You’re reading Signal vs. Noise, a publication about the web by 37signals since 1999.

Are there negotiation insights to learn from how David became a partner at 37signals? Was Ruby on Rails David’s leverage to become a partner vs. an employee?

Could you could about the success or failures of your affiliate program and why you’re not accepting new affiliates? Cheers.

I asked the same question on twitter as well.

What is your take on methodologies like Agile or Waterfall? Do you follow ‘em or do you pick a feature, code it, test it and ship it?

A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.

Do you ever find yourself struggling to take action? If so, what sort of advice could you give that has helped you in the past to move beyond a lack of motivation?

I would like to ask David if he ever intends on “retiring” from Rails development, or if there is an exit plan (however tenuous)?

For Jason, how important is Rails to the operation of the company? Do you think you could have had the same success using some other language/framework?

P.S. David, how much fun is it driving that Porsche?

Are you going to add Video conference / Video Chat to Basecamp or campfire ?

@Jason do consider being on the board of Groupon a return to consulting work ?

@Jason/David would 37signals consider providing consultation for startups with a lot of cash but no clue ?

i.e. They pay you guys tens of millions to help them reach their lofty goals…

The rest is all about Sortfolio

Why can’t Sortfolio grow to be your big dog ? (it seems like a perfect fit for your company )

What would you have done differently with Sortfolio ?

Sortfolio is it/ was it your dropbox ?

How do you prepare for public speaking?

last Sortfolio question : How much did it cost to run monthly ?

Hi Jason/David – I’m curious about what personal finance looks like when making the amount of money that you guys do. Do you two play the stock market, or invest otherwise? Are there any books or blogs on the subject that you recommend?

What is your philosophy when it comes to giving feedback to your employees? How do you deliver criticism and how do you deliver praise?

Are there negotiation insights to learn from how David became a partner at 37signals? Was Ruby on Rails David’s leverage to become a partner vs. an employee?

Im a recent graduate with a degree in software engineering. I loved working with small companies while i was in school, but finding a smaller company to work for full time is proving difficult. most of the job requests are for people with years more experience. I believe im more than a competent programmer and could do the work required, but its hard to get past the ‘your to young’ thing. any advice?

1. Who’s more of a badass? Explain your answer: A. Samuel L Jackson B. Morgan Freeman C. Bruce Willis D. Nicolas Cage. Just kidding.

2. When was the first time you guys realized you wanted to do your own thing (as far as building your own business, etc.)?

@Matt – I can think of few other fields where it’s easier to build something on your own and concretely prove your abilities. Start coding something!

Will you be doing more work to integrate Highrise and Basecamp? E.g. integrated to do lists?

What lessons have you learnt since writing Rework?

David and Jason,

How would you rank the qualities you desire in a new software developer? How much is technical aptitude? How much is personality and work style? Have you discovered creative and effective ways to identify those qualities during the interview process?

@david anderson. i have, but that usually doesn’t get me past an initial resume scrub. I feel i get looked over because i don’t have 5-10 years experience in web technologies. Since most smaller companies dont have alot of resources they are looking for ‘ninjas’.(a word and criteria I disagree with) also my projects don’t get a lot of traffic, which puts me behind in the previous experience with ‘scalable’ sites criteria.

David- If 37signals were a car what kind of car would it be and why?

Jason- Would you say you are fundamentally the same person now as you were in high school/early college?

Jason- While taking time off time off from public speaking and writing books are you finding it hard to work as hard as you once used to? You were so good at public speaking and making money from it, I was just wondering if it was an easy transition to stop it when you did?

It seems 37signals recently crossed a threshold. A few evidences are your growing employee count and your hiring of an executive admin. (I’m jealous about that btw.) How do you now feel about employing people who do not have a direct impact on your customers? Do you have other such hires in your future (HR comes to mind but maybe others)?

Follow-up question …

Why is 37signals honestly selling Sortfolio?

If the site requires 0 attention, which you’ve stated, and generates $200k – why give up that revenue stream. It’s essentially 100% profit.

Seems fishy to me.

Why keep Job Board but shed Sortfolio?

Sortfolio fits better into your passion for “design, business, experience, simplicity, the web, culture, and more” than the Job Board does; which weakens the argument that Sortfolio’s non-coreness is a primary reason to sell it.

What does your typical work day look like? What are tasks you do that you want to do, versus tasks you do because you have to?

@ david : node.js &/vs rails ?

How’s the new office space affecting your work? What are the pros and cons compared to your former office space at Coudal?

Node.js has so much potential but lacks the maturity, community and gems of Rails. Do you guys foresee any sort of convergence between Node and Rails? Is Pow a one-off thing or the start of a new hybrid?

What did you guys do early on to get people to notice your products? I mean, I understand that Rails, conferences you spoke at, etc. were all advertising opportunities, but as a start-up, what sorts of things helped you get Basecamp’s name out in the masses?

I’ve a start-up with one product thus far, we’re preparing a second and we’ve had a little bit of information out there about us and our products, but man, it’s hard to get noticed, even if you have good products or not.

Are all partners of 37signals partners in the traditional sense, or are some of them employees?

Here are some good ones:
1. What have you learned since having your own offices? Are they good? Bad? Impacting how you work at all?
2. What have you learned about people, business, and/or something else from trying to sell Sortfolio?

What is the biggest mistake that you guys have made while in business? Were you able to learn from that mistake and have more success because of it?

Last one, I swear
Is there anything you miss about the web-design firm days of 37signals?

Despite the fact that you prefer staying small you still constantly grow as a company: we see new job vacancies quite often, you also recently hired a person to do administrative tasks. Does it mean you are also growing out of your philosophy of staying small and flat company? Do you have any capacity planning or scaling plans for the near future? Also, is selling Sorfolio an attempt to avoid growing horizontally?

For people with basic HTML experience who want to create an new app, should we learn about desktop web app development first or just go straight to mobile app development? Especially given the big shift toward mobility.

And if we want to create a mobile app, should we focus on mobile web app development (HTML, CSS , Javascript) or native app development (Objective C, etc)?

With employees scattered over many states, isn’t it a huge burden and expensive dealing with various state payrolls, taxes and incorporations and laws? Or how do you make it simple? Thanks.

What do you do, or who do you talk to when you have doubts? Do you have mentors or advisors, and do you recommend people find a mentor?

(This is a better place for my unanswered question from the Rails blog).

David, could you please share your and your colleagues’ view on upgrading Basecamp and other “mainstream” 37Signals applications to Rails3? This would be an interesting example.

It has been a while since the Programming Rountable podcasts in September–October 2010 – those had lots of insights. I wonder if since then you have undertaken the upgrade of the heavyweight projects, sensitive to performance.

And in part I ask this because of Tolk i18n engine where only the rails3 branch has been getting new commits in the last 6 months or so. Which probably means that either you are completely happy with its master branch (for rails 2.3), or you have already switched to rails 3, or the development happens somewhere else. Please give a hint on the plans with regard to Tolk if possible. While it is easy to fork and tweak, the opinion of the authors may be helpful in avoiding reinvention of the wheel.

Hello David, hello Jason,

First, thank you for what you’re doing for the community and for the world.

Little questions : What was the first motivator for being partners ? How did you achieve to not ruin this partnership ? (shares, agreements, etc.)

What was the weekly income (from basecamp) that made you believe that you were already successful ?

David, have you ever tried playing jazz music ? For me it’s a lot like coding and I would like your thoughts about that.

David – If/when 37signals makes the money, would you like to run your own Formula 1 team? If not, would you ever want to drive in Formula 1?

How did you deal with managing the recent influx of new employees?

Hi guys, thanks for taking questions.

Here’s my question: for someone who is developing a web application, what steps would you suggest to begin marketing it?

Do you think monthly pricing for a service is doable with consumers (as opposed to businesses)?

David – I would like to know how you see Continuous Integration (Jenkins/Hudson, Maven, Unit Testing, etc) impacting code development in the future. Also what is your take on code reviews during a development lifecycle (I think they are tedious & condescending)? I have heard surprisingly little on these subjects from 37 signals (Blog/Rework/Getting Real).

Jason – How do you promote horizontal career paths? Also what is your take on “broadbanning” (making vertical career perusers take a pay bump at first w/ option to make more if they improve in new role)?

@jasonfried: why did you become a designer? @dhh: why did you become a programmer?

For fun: If you were going to start a physical product company, what product(s) would you sell and why?

Would you recommend some blogs you enjoy?

If we agree to the statement that says that a company goes to 3 phases (1- pioneer, 2 – growth, 3 – hypercompetition), your company is from my point of view entering the 3rd phase.

How do you manage that situation? Considering a new mid or long-term goal? Trying to change something to go back to pioneer phase?

I’d like to ask you the following questions. Thank you in advance for your answers, I’m sure your advices will be very helpful: 1. What do you think about selling information products online? 2. What do you think about the online marketing methods used by the “marketing gurus” selling their information products? 3. How to start an own online business being short of money and time, and having a full-time job you don’t quite like but you need to keep for now to support your family. Because of that I feel like being trapped in a closed circle, impossible to get out from. Which move should I make? Every move I can think of is limited by the other factors.

Once again thanks for addressing my questions.

Hello guys,

Do you think that “Best Practices” of small businesses can be written down and applied as is or it’s utopic to think so ?

I think about the large IT company building the ITIL B .P. for instance.

@David Yesterday I spent 4 hours trying to get the “REST” plugin to work in Struts 2 for a company I work for. FOUR hours. And it still doesn’t work. All I want to do is: GET http://example.com/orders/42

FOUR hours and it still doesn’t work. Going to try and get it to work today.

When I went home last night and worked on my personal project (in Rails), I did more in 20 minutes than I did in FOUR hours with Struts 2.

So, THANK YOU for Rails.

(sorry, not really a question)

Matt, make sure the spelling and grammar on your resume are perfect. Phrases like “your to young” will get you nowhere fast.

Are you happy for sara’s new business or jealous that she’s so successful now?

Anonymous Coward, why would they be jealous? It’s not that Sara’s new business is successful while they aren’t.

How do you remain interested in your own products once they’ve “scratched your itch”?

I.e. how do you avoid finding it dreary to work on the same handful of products every day? Obviously you use the products yourself so you want them to be good, but at some point, you must feel that you’ve scratched your own itch sufficiently, and it becomes a matter of satifying other people (customers).

You’re too smart to start down the endless path of “Completely rewritten! Brand new code base!” and you say no to most big new features. But building new, big things is also very alluring compared to “just” doing maintenance (it is to me at least). So again, how do you remain stoked about your day-to-day work and the prospect of doing it for 20-odd more years, when you explicitly try to avoid doing big new things?

Could you walk through, in some detail, what a typical week looks like for each of you?

Can you talk about your pricing for Basecamp or Highrise. How did you go about picking those prices/features in each package? Have you done any A|B Testing? What has worked well and what didn’t.

Thank you.

What is the operational cost of running Sortfolio.com?

In addition, for example, how much did you spend advertising the site?

How would you advise a new start-up to get people using or even hearing about their new application?

Do you think blogging/tweeting/emailing is sufficient, or are there other approaches you’d suggest (e.g. releasing by-products etc).

I see you guys use Adwords, do you see good results from paid advertising?

At the beginning of 37signals, users were asking for simple products with only must-have features. And 37signals create a simplified product that was really useful and easy to use.

But it seems that users are now looking for more complex solutions (like suites and integrations within tools). Everybody can see that demand in 37signals Answers. For us, users, looks like 37signals stopped listening to our need and just want to satisfy its own culture: “simplicity”. Dont you think it will ruin the company?

What are the advantages of having offices in Chicago?

What is the future of mobile apps: native or Web?

If you don’t learn much at university, what would you recommend as an alternative? Sort of what is your alternative MBA ?

How often do you throw or shelve good ideas or possible products.

@Jason/David: It’s been already a year since you guys published REWORK . Do you think you have learned more lessons in this last year to start writing a second version of the book?

how do you handle subscription based, recurring billing with different plan (free, base, pro)?

Skype almost seemed like a good candidate for the bootstrapped, profitable and proud slot. But now they have sold out to Microsoft – to the universal disappointment of just about everybody. Any tips for companies tempted to sell out – what can they do to keep the faith?

1. When can I (I mean we) get hands on your cinco mobile app framework?

2. 37signals ID – Fantastic idea, amazing execution! If you could do it over, would you have had centralised authentication earlier in your app evolution?

3. Where does support fit in to your application development? Would you say you “design” support in to your applications. Is support one of the forces you design with?

Early on, 37signals made the shift from a consulting company to a consulting and product company, and then to a product company. I run a small consulting company and hope to follow a similar path. We are struggling to find time to work on the product side as our consulting time is very in demand (and we’re not cheap, either).

We have stopped searching for new customers to try to slow down the flow of incoming work, but it continues to find us. I don’t want to lose our existing customers as I’m not sure if the product will be a success, so we have to continue to service them.

How did you make that initial shift from being a consulting company to also selling products? How did you generate the extra time required to both work on the products and market them? I’m interested in specifics – did you set aside x hours per day, or x days per week? Are there any lessons learned you can share?

Do you set deadlines?

Some of your reasons for changing from a service business to a product business were the intimate client relationship tension, client drama, babysitting, etc. that took place with your clients.

Now that you’re “doing products”, what is the equally frustrating aspect of your product business that you try to avoid?

The grass is always greener on the other side… but is it really greener in the product business?

1/ How do you convince a recalcitrant employer as to the benefits of a teleworking arrangement, beyond providing a very indepth impact summary on your job. Remember, they are not as forward thinking as you.

2/ How do you foster the same sort of thinking you guys exhibit, in a workplace replete with deadwood and a complete lack of self starting initiators/Linchpins.

3/ How do you ignore the competition. I am launching my first iPhone app and am a year late. In the meantime 2-3 competitors have sprung up. Is it a case of living the maxim of underdoing the competition, or just keeping focussed and not worrying.

Why did you stop the affiliate program?

Can you encapsulate the methods/techniques that you use to keep your business moving at light speed when there are thousands of miles between the principles in the business?

Most companies fail when they are in the same room every day, what recipe for pixie dust can you share?

Is it worth my while?

I’m considering a career change into programming. I’m 35 with no experience in the subject, but I find it intriguing. I would love to write programs to make computers do things. To create.

I’ve heard jobs are scarce and I’ll be competing with pros who’ve been at it for years, or younger prorammers who have more time than I do – my family is a priority and I’m going back to school to complete my BS (no pun intended).

So is it worth my while? As opposed to network security/info assurance which I’ve heard is in demand. Or some other field – like mechanical engineering which I find interesting.

Answers from both you guys would be appreciated.