro:
Truth will out.
What’s done is done.
Dead as a doornail.
Every dog will have its day.
Fool’s paradise.
The game is afoot.
It’s Greek to me.
Kill with kindness.
Love is blind.
All’s well that end’s well.
See more of Shakespeare’s coinages (via EL). It’s neat to think about one person sitting down and actually creating so many of these words and phrases which now seem ubiquitous.
Summary
Three members of the 37signals programming team — Jeffrey Hardy, Jamis Buck, and Jeremy Kemper — answer questions from readers of Signal vs. Noise. Topics include Rails, Git, Mocha, Vim, nginx, Passenger, and more.
More episodes
Subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or RSS. Related links and previous episodes available at 37signals.com/podcast.
1) Interesting use of unicode characters for the UI on Flickr:
That triangle up top is actually two triangle characters side-by-side. Sucks that we still have to resort to such hacks for such a common UI shape — but this is a smart solution.
2) Also interesting is this inline tour of the new photo pages. Rollover a number and bubbles pop up to show you what’s fresh for that section.
Late Monday afternoon David, Kiran, and I were discussing how we could begin to measure how our customers felt about our customer service. We’re already measuring things like response time, average tickets per day per person, average tickets in a thread, etc. Those stats are helpful for measuring internal efficiency and speed, but they don’t measure quality from a customer’s perspective.
The idea
We talked about it for a bit and came up with this basic goal: Let’s make it really easy for our customers to quickly rate our customer service every time we talk to them. It’s not rocket science, and it’s not a breakthrough idea, but it wasn’t something we were doing. It was time we experimented with the concept. We’d write some software and try it out. We’d call the app Smiley.
The key
The whole feedback process had to be easy, it had to be fast, and it couldn’t be a burden on our customers. We didn’t want to put people in front of some long-winded complicated survey — no one likes filling those out. We just wanted to ask them one quick question and that was it. The whole thing should take about five seconds and it should be entirely optional. We’d start there and see how it went.
Linked from the email signature
We decided we would add a short link to each support person’s email signature. The link would encode the support person’s ID along with the ticket number for the support request. When someone clicked the link they’d go to our site where they’d be asked to answer one question about the customer service experience they just had. That’s all.
Starting on the design
The next morning I went off and started designing some screens. After a few minutes I had the basic structure. There were five screens total: Three customer facing (and two of those were optional), two internally facing.
(Customer facing) One screen which asked a customer a single question with three possible answers.
(Customer facing – optional) One screen with a single text field where someone could choose to elaborate on their answer. This was entirely optional.
(Customer facing – only seen if someone provides freeform text feedback) One thank you screen someone would see after they submitted their feedback.
(Internal) One screen that showed all our customer service people along with their most recent ratings, their overall average rating, and a link to see all their ratings and feedback.
(Internal) One screen that showed all of someone’s ratings along with any feedback a customer left on a particular rating.
About an hour or so later I had the customer facing screens done. We went back and forth on a few iterations, and experimented with two options (“great” and “not great”) vs. three options (“great”, “fine”, and “not very good” – we picked this version), but overall the design was settled in about an hour. Originally I used some stock photo smiley faces for the mockup, but I asked Jamie to design some custom smileys for the design (you’ll see these below).
The screen the customer sees after clicking a link in the email signature.
The optional screen a customer sees if they answer the first question.
Hooking it up
Next David took the UI and began writing the Rails back-end to make it all work. While David was working on this, I started working on the internal facing admin screens. I spent a few hours messing around with some ideas, but eventually settled on the simplest version:
If you ask an artist why, the greatest artists will tell you, “Well, it was beautiful. It inspired me. It touched me. It reminded me of this or that.”
But you ask a designer why and he says, “Well, I’ve got these 15 different things that all have to coexist in this 800×600 pixel area. And if I do this, that doesn’t work. If I do this, it breaks the other thing. So in order for these three things to be in harmony, I have to do that…”
That points more and more to the challenge to somebody who’s trying to get into or who’s trying to get a job doing UI design, that it’s not about looking at screen shots. Because then you’re putting yourself in the graphic design box.
It’s about your ability to describe problems and your ability to show how it is that a design that you did worked. And if you can show the reasoning and the different relationships between the elements, then you can show that you really know something.
Oxxford Clothes is the last factory in the U.S. making custom tailored suits by hand. They are based in Chicago. Pitch perfect simple promotional video. One of the best I’ve seen.
Many people ask me, “How can I get started in web design?” or, “What skills do I need to start making web applications?” While it would be easy to recommend stacks of books, and dozens of articles with 55 tips for being 115% better than the next guy, the truth is that you don’t need learn anything new in order to begin. The most important thing is simply to start.
Start making something. If you want to learn web design, make a website. Want to be an entreprenuer and start a business selling web based products? Make an app. Maybe you don’t have the skills yet, but why worry about that? You probably don’t even know what skills you need.
Start with what you already know
If you want to build something on the web, don’t worry about learning HTML, CSS, Ruby, PHP, SQL, etc. They might be necessary for a finished product, but you don’t need any of them to start. Why not mock-up your app idea in Keynote or Powerpoint? Draw boxes for form fields, write copy, link this page to that page. You can make a pretty robust interactive prototype right there with software you already know. Not computer saavy? Start with pencil and paper or Post-it Notes. Draw the screens, tape them to the wall, and see how it flows.
You probably don’t even know what skills you need, so don’t worry about it. Start with what you already know.
You can do a lot of the work with simple sketches or slides. You’ll be able to see your idea take form and begin to evaluate whether or not it really is something special. It’s at that point you can take the next step, which might be learning enough HTML to take your prototype into the browser. The point is, go as far as you can with the skills and tools that you have.
Avoid self doubt
Many times the reasons we don’t start something have nothing to do with lack of skills, materials, or facilities. The real blockers are self-criticism and excuses. In the excellent book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, the author, Betty Edwards, discusses how we all draw as kids but around adolescence, many of us stop developing that ability.
“The beginning of adolescence seems to mark the abrupt end of artistic development in terms of drawing skills for many adults. As children, they confronted an artisitc crisis, a conflict between their increasingly complex perceptions of the world around them and their current level of art skill.”
At that age kids become increasingly self-critical and equally interested in drawing realistically. When they fail to draw as well as they know is possible many give up drawing at all.
This feeling continues into adulthood. We want to design a website or build an application but if our own toolset doesn’t match up to the perceived skillset we never start. It doesn’t help that the internet gives us nearly limitless exposure to amazing work, talented individuals, and excellent execution. It’s easy to feel inadequate when you compare yourself to the very best, but even they weren’t born with those skills and they wouldn’t have them if they never started.
Do—there is no try
People who succeed somehow find a way to keep working despite the self-doubt. The artist, Vincent Van Gogh was only an artist for the last ten years of his life. We all know him for masterful works of art, but he didn’t start out as a master. Compare these examples from Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain showing an early drawing compared to one completed two years later:
Vincent Van Gogh Carpenter, 1880 and Woman Mourning, 1882
He wasn’t some child prodigy (he was 27 when he started painting), he learned his craft by hard work. If he’d listened to his own self doubt or despaired that his skills didn’t compare to Paul Gauguin’s it’s likely he never would have even tried.
This is all to say that there are many things that can get in the way of the things we should be creating. To never follow a dream because you don’t think you’re good enough or don’t have the skills, or knowledge, or experience is a waste. In fact, these projects where there is doubt are the ones to pursue. They offer the greatest challenge and the greatest rewards. Why bother doing something you already have done a hundred times, where there is nothing left to learn? Don’t worry about what you need to know in order to finish a project, you already have everything you need to start.
Now that we’re 20 people, it’s time we add someone to our team who is dedicated to making sure our day-to-day administrative tasks are taken care of efficiently, reliably, and properly.
Here’s who we’re looking for:
You’re the type of person who thrives on taking care of things the right way the first time. A task comes in and you figure out how to get it done without having to ask a lot of questions. When you say “I’ll take care of it” we know it’ll be done well. You get excited when you know you’ve made someone else’s day easier. Great handwriting is a plus, too.
If you were working for us, here are some of the things you would have done last week:
Talked to the landlord to get an update on the parking garage situation.
Coordinated with Abt Electronics to schedule installation of 4 flat panels.
Received UPS/FedEx deliveries + US mail.
Sent 25 handwritten thank you notes to customers.
Recommended restaurants and activities for our of town guests.
Booked two hotel rooms and two flights for out of towners.
Answered a handful of calls and routed them to the right people.
Researched and recommended local floral arrangers for weekly flowers for the office.
Researched and recommended local caterers for a variety of events.
Cleaned up our Highrise account to make sure contacts have photos, proper company names, phone numbers, addresses, etc.
Showed the cleaning crew exactly what we needed cleaned.
Took notes during various discussions + transcribed some audio to text.
Researched and recommended dental/vision healthcare plans.
Asked 100 customers permission to include them on our customer page.
Paid a few bills.
Welcomed various people to the office.
Packed up and shipped out about 5 copies of REWORK to various people.
Packed up and shipped out a few other packages.
Picked up some office supplies.
Answered a dozen general questions about 37signals via email/phone.
Here are some other things you might do:
Basic event planning/management/support for our in-house workshops.
Handle any basic issues with outside vendors.
Check in occasionally with top customers via phone/email.
Stay on top of things that were promised to us but haven’t been delivered yet.
Fill in on some basic customer service/support if the team is short.
General reception duties.
Experience is important. We’re looking for someone who’s managed an office of 20+ before, or has worked full time as an executive assistant for someone who had a very full schedule. You should consider yourself a pro – this is not a job for first timers or designers/programmers who are looking to work their way into another job at 37signals. Note: You must live in the Chicago area to apply for this job.
If this job sounds like something you’d love to do every day, we definitely want to hear from you. We need to hear from you!
Please get in touch by emailing jointheteam [at] 37signals dot com and include “OMEA” (no quotes) somewhere in the subject. Thanks!
A couple of years in the making, thousands of commits, and hundreds of contributors, Rails 3.0 is finally done. We’re already running a handful of our applications on it and the rest are moving to it shortly.
Last week at our full-company get together, each person was asked to say two things to the group: 1. What do you want to get better at? 2. What do you want to learn?
Unfortunately I was out sick and unable to participate, but I heard it was a great session. Had I been there, here’s what I would have said.
1. I want to be a better teacher. I feel like I’ve been guilty of “drive-by teaching” over the last year or so. Someone will show their work and I’ll see an opportunity to make it better. But instead of spending time with that person to teach them what I see and how to make it better, I’ll drop some quick comments in Campfire (or IM or email) and then just move on. Things like “That sentence is a bit wordy – let’s try it this way” or “I think there are too many horizontal lines going on here… Can you remove some?” It’s not that the comments aren’t useful, it’s that I drop them and move on. That’s not teaching, that’s just critiquing and suggesting and that’s not going to help people get better. Teaching is about encouraging understanding — and patience. I want to be a better teacher. I’m going to be working on that this year.
2. I want to learn Rails. I’m surrounded with some of the best Rails programmers in the world, yet I’m mostly clueless when it comes to Rails. That’s gotta change. It’s time to get a good basic understanding of Rails. I’ve always enjoyed what little programming I’ve done. Be it back in the day with FileMaker (that’s barely programming, but it let me make programs I wanted), or what little PHP I knew. It’s a constant frustration for me that I can’t make my designs work on my own. I can design it, but I just don’t have the knowledge to hook it up. I also believe learning Rails will make me a better designer. First step: I signed up for the Getting Started with Ruby on Rails tutorial at Windy City Rails. I’m really looking forward to it.
The amazing John Cleese shares his wisdom on writing, creativity, getting in the zone, and interruptions. It’s great to see advice that we hear all the time reaffirmed from outside the tech industry.
This is a Q&A with Jeff Butterworth (pictured below), Queen Bee (CEO when speaking to suits) of Alien Skin Software. This is part of our “Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud” series which profiles companies that have $1MM+ in revenues, didn’t take VC, and are profitable.
What does Alien Skin Software make?
We make Photoshop plug-ins for photography and graphic design. Our graphic design plug-ins tend to be glitzy effects like fire and lightning. Most of our photography plug-ins are more practical tools for things like resizing, but there are some cool photo effects too, such as film simulation and oil painting. Our strength is making research level image processing easy to use.
Unlike many of the other companies highlighted here, our software is on the desktop rather than on a web server. As a result, we deal with some old fashioned issues like piracy, resellers, and physical disks. Another difference is that we have been around for 17 years.
What’s your evolution been like with the company?
The early years were exciting because I was experiencing completely new things like travel, leading a team, and handling what, to me, were large amounts of money. On the negative side, we worked very long hours and there was a lot of chaos. These days we don’t experience quite as much novelty, but there is always something new to learn. Now we coordinate our efforts and get much more done in less time. I love our calm efficiency and would not trade it for extra excitement.
You dropped out of computer science graduate school to start the company. What was that situation like? How did you make the decision to jump ship?
I enjoyed computer graphics research, but I didn’t like the unfinished state of most software created in academia. When I figured out that I wanted to make bug free finished tools, it was an easy decision to move into commercial software.
My friend George Browning and I left school together to start Alien Skin Software. I have to admit that we partly did it because we thought we would get rich quickly. I’ll never forget a conversation we had with a friend who was an experienced software CEO. He laughed when he heard our predictions of easy success and said, “I promise that if you ever get rich, you will have earned every penny.” So true! We are successful, but it has been 17 years of challenging work.
An experienced software CEO laughed when he heard our predictions of easy success and said, “I promise that if you ever get rich, you will have earned every penny.” So true! We are successful, but it has been 17 years of challenging work.
How much cash did you need to get up and running? How did you get that money?
I don’t recommend starting a business the way we did. We quit our day jobs, had almost no savings, and I was borrowing my roommate’s computer to work on our products. When our first project was severely delayed by our publisher, we had no financial cushion.
George left for saner pastures and years later founded Zengobi, maker of Curio. I asked my parents for money, but they thought I was being irresponsible (correct at the time), so I got a $2000 bank loan to buy a low end Mac. It’s amazing what fear of starvation will do for your work ethic. I quickly made my first set of Photoshop plug-ins called The Black Box. It started to support me pretty soon, which was easy since I was just living off of burritos in a cheap apartment.
A few years later, I sold my father 1% of the company for $2000. I didn’t need the money by then, but it made Dad feel better about not loaning me money in the beginning. Also, North Carolina law at the time required at least two partners to form an LLC. Since then I’ve never received any type of investment or loan for the company.
How successful is the business?
The company became profitable in 1994 and has been profitable every year since then. We passed the $1M revenue mark in 1996 and have remained well above that ever since. The most important measure of success to me is whether everyone in the company enjoys their work. Money feeds into that, but so does the quality of our products, the competence of coworkers, and happiness of customers. By those measures, I think we kick ass.
The most important measure of success to me is whether everyone in the company enjoys their work. Money feeds into that, but so does the quality of our products, the competence of coworkers, and happiness of customers.
If you can’t draw as well as someone, or use the software as well, or if you do not have as much money to buy supplies, or if you do not have access to the tools they have, beat them by being more thoughtful. Thoughtfulness is free and burns on time and empathy.
The event is sold out, but they may be opening up some additional slots. If you’re interested in attending, fill out this invitation form and let the organizers know you want to be there.
A conversation about signatures (real ones, not digital) from our room in Campfire:
Jason F.: Don’t you think that would be a really cool niche side job for a designer? Custom designed signatures? The client would have to learn it, but I bet there’d be a decent market for a really cool signature.
Jamie D.: That is interesting, and actually w/ all the digital stuff you probably don’t even need to really sign it
Jason F.: Either way, I think it would be really cool to have a beautifully designed signature. One carefully considered, unique, and interesting.
Jason Z.: It’s actually surprising that never happened when calligraphy was in it’s hey-day. Surely everyone didn’t have a knack for graceful flourishes.
Matt L.: love the idea of a signature designer. wouldn’t even have to invoice you. he can just sign the check himself.
We help web developers have more fun creating websites. We have a single product called Kentico CMS for ASP.NET. Now you may think it’s just another boring CMS. Well, it may be. But we believe it’s different. Most CMS systems are either very simple and thus easy to use or they are extremely flexible and complex. We decided not to make decissions between simplicity and flexibility and mix both of them in a single product. So we built a CMS that makes web developers much more productive, but also allows them to design the website in the way they need.
What does Alien Skin Software make? 
