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.
We’re getting really close now. Back in August we previewed 37signals Accounts — our new single sign-on system for Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack, and Campfire. Today we announced that we’re just a few weeks out from official release.
Since we launched Basecamp back in February 2004, every time anyone wanted to log into to any one of our products they had to go to their own custom URL. It’s been fine, but it’s always made us cringe a little. It’s a lot to remember and we often get emails asking us where to log in. Each time we have to explain the custom URL thing. It’s just not right.
So one big part of the 37signals Accounts transition is to centralize sign-in. You’ll now be able to sign in to any one of your accounts at 37signals.com. Here’s roughly what the universal sign in screen will look like:
FYI, you can still sign in at your own custom URLs too. Those sign in screens will look the same as they do today – with your logo centered at the top.
Launchpad
If you sign in, and you use multiple products (or have multiple accounts on a single product), you’ll see the new Launchpad. The Launchpad lists all your accounts. Click one to instantly sign in to that account. You can drag and drop reorder the accounts and columns to best fit your workflow.
The Launchpad is also where you’ll be able to edit your identity. Change personal information (username, password, avatar, etc) here and it’ll change in all your accounts.
And more…
The 37signals Accounts upgrade is a big deal. We understand it will be a bit of a hassle for everyone to pick a new username and password, but you’ll only have to do it once and it will only take a few seconds. Then you’re good to go.
The new 37signals Accounts system also lays the groundwork for a variety of enhancements and cross-product integrations you’ve been asking for. We’ll begin working on these in 2010.
Ever found yourself in a situation where you want to split the restaurant bill with your buddies, and all want pay by Credit Card. Like you want to get the calculations down to the last penny, or sip of Apple juice? Fret Not, if the Piece of Cake ever comes into existence, it’ll give going Dutch with friends a whole new meaning. By using this device each one can pay for just what they ate using their CC. The screen displays the total items consumed and you select your share to be automatically calculated.
When the bill comes, instead of dividing it up everyone drops their credit card into a folded up napkin. The cards are mixed and someone pulls one out at random. The unlucky person whose card is drawn pays for the entire meal; everyone else gets off scot free.
“I have no desire to scale up or get bigger. My desire is to produce the best food in the world. And if in doing so, more people come to our corner and want stuff, then heaven help me figure out how to meet the need without compromising the integrity.
As soon as you grasp for that growth, you’re gonna view your customer differently, you’re gonna view your product differently, you’re gonna view your business differently. Everything that is the most important – you’re going to view that differently.”
A digital still camera + the conference room + a shopping trip to a craft store + some moss + a shiny pop song from a band from Canberra, Australia + 30 hours of setup and editing + the creative minds at Coudal Partners = A recap of the first season of Field Notes COLORS. Check their site for a special $20-off holiday coupon as well. The “Just Below Zero” set is especially beautiful in person.
Basecamp New in Basecamp: Add due dates to to-dos!
This one’s been a long time coming. It’s been our top request for quite a while. Now you can add due dates to to-do lists in Basecamp. We spent a lot of time working on the experience, the interface, and flow, and the speed of this feature. Countless variations and hundreds of little tweaks later, we think we nailed it. We hope you’ll agree.
Inc. magazine looks at how an organic produce farm in Indiana uses Basecamp
“Now the partners use Basecamp to discuss strategic decisions and keep up to date on marketing efforts, crop conditions, and chores. Through Basecamp, the partners also check a daily log from Caruso, the farm’s manager, who documents what happens in the fields. Among her recent posts: ‘Fixed a little wind damage on the field. Not too bad, though. Much warmer and windy. Mice seem to be eating squash seeds, so I moved all trays up to the cloche.’ Entries like that help all the partners sleep a little easier.”
One of the more common problems which tends to create doubt and confusion is caused by the inexperienced and anxious executive who innocently expects, or even demands, to see not one but many solutions to a problem. These may include a number of visual and/or verbal concepts, an assortment of layouts, a variety of pictures and color schemes, as well as a choice of type styles. He needs the reassurance of numbers and the opportunity to exercise his personal preferences. He is also most likely to be the one to insist on endless revisions with unrealistic deadlines, adding to an already wasteful and time-consuming ritual. Theoretically, a great number of ideas assures a great number of choices, but such choices are essentially quantitative. This practice is as bewildering as it is wasteful. It discourages spontaneity, encourages indifference, and more often than not produces results which are neither distinguished, interesting, nor effective. In short, good ideas rarely come in bunches.
The designer who voluntarily presents his client with a batch of layouts does so not out prolificacy, but out of uncertainty or fear. He thus encourages the client to assume the role of referee. In the event of genuine need, however, the skillful designer is able to produce a reasonable number of good ideas. But quantity by demand is quite different than quantity by choice. Design is a time-consuming occupation. Whatever his working habits, the designer fills many a wastebasket in order to produce one good idea. Advertising agencies can be especially guilty in this numbers game. Bent on impressing the client with their ardor, they present a welter of layouts, many of which are superficial interpretations of potentially good ideas, or slick renderings of trite ones…
Expertise in business administration, journalism, accounting, or selling, though necessary in its place, is not expertise in problems dealing with visual appearance. The salesman who can sell you the most sophisticated computer typesetting equipment is rarely one who appreciates fine typography or elegant proportions. Actually, the plethora of bad design that we see all around us can probably be attributed as much to good salesmanship as to bad taste.
There’s an old joke that you know you’re in heaven if the cooks are Italian and the engineering is German. If it’s the other way around you’re in hell. In an attempt to conjure up a perfect city, I imagine a place that is a mash-up of the best qualities of a host of cities. The permutations are endless. Maybe I’d take the nightlife of New York in a setting like Sydney’s with bars like those in Barcelona and cuisine from Singapore served in outdoor restaurants like those in Mexico City. Or I could layer the sense of humor in Spain over the civic accommodation and elegance of Kyoto. Of course, it’s not really possible to cherry pick like this — mainly because a city’s qualities cannot thrive out of context. A place’s cuisine and architecture and language are all somehow interwoven. But one can dream.
Byrne’s article is fascinating, but so is this inital warning about singling out individual elements — the idea that cherry picking is a pipe dream. Qualities cannot thrive out of context. Everything is interwoven.
The soul of a carrot
A related example (popularized by Michael Pollan): the soul of a carrot. Scientists keep trying to isolate the part of a carrot that makes it healthy. They have identified 15 carotenes in the carrot, yet the resulting carotene pills don’t produce the health benefits you get from munching on actual carrots. Pollan explains why the reductive reasoning of food scientists is problematic:
We know carrots are good for you, right? People have been eating them for a long time and the assumption was that what was good in cancer preventing in the carrot was the beta carotene. What makes it orange. So we extracted that and we made these supplement pills and we gave them to people and low and behold in certain populations like people who drink a lot would get sicker, were more likely to get cancer on beta carotene and the scientists kind of scratched their head. There is a couple of explanations. We don’t know. But one may be that the beta carotene is not the key ingredient. You know there are 50 other carotenes in carrots.
Food is incredibly complex. It’s a wilderness, you know, we don’t know what’s going on deep in the soul of a carrot. And we shouldn’t kid ourselves to think we can reduce it to these chemicals. It also may be some synergies between different thing. Beta carotene is also found in the company of chlorophyll, maybe it’s that combination that contributes to health. The point is we don’t, as eaters, need to know what makes carrots work. We can eat carrots, they taste good, they’re good for you. It’s that simple.
Isolating the healthy part of the carrot is harder than it looks. There are hidden combinations at work. There’s a soul there that we don’t completely understand.
The sum is often greater than the parts
In today’s isolate then cut-and-paste world, it can be tempting to go around trying to single out just the best parts of things. Think of the “show three comps” method of delivering designs to a client. Inevitably the same thing happens: The client picks a few elements from design #1, a couple from #2, and a few others from #3. Then the designer(s) try to frankenstein these pieces together into a “perfect” hybrid — which turns out to be quite imperfect. All that cherry picking destroys any sense of cohesiveness. The end product looks like a collage instead of something unified.
When you cherry pick, you lose integrity. You lose the below-the-surface aspects of what makes something great. You cut the invisible strings that hold the whole thing together. You wind up with a mash-up instead of something that’s got soul.
That’s not to say you shouldn’t strive to improve, refine, and combine ideas. Just keep in mind the price you’re paying along the way.
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.
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.
