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.
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.
Taylor Weibley has joined 37signals as our new operations manager. Taylor comes from a long stint at Engine Yard where he helped build up their support department. He’ll be adding Tampa, Florida to the now long list of cities that the 37signals team pings from.
We’re really looking forward to having Taylor take on a slightly more methodical approach to our growing infrastructure and make sure we keep adding 9’s to the uptime stats. He’ll also be heading up new projects like improving performance of our applications in Europe and the rest of the non-US world as well as multiple datacenter deployments.
Between Draft, Campfire, and Highrise, we’ve been building quite the iOS portfolio of applications. We want to take good care of them and continue building more iOS and mobile applications, so we’re hiring a dedicated programmer for the task.
Cute, but seems too clever. I got this when I forwarded a message where someone earlier in the thread had talked about attaching. Wonder if Google tracks false positives in the wild?
We’re sad to say goodbye to our good friend and current operations manager Mark Imbriaco, but we know that he’ll continue to kick ass in his new position at Heroku. Mark has been with us for almost four years and seen our infrastructure grow from a handful of servers to I’ve-lost-count.
This means that we’re looking for a new operations manager to join our band. The operations team already consists of Joshua Sierles and John Williams and this new person will be working closely with the two of them, and the rest of us, to make sure all 37signals applications are always running like the German Swiss trains.
I’m not going to lie. I was never a Microsoft fan. Not even when I was using Windows (that I begrudgingly moved to after the Amiga). But at least you used to have some awe and respect for the gorilla that was Microsoft. Bill Gates might have been an evil genius, but at least he was a genius.
Now contrast this to Steve Ballmer. Who’s certainly no genius and calling him evil is to belittle evil. He has turned the gorilla into a buffoon. And frankly, it’s sad. Gone are the feelings of rage (except when they patent troll people for being web apps) and left is pity.
None of this is new, of course. Ballmer has be running Microsoft for more than a decade now, but when you don’t hear from the guy directly for a while, it’s easy to get lulled into the belief that he’s probably running alright. Not.
See this video from D8 of Ballmer babbling about “productivity is going to be important, consumption is going to be important”.
Now contrast this with Steve Jobs speaking about a much, much tougher issue at the same conference:
Jobs is lucid and reasoned. Ballmer is… Hell, I don’t even know how to describe it. He’s all over the place. No clear definitions, just randomly running his mouth. Compared to Jobs, I think it’s charitable to call him pathetic.
Jobs needs worthy opponents and Ballmer isn’t it. Look at this chart of Microsoft’s market value from the Gates to Ballmer hand-over:
Now look at this picture of Apple stock since Jobs returned:
It matters who’s at the top. It sets the company tone. Microsoft is undoubtedly full of very smart people, but as long as they are being run by Steve Ballmer, they’re going to be shackled by his ineptitude.
37signals can trace its roots back to the dot-bom tech recession of the early 2000s. The party was over, the mega budgets were gone, and you had to hunker down and make money in exceed money out. Back to basics.
This might have seemed like exactly the wrong time to start a business, but I believe the opposite is true. The skills and the culture you pick up at formation will stick with you forever. The corporate mind of 37signals became imprinted with frugality and efficiency that still is at the core of who we are today.
Maybe this is a good thing. A deep recession can be the mother of invention. These Americans are now liberated from the bureaucratic straitjackets they thought they had to wear. They can now fulfill their creative dreams and find their inner entrepreneurs. All they needed was a good kick in the pants.
A whole class of companies forced into existence, forced to be lean, forced to be profitable. Nothing is so bad it’s not good for something.
(Yes, some of these starters will not be successful or they’ll make less than they did in their former job. Just starting a business is no guarantee for success.)
We don’t realize how much our unexamined assumptions take us to radically different places. If I’m running an organization and my starting premise about human beings is that people are fundamentally passive and inert, that they won’t do a damn thing unless I threaten them with a stick or entice them with a carrot, that takes me down one road. But I think that’s the wrong premise, the wrong theory of human nature.
Many people with jobs have a fantasy about all the amazing things they would do if they didn’t need to work. In reality, if they had the drive and commitment to do actually do those things, they wouldn’t let a job get in the way.
I’m sick and tired of hearing about how you should be producing “content” to attract a web following. Treating content as a category on its own is missing the point entirely. Nobody cares about content. Nobody wakes up in the morning and thinks, hey, I should read some content today.
What people want is opinions, analysis, techniques, experiences, and insights. The best of all these come as a by-product from actually doing stuff. The closer you are to the topics, the more natural you’ll be able to extract the goodies.
This also means that it’s hard to schedule. You can’t put neatly into timeslots when you’re going to be annoyed, ecstatic, disappointed, have a great insight or discover a new awesome technique.
The great thing is that it doesn’t really matter that much anyway whether you follow a tight schedule. Between Twitter, RSS, and the aggregator sites, good stuff usually bubbles to the top regardless.
Lest you think these are just the headlines and that the abstracts are better. Check out the one for System and method for providing and displaying a web page having an embedded menu:
A method for providing a web page having an embedded menu to a web browser and for displaying the web page to a user of the web browser are provided. A request for a web page is received from a web browser In response to the request, a web page and an applet associated with the web page are packaged for transmission to the web browser. The web page and the applet are then transmitted to and downloaded by the web browser. When the web page is displayed and the applet is executed by the web browser, the applet creates and manages an embedded menu in the displayed web page under control of the applet . This embedded menu provides a user of the web browser with a plurality of links through one action in the displayed web page.
Software patents are a despicable tax on innovation. Companies that use them in aggression are pathetic.
Big companies where both sides have huge patent inventories might have fun with this sort of sue and counter-sue, but when the titans reach outside of their country club gardens to pick on someone a speck of their size, it’s truly disgusting.
These patents are so generic that Microsofts suit against Salesforce is purely selective enforcement against a competitor. What would we do if we were sued in a similar fashion? Probably the same thing a shop keeper on a street run by mobsters would do: Pay up or lose a limb. Extortion at its best.
But hey, maybe five years from now a cut-off-the-air-supply email can emerge, then the justice department can spend another half a decade pursuing a slap on the wrist, and in 15 years we’ll have some “justice”.
Fucking patent trolls. Fucking Microsoft. What a sad day.
Basecamp is being used by companies all over the globe, but until today they’ve had to make do with a user interface in English. That might be fine for creative professionals used to dealing with English in their company, but it’s often a problem for dealing with clients who are more comfortable in their native tongue. We’re tackling that problem today.
The Basecamp interface has been translated into nine languages already and we have even more coming. The languages that are going live today are French, Spanish, Portuguese (Brazillian), Dutch, Greek, Polish, Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish. Italian, Russian, and Slovak are not far behind and will be ready soon.
You can change the language of any company in Basecamp by going to the edit company screen and picking from the language drop-down.
Everyone from that company will now see Basecamp in the selected language. (We’re open to making localization a person-by-person option, but we’re just starting with companies for now.)
Getting a translated interface just right is hard, though. So it’s unlikely that all of these translations are perfect out the gate. But we wanted to get them out there and get some feedback on what we need to improve.
The translation team
We couldn’t have done this without an amazing team working on translations. We’d like to extend a big thank you to the following translators for their hard work. I did a fair share of the Danish translation myself and I can tell you that it’s harder than it sounds to translate the 2,000 strings needed for Basecamp.
If your language is not on the lists mentioned, we could use your help. We’re looking for volunteer Basecamp users that would use the application in their own language to help make it available. Please write david@37signals.com with the subject “Translate Basecamp into LANGUAGE” if you’d like to help.
The Rails infrastructure
The technical side of things relies on the excellent i18n infrastructure already present in Ruby on Rails and a new tool we developed called Tolk. It gives translators a web interface for updating the phrases and can even track things like updated strings. It made translating Basecamp much simpler. It’s completely open source and free for anyone else to use. Enjoy!
Ning is laying off 40% of its staff and dumping free versions of its service. That’s a shitty day for the people who lost their job and the folks left behind without their coworkers. I went through a few rounds back in the dotcom days and fun it was not.
But I can’t help but be puzzled by the coverage of this. Here’s TechCrunch on the situation:
While the massive layoffs are obviously a big hit to the company, it isn’t all bad news for Ning: the service is still seeing its traffic grow according to comScore. But traffic growth is no longer good enough for the company — it needs to start generating some serious revenue, and advertising clearly isn’t cutting it.
Are you kidding me? The company has blown through $120MM of VC funding over six years, built up massive traffic, yet just had to slash and burn, and you’re saying that “traffic growth is no longer good enough”. How the hell was it ever good enough?
Ning’s problem is not a lack of eyeballs but its inability to turn them into cash money to pay the bills. Getting more of something that’s a net-negative is not going to make up for it.
That was always their problem. From day one. Just like it’s any other business’ problem. Acting all shocked and surprised now is just incredibly ignorant of our industry’s very recent past.
This is the same kind of ignorance that goes on to celebrate so-called businesses successes before they posted black numbers on the balance sheet. Until that happens it’s all conjecture and possible maybes.
The just-give-it-away-for-free-and-they-will-come-and-we’ll-be-rich automatron is as broken now as it was in 2001.
UPDATE: Just found this fantastic piece of cheerleader reporting from Business Insider from just last year: “Build-your-own-Facebook startup Ning is still on fire… How much money is Ning making with all that traffic? Bianchini wouldn’t comment. But by our back-of-the-envelope calculations, Ning could be on a nearly $10 million annual”. Oh boy.
Many developers are up in arms about a new policy from Apple that mandates all iOS applications to be written in either a flavor of C or JavaScript. It’s original motivation is apparently to prevent Adobe’s imminent Flash-to-iOS compiler in CS5 from working, but the collateral damage is much greater than that.
There’s a wealth of cross-compilers in the wild that looks to be outlawed by the same provision. Titanium, Gambit Scheme, MonoTouch, and Unity3D are a few of the bigger ones. These layers allow you to write applications in programming languages like Scheme or C# and compile that into a native iOS applications (as well as other platforms like Android).
Lots of developers, me included, have had such a gut-turning reaction to Apple’s new policy that we have a hard time thinking and speaking rationally. The emotions take over and we start screaming “fascists!”, which isn’t very persuasive to non-developers who don’t have the same instinctual reaction. So instead, allow me to go through five (mostly) rational arguments for why this is a bad idea.
Turning ambition into success is hard enough as it is. Whether you’re taking time to work on a project on the side or you’re launching a full-time business, it’s going to require peak personal investment. Not in terms of working crazy hours, but of dedication and perseverance.
Why would you want to pour so much of yourself into anything less than your best idea? Other ideas might seem more achievable or convenient, but if your heart and mind is elsewhere it’s all for naught.
Whatever excuse you can come up with for why you’re settling for less is probably not good enough. It’s intensely draining to give up on your dreams and you’ll not look kindly back at yourself for treading water.
You can’t say your company is not for sale these days without incredulous stares and doubtful gasps. The big flip has become the holy grail. Worshipped to the point where non-believers are chastised, straight-faced, for refusing to give up their life’s work.
See, the new world of “sell it and do it again” belongs to the serial entrepreneur. The too-cool-to-stick-around nouveau rich of the 21st century. Staying for the long term is now seen as old-fashioned and uncool, a handknit sweater from your grandfather’s closet.
Fuck that.
Do you think Steve Jobs wants to be a serial entrepreneur? Bill Gates? Warren Buffet? Larry Ellison? All these guys put big stakes in their life’s work. Companies that they built from scratch, that they’ll champion until they can champion them no more. Sure, they may have hobby companies on the side, but for each of them, there’s one defining business, one spectacular legacy to leave behind when they’re gone.
These are my business heroes. People so dedicated to their company and its impact on society that you couldn’t pay them any amount of riches to leave. People willing to build for decades.
But, aside from the ideology behind it — the pride and satisfaction of building a company of real value to the world — there’s the financial side too. Why would you want to take a 10 times multiple of today’s earnings, if you believe you can still grow your business and you’re committed to sticking around to do it?
Why do you think you’d do a worse job than a prospective buyer of running your own business? Selling your company only makes sense if you think they can do a better job than you can. Or when you think they’re overvaluing the prospects of your company. That’s either the talk of the meek or a con man (“let’s get these suckers to overpay for this company of questionable value…”).
Flipping is a servant’s game. As the Chris Rock joke goes, Shaq is rich, the man who signs his check is wealthy. Be the man who signs the check, not the baller who takes it.
There are many reasons why someone would want to start a company. There’s the pursuit of wealth, glory, and fame, but above all, I believe most founders are searching for freedom. Freedom to run things the way they see fit, freedom to be the masters of their own domain.
But until you have profits, until you’re self-sustainable, you won’t truly have that freedom. As long as you’re beholden to other people’s money, you’re ultimately beholden to their approval.
Because we’re profitable, Jason and I get the freedom to do all sorts of “crazy” things:
37signals runs entirely without debt, which is apparently so uncommon that we had trouble getting net-30 terms from a vendor recently, because we couldn’t give four trade references for credit. Running a company without debt is like paying off your mortgage—liberating.
We actually trust our employees. No expense reports, no counting vacation or sick days, no required location or work hours. We give everyone a credit card for expenses and tell them to spend it wisely. What really matters is turning out good work.
We speak our minds — even when it’s inconvenient, controversial, or risking offense to some of our customers or partners. There’s none of the traditional self-censorship that quickly creeps in when you have to worry about what the big man thinks about your opinions.
It’s these supposedly crazy things that make me not want to give up 37signals for anything.
Now, all this is technically possible without the freedom of profitability, but it certainly wouldn’t be natural or common. Once you start thinking about how your decisions and actions might displease the men with the money, you invariably shy away from the most controversial (and best) ideas.
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.
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.
1. The Answers market is in a land grab mode Unlike eBay, where there’s a general market for goods and you get huge network effects from having a critical mass of buyers and sellers, StackOverflow is all about niches. People who are searching for “how to make sql server not go slow?” aren’t likely to bleed over to “how to make swedish meatballs?”.
This means that you’ll have to fight for every niche. Similar to how general forums would have to fight for every niche. Just because you have a forum site that’s big for gamers, you won’t have much of an edge attracting foodies.
Finally, it’s not like this is a new idea with no other entrants. Look at Yahoo Answers for a site that’s still up with a similar model and look at Google Answers for another that couldn’t be turned into a worthwhile business and closed.
2. Stack Overflow is like Starbucks It really isn’t. Starbucks can use capital efficiently because they have big capital expenditures securing land, building out stores, and purchasing coffee machines. Where’s the capital intensity part of starting another answers site? Adding another server? Coming up with a new design?
It doesn’t seem like Stack Overflow can efficiently use big money for anything but advertising itself. Which is kinda funny when the whole business is about getting page views to sell for ad crumbs. It also rings very much like dot-com. Remember when all you had to do was get eyeballs? Oh, it’s free? Who cares, let’s make it up on volume!
3. Stack Overflow wants to get on Techcrunch If you’re listing the publicity of “Stack Overflow raises $10M in Series A by Fancy Schmancy VC” as the 3rd pro for taking money, you’re bound to be in trouble. The Techcrunch post you’re going to get from this is going to scroll off the front page in 4 hours and nobody who’s actually going to use your service is going to care.
Do you think people looking for an answer to “how do I get the three gold rings in zelda?” is going to give a hoot who’s money you’re burning to provide that forum? Or even that the advertisers you’re hoping to attract is going to look at anything else than CPM and demographics for a clue on whether to invest? No.
4. The investor will give you advice, connections, and introductions They may, but most of the introductions your typical investor is going to give you is how to get you out in 3-5 years. You can find a lot of advice in many places. Rarely is the quality of the advice associated with having money involved of largely superior quality.
And if you end up building something of considerable value, then the connections and introductions will come all by themselves. You usually have to work to fight them off with a stick when things are going great. And getting an intro to Mr. Very Important Person before you have anything of material value is usually not going to give you much anyway.
5. Taking money means big exit or IPO I’d argue the opposite. When you take money, your exit is bound to be smaller unless you’re playing the Web 2.0 lottery game (where a few lucky contestants gets bought for sums completely uncorrelated to business fundamentals). Taking money means giving up equity, which means there’ll be less left over if you happen to build something that’s valuable enough for others to buy.
And I don’t know if you’ve heard, but the IPO markets aren’t all that interested in eyeball companies without the numbers to back them up any more. Doesn’t matter how many letters of the alphabet you’ve used for series whatever funding before you got there.
If you can build a great, profitable business, you’ll have all the options to sell or go IPO. Taking VC only complicates that.
6. Taking VC will make your company successful This one is funny. So if you’re not looking to take VC and play the Web 2.0 lottery or aim for an early exit, you’re just in it for “personal aggrandizement”. If you take the money, you just want the best for your business. Spot the disconnect here.
Now even given all this, there’s actually still an argument for why Joel should take the money. It’ll probably lower the chances of Stack Overflow ultimately succeeding as a long-term sustainable business, but if he has eyed that he has a hot property right now, it’ll be a good time to take some money off the table.
A fool and his money will soon be departed applies equally to venture capitalists as it does to everyone else. If Joel and co. can negotiate a deal with Sand Hill road to give them a nice payout as part of the deal, this might well be even better than trying to shop around Stack Overflow for a sale that it’s probably premature for.
Much better to take a small slice of the proceeds from a “if this just get 1% of the billion dollar advertising market” than to take the slice from “how much money did you make for the past 12 months?” of a strictly look-at-the-books sale.
I love my iPhone and I love Apple (cue images of flag pins and “I love muh countray!”), but I believe they’re blowing it with the App Store gate keeping. That’s of course not a new opinion. Developers left and right have been decrying the broken process. But there’s nothing like feeling it on your own bones to make the point.
We have a couple of new features in the wing for Campfire. They’ve been done for more than 10 days now. Why haven’t we released them yet? Because the iPhone app Ember needed to have a simple regular expression updated to support the features. We really like Ember, so we decided that holding back the features until this pro forma update went through was prudent. We’re still waiting.
This has made me think about all the ways the app store process sucks and how little we get back in return. The argument I keep hearing for why this terrible process is worth it is quality control. Here’s a breakdown of each argument:
Applications will be more stable: No they won’t. Echophone still crashes on me all the time. It’s not like the iPhone is immune to crash bugs. And why would it be? You’re writing native Objective-C here. Shit is going to crash every now and then. No 10 minute look-over by a App Store clerk is going to help that.
The App Store will be free of malware: That’s certainly no given. If you really wanted to be evil, you could very well hide your malice underneath a cute game and have a time bomb or a remote trigger installed. Do you think the App Store clerks are combing through source code to look for security issues? Ha!
Only good stuff in the App Store: Ha! The App Store has some 140K+ applications. I can guarantee you that the bulk of that is less than average. There are some 100 fart apps for christ sake!
We’re paying for the inconvenience of quality control without the quality part. In fact, lots of software has lower quality because of the App Store process. Developers can’t easily get bug fixes out and they certainly don’t release new versions as often as they otherwise would. This harks back to the era where software was really cumbersome to release on CDs, so you did it much less frequently.
Contrast this with OS X and the web. Both platforms are much more open and on a mac you have very little trouble with stability or malware or even quality. In general, the market is pretty good at sorting this stuff out. If you make a crappy application, people don’t buy or recommend it. And OS X seems to be holding up well as a secure platform compared to, say, Windows, so malware isn’t much of a concern either.
What I think Apple should do instead is to reserve the power to nuke apps that prove troublesome. Have a “if you fuck it up, we’ll yank it” policy rather than a “we’ll review everything poorly and slowly and still not catch it all” policy. They’d be able to get by with a much smaller App Store clerk staff, developers would be thrilled to escape the needless gate keeping, and consumers would enjoy more applications updated more frequently.
What’s there to lose except for the feeling of powah?
“When is it going to be done?” is a reasonable question and we as software developers should try to come up with the best answer we can based on our experience and analysis. What we should not do, however, is treat our answer as solemn oath.
When you treat estimates as promises instead of guesses, you bind your worth as a worker to it. If you do not meet your own deadline, you are a failure. And since nobody likes to be a failure, they’ll indulge in risky behavior to avoid it, like burning the midnight oil and checking in bad code with scanty or no tests.
Rushing to meet your estimate promise once or twice might be bearable, but it’s ultimately unsustainable. Software development is inherently unpredictable. There are just too many moving parts and ice tips that turn out to be icebergs.
If you treat the estimate as a “best guess based on the limited information available to me before I start the work”, though, you’ll change the frame and break the cycle of deadline anguish. Now the task becomes collaborative and you can share new discoveries with the stakeholders.
Found out that doing the feature as originally designed requires changing some fundamental infrastructure that’ll add another two days to your one day estimate? Maybe it’s not worth it any more. Ask the stakeholder if he’s still interested in the feature when it costs three days instead of one. Or if there’s a way to simplify it such that the infrastructure change is not necessary.
That’s the true value of estimates. That it sets up conversational constraints that can be used as boundaries for trading concessions. Not that they’re nails for your own self-erected cross.
Chart by Erik Pukinskis of 
You can change the language of any company in Basecamp by going to the edit company screen and picking from the language drop-down.
