SEASON 2 - EPISODE 0080 - OCT 25, 2023

Build an Audience

This episode kicks off with the Underdog Challenge winner sharing the unconventional strategies that enable his small business to take on their larger competitors.

Then, 37signals’ co-founders, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, sit down with host Kimberly Rhodes to delve into the power of building an audience through authentic content.

Jason and David share the secret of building a genuine connection with your audience and the importance of having “skin in the game” in content creation. Listen in as they walk listeners through the vital components of organic content creation to engender trust and resonate with your audience in a landscape overflowing with “content marketing BS.”

Check out the full video episode on YouTube

Show Notes

00:00 - Kimberly welcomes Christian Hyatt, the co-founder and CEO of cybersecurity company Risk3sixty, as the winner of 37signals’ Underdog Challenge.
03:16 - Christian shares his top tip for underdogs.
03:50 - Kimberly awards one year of Basecamp Pro Unlimited to Christian and his team.
04:08 - 37signals co-founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson join the podcast to discuss building an audience through authentic content.
04:32 - Jason shares the key to building a genuine connection with your audience.
05:51 - David stresses the importance of demonstrating competence and having “skin in the game” in content creation.
09:34 - Why you should avoid adding more “content marketing bullshit” to the internet.
10:12 – Avoid the “content marketing playbook.” Today’s challenges in audience building require alternative marketing strategies.
10:55 - Kimberly discusses the concept of giving before asking inspired by Gary Vaynerchuk’s book,* Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook*.
11:16 - Steering clear of rigid sharing schedules and examples of authentic, meaningful content that resonates with your audience.
12:04 - Keeping the easy from becoming hard. The importance of sharing thought processes and insights with your audience.
13:22 - A non-pushy approach to introducing new products or content.
15:54 - Advice for listeners on being willing to share and educate online, particularly in the face of potential internet criticism.
16:18 - The importance of an audience that includes supporters and detractors
18:50 - 37signals’ marketing strategies, specifically their perspective on paid advertising and leveraging their existing audience.
19:07 - Building a trusted brand through organic sharing.
21:45 - “Engage, respond, argue, defend, promote, whatever it might be,” but actually have a conversation.
22:41 - The value of being in-the-trenches to build brand equity.
25:59 - How entrepreneurs who are just starting out can begin building an audience.
26:15 - The key to getting started and improving as you grow.
27:22 - Why you shouldn’t overlook the importance of educating people about the finer details of your field.
28:02 - REWORK is a production of 37signals. You can find show notes and transcripts on our website. Full video episodes are available on YouTube and X. If you have a question for Jason or David about a better way to work and run your business, leave us a voicemail at 708-628-7850 and we might answer it on a future episode.

Links & Resources

Transcript

Kimberly (00:00): Welcome to REWORK, a podcast by 37signals about the better way to work and run your business. I’m your host, Kimberly Rhodes. We recently put a call out for underdogs to tell us their story, and this week I have the winner of our Underdog Challenge with us. Welcome to the show, Christian Hyatt, who’s the co-founder and CEO of cybersecurity company Risk3sixty. Christian, welcome to REWORK. We’re excited to hear your underdog story. Tell us why you think you’re an underdog,

Christian (00:27): Man, this is kind of like a dream come true. I’m such a big fan of you guys, Kimberly, thank you for having me. So when I saw that you guys put out the underdog story, that really resonated with me because at Risk3sixty, we’re a cybersecurity company and we compete with a lot of our competitors that have billion dollar valuations over the last few years. They’re highly funded venture capital firms. We can never outspend them, we can never out recruit them. So the way that we’ve won over the last few years is just a spirit of giving and trying to be crafty and trying to figure out ways to build our business, get noticed from a marketing perspective, over serve our clients. And it’s largely worked. And so it’s kind of a David versus Goliath story in many ways where our small 50, 60-person firm is up against really large SaaS companies and consulting firms and trying to win and often winning. So when I saw the underdog thing, I was like, that’s us. I got to apply. I’m very excited to be here.

Kimberly (01:24): Well, I loved what you wrote in your application. You said one of the secrets to success is you have higher strange renegades, teach them how to be craftsmen. Tell me what that means. What does that mean? Strange renegades?

Christian (01:35): Yeah, so strange Renegades is kind of our internal code name for what we call each other. And the reason we came up with that is it’s really a symbol for who we think we are. And I think if you follow conventional wisdom in terms of how to run a business, it’ll actually in many times ruin your business. Often, especially in our space, there’s these big companies that are not running a profitable business, they’re spending too much money, they’re not being disciplined. Customer service really goes down the drain. And the reason they’re doing that is because they’re trying to scale a business and then ultimately sell it. And for most businesses, that’s an insane way to run your business. And we think the only sane way to run a business is through scalable processes, discipline, over-serving your customers, hiring great people, training great people, and doing the right thing for a really long time without quitting.

(02:29): And the way that we embodied that is we said, you know what? We’re a little unconventional, but in this case, the unconventional is actually sane and that is where strange renegades come from because we’re a little bit strange in that we’re doing things a little bit different and then we’re renegades because we’re turning against what is otherwise conventional to do something that’s very logical and that means investing back into our people and our most important stakeholders, which is our own people, our employees, and then our customers and over-serving them. And it’s one of those things in the world where the unconventional is the only sane thing, and that’s a strange renegade. That’s where that came from and our investment philosophy and pouring back into our own people.

Kimberly (03:10): Amazing. Okay, Christian, before we wrap up, tell us one big tip you would give anyone listening about how to get ahead when you’re an underdog.

Christian (03:16): I think give first. So we did an analysis of our competitors. Some of our competitors are spending like $700,000 a month on just Google ads and as an underdog, there’s no way you’re going to compete with that. So the way that we chose to compete with that was just giving first. We put content out there, videos, learning documents, and that really helped the world appreciate us and some of those folks come back and decided to do business with us. So my number one piece of advice is do the right thing for a really long time and focus on giving first. And sometimes a little bit of that will come back.

Kimberly (03:50): Christian, you sound like an underdog, just like 37signals and you’re getting ahead and we love it. As the winner of our Underdog challenge, you’ll receive one year of Basecamp Pro Unlimited on us to help you stay ahead even as an underdog. Congratulations and thanks again for joining us. Now, back to the show.

(04:08): As always, I’m joined by the co-founder of 37 Signals, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. This week we’re talking about building an audience and not one that you pay for, but how that can be your secret weapon in business. Guys, let’s chat about it. This isn’t an episode of REWORK, but you guys have clearly been doing this for a long time, just building your own audience with writing and tweeting and videos. Kind of tell me about your philosophies on this.

Jason (04:32): Well, the first thing is we’ve just been sharing =. So the idea of building an audience is a byproduct. I don’t think you go into it trying to build an audience. You go into it sharing things and writing things up and exposing lessons that you’ve learned in the whole thing. And that is what forms an audience. And an audience is a group of people who come back to you to see what you have to say versus an audience that you have to pay for to reach audience. You have to pay for to reach is not an audience, I dunno what you want to call it, marketing collection of people, I dunno whatever you would call it, but I don’t consider an audience. An audience is someone who comes to see your show. That’s an audience basically. And what’s nice about that is if you primarily are sharing and giving back with no expectation of return, then occasionally you can throw something in there that is asking for something like a new product launch or a new feature or whatever it might be, or a new book or something like that. But if you’re constantly asking for things in return, people aren’t going to stick around. You’re not going to have that audience anymore. So I think it has to be rooted in sharing and giving with no expectation and then you can do some special things with that group of people that you couldn’t do otherwise.

David (05:51): That’s the problem I have with these terms like content marketing or SEO even, a lot of them are based entirely around being instrumental. If I do the thing that I perhaps don’t even really want to do and I’m going to do it shittily, then I’ll get what I really want, which is the audience. I’ll get more followers, I’ll get more sales. And what I find at least is most of the time that is so obvious that that’s what you’re trying to do. It is obvious you’re trying to do content marketing and it smells like content marketing and content marketing stinks. It is shitty. It is in service of something else in such a transparent fashion as to be, this word has been thrown around a lot, but inauthentic. I don’t believe that you believe what you’re telling me. I think you’re trying to tell me whatever you think I want to hear, which is one of those experiences I’ve had.

(06:43): Sometimes with car salespeople, you show up on the lot and you start chatting to the person and you can see the CPU just going, what does this customer want to hear? What does this customer want to hear? Oh, I’ll tell you exactly what you want to hear. And you’re like, that’s not a conversation, that’s a marketing drone just sort of scanning your brain for ways it can puncture and get through your defenses for buying. That’s not a equitable exchange. That’s not something I want to be a part of. What I do want to be a part of is I want to learn something from someone who knows stuff, and I think when content marketing, we’re just going to use this term here, half despairingly, half in quotes when it’s good, it’s someone showing that they are competent at what they’re building, they’re showing that they have skin in the game.

(07:29): If you’re trying to buy a project management tool, for example, would you rather buy from someone who knows something about project management, like legitimately knows something about it or perhaps even an expert in it, or would you rather buy from someone who went like, oh, we went out, did a bunch of market research, figured out whatever the hell it was that the customers were telling us that we should bill for them and we’re going to build just that. I’d much rather buy from the competent person, and I think this is why it’s so difficult to do because you actually have to exhibit that competence also in a compelling way. But there are plenty of people who perhaps could do that, but somehow won’t let themselves just be that competent person sharing advice. I think for me, one of the best examples I come back to is this guy Jason. We’ve talked about him in the past that makes these leather bags, what is it called? The Saddleback? Saddleback. Saddleback Bag. Yeah, Saddleback. I remember the first time I watched the first video where I think he’s taking apart a competitor’s bag, and it’s not so much that it’s a competitor, it’s the fact that he’s demonstrating just

Jason (08:30): He’s taking apart his bag. He’s taking about his bag to show you how to rip off. Here’s how you can rip off our bags. Yeah.

David (08:36): Yes. And he breaks it down. Why is this bag good or not good? Right? What is it that makes a good bag? He’s leveling up your eye for recognizing quality, and I think the people who do that, we have a natural affinity quid pro quo. Do you know what? Yeah, that’s good. I want to hear more from this person. But clearly it’s not easy to do and it’s not easy to distill it into a 10 point list of things you should be doing and then you will produce this outcome. You can’t make it a process of repeatable process that you can just apply that process to anything. The raw ingredients simply have to be there that someone who gives a shit, who have skin in the game, who have competence and have some ability to convey those things to you. Once those elements are present, I think that’s when you can create that connection that forms an audience that isn’t just transactional. I think for me, Gary V is one of the very best at this,

(09:34): Forming that connection with an audience. I just saw this video from one of his conferences a couple of weeks ago where he’s trying to teach this approach to someone, and you can just see someone who legitimately cares about conveying the information to another party and is interested in doing it as quickly as possible, dispelling as much of the bullshit as possible while still not alienating people. And if that’s the kind of stuff to get good at, if you have the competence already, but if you don’t have that or if your organization doesn’t have that or they’re not going to have an interest in it, please spare the internet, the content marketing bullshit.

(10:12): Just like do something else, buy a bunch of ads, raise a bunch of money, just do something else. Don’t flood the internet with more white papers. Don’t flood it with more stupid mailing lists that you can sign up for to get bullshit transactional trickle updates. Just do something else. Just do regular marketing. I think this is perhaps one of the things where I’ve moderated is we give the advice, build an audience, and I’d go, like if I were to write that essay today, I’d be like, you can’t build an audience, but listen, here’s what it’s going to take. You probably don’t have it.

(10:45): Let’s just be honest here. It’s a tactic. You can use it and you can’t get good at it, but if you just start with the content marketing playbook, it’s going to be shit. And I’d rather you didn’t.

Kimberly (10:55): So Gary v’s book, I think it’s jab, jab, jab, right hook or left hook, but it’s this concept of you just give it away, give it away, give it away, tell people things, share, share, share. And then eventually you can ask for something and it seems like you guys have naturally done that. Just give it away. Teach out, teach the competition. You guys have talked about that a lot, just sharing.

Jason (11:16): Yeah. Although I wouldn’t put it, not that you’re suggesting this, but I think some people do that. You put it on a schedule, let me share eight things and I can ask for one thing, let me share things, or once a month I’ll ask for it. It’s like just no, just share. And occasionally if you have something to ask, you ask or something to share. I also see a new product launch is sharing. It’s not just asking, buy this. It’s sharing about why’d you decide to make this product, you decide to make this product. What’s different? That’s something we try to do a lot is break down the reasons why. I wrote something on my Hey world yesterday about this. We’re changing inside. We have a feature called Campfire, which is a chat tool and we have to-dos, which are called to-dos and messages, which are called messages and a schedule, which is called Schedule.

(12:04): And we have this thing called Campfire, which is chat, so let’s just call it chat. So I wrote up this post about we’re just going to change the name to chat. Now, that’s the easy way. There’s also a hard way to do it, which is to go through and migrate all previous instances of the word campfire across millions of existing projects and dealing with all the potential errors and issues that come up with that and staging it because doing a migration, all the complicated stuff, or you could just say moving forward, we’re going to call the Campfire chat moving forward, and everything that already exists can stay as is. This is a much, much simpler approach. Now what I’m doing there is I’m actually talking about the product, but I’m really sharing more than what I’m giving or what I’m asking for. I’m saying, here’s how we think about issues.

(12:47): Here’s a way you can think about simplifying things. The post was like, don’t make easy into hard or don’t make easy into difficult. This is a mindset that you can apply to your own stuff. Even if you don’t use Basecamp, it doesn’t matter. But by using Basecamp as an example, you’re also of course exposing people to the product, but the primary reason for writing this is to share the thought process, which might be helpful to others. That’s another way to do this sort of thing, but you don’t again, want to do it in this scheduled way where it’s becomes very obvious what you’re trying to do. You just do it and sometimes you drop things in that can be helpful for others.

David (13:22): I think when you do it like that, when you introduce people to new stuff that you’re doing, it’s like, yeah, I’m in the audience of a bunch of different musicians, as in I enjoy their music. I’m actually interested when they put out a new album or they put out a new song that’s not selling, that’s not a sort of hard push. I’m simply sharing or I’m interested when they share like, oh, I have some new music. Would you want to listen to it? Yeah, I definitely do want to listen to it because I like your style, I like your stuff. And I think if you can get into that mode of having enough self-confidence that you don’t need to ram it down people’s throat, that you just go like, hey, I made some new stuff. If you are the kind of person who liked the stuff that I make, the way we think about products or business, you probably will like the product because that is the outcome of how we think about business and how we think about product.

(14:14): So if you resonate with those things, you’re probably going to enjoy it or maybe not, but at least it’s an open invitation for you to give it a try. I think part of it this year is the trouble with the internet and internet marketing is that everything has been quantified to the nth degree. We have been able to break down the efficiency of so many forms of advertisement, especially when they’re based on surveillance capitalism, that doing anything that can’t be quantified in those terms. And certainly anything that can’t be quantified in within three months or even six months gets difficult do. And these kinds of audience approaches to marketing sometimes have a very long time span, sometimes have a very long payback. I get notices from people all the time who have been following what Jason and I have been writing or saying for years and years, haven’t bought anything, and then suddenly they get a new job or some trigger enters their lives and they go like, yeah, actually now I’m in the market for a product like Basecamp.

(15:18): I’m going to check out Basecamp. And I’m going to have a bias towards Basecamp because I like what these guys have to say. And I’ve benefited from everything that I’ve heard over the years. That’s not a hard sell. That is just sort of this kind of relationship where I’m not looking to get in your pocket as soon as we shake our hands. Can I get into your back pocket somehow? And it sometimes has a long payback, but if you have confidence in the fact that what you’re sharing is actually genuine and there’s some feedback from the market saying that people are actually interested, this is viable.

Kimberly (15:54): Okay. David, since you’re bringing up confidence, I’m curious because I feel like for a lot of people when you’re sharing and educating others, you’re putting yourself out there, which means you’re opening yourself up to judgment. Do you either of you have tips for that of getting over that hump of especially the internet, internet can be very mean and getting past that so you’re still willing to share and educate others?

David (16:18): Yeah. I think it is a way where you almost need exposure therapy because it’s never going to be easier than when no one knows who you are. So this is one of the benefits of starting with an audience of zero, of building it up, is that you get to slowly ratchet up what you’re doing and the feedback you’re getting to it. It is very rare that someone just arrives at the scene, start sharing something, and they get feedback from a million people. That doesn’t happen that often. What usually happens is it’s a very gradual process and it takes, in many cases, years to build up a real audience, which also means that it takes years for you to get real serious weighty feedback. And I think that’s actually an appropriate cycle. You wouldn’t want to go from zero to a million followers because I think most humans would not be well-equipped to deal with is the onslaught of negativity and whatever spite and stuff that comes versus for Jason and I, we’ve literally been doing this for over 20 years.

(17:20): We had that slow ramp when we first got started. I remember when we launched Basecamp, we had 5,000 followers essentially on our blogs, 5,000. That’s nothing by today’s standards, 5,000 followers is very little at all. Yet that was enough to bootstrap the business. That was enough of an audience to see things, to get things off to the road. And now that the audience are much, much larger, they’ve grown that over time. So it doesn’t really phase me that much when we get pushback. In fact, most of the time I look at that and go like, oh, awesome, thank you. That is great. If we did not get this kind of negative feedback, we would not be getting the positive feedback either. There’s no universe that exists where people are just uniformly all of them, super duper excited about what you make, and there’s no one who thinks it’s shitty or a bad idea.

(18:08): I think if you’re missing the people who think it’s shitty or a bad idea or you’re an idiot, it usually also means you’re missing the people who think it’s the greatest thing ever, which is where I often come back to Kathy Sierra’s infamous slide here, where you do not want to be if you’re following this strategy of trying to build an audience. And I also think in general, you wouldn’t want to be in the boring middle where no one gives a damn. Maybe if you’re making paperclips, I don’t know. You don’t have to have an emotional response to paperclips. That is just a different kind of business. If you’re making our kind of stuff, product management tools or whatever, having some sense of order in the universe, a balance in the universe, people who really like what you’re doing and it’s people who don’t like it at all, is actually the positive good outcome.

Kimberly (18:50): And then I’m curious, and Jason, this one might be for you marketing in terms of 37signals. So we’ve gone through some phases of doing paid advertising using just our existing audience. Do you guys have kind of perspectives on that? What is better or what we’ve done over time?

Jason (19:07): For us, nothing’s been better than organic. I don’t even like sharing, I’m just going to call it sharing because organic whatever. Then you start to fall into this marketing languagey stuff. We just share and we’ve built our business on sharing and we continue to build our business on sharing. We’ve tried some other things. We’ve tried some paid stuff, we’ve made some ads, we’re still making some videos, which we really enjoy making, and that stuff’s more for fun and it has some impact, but our business moves based on sharing and a reputation that we built. You don’t really build a reputation on marketing. You build a reputation I think, on sharing and having a point of view that people either agree with or don’t agree with, but we’ll pay attention to. That’s been the most successful thing. And then of course there’s word of mouth that people use your product and they tell that people bought your product.

(20:04): And if your product is something that people use together, the more people are exposed to it. All those things are the things that we’ve really spent not money on because it’s free in a sense. But we’ve spent our time and our energy on, and this is again one of the benefits of sticking around. We’ve been around for almost 25 years as a business, so this compounds over time. More and more people hear about you. More and more people know about you. More and more people have used your stuff over time, and it’s not an overnight thing. So people who start, like David was just talking about the number zero, everyone’s going to start there. You’re going to have no one paying attention to you, and it’s very intimidating to have nobody paying attention to you in the beginning. And the problem is that the benefit of when we started was there was no way to track who was paying attention to you anyway.

(20:49): There were no follower accounts, there were no social networks. Web traffic was the only thing you could look at, and no one even knew what was good or bad and what really mattered. So it was a lot less intimidating to share when no one was paying attention. Now when you start something, you go on LinkedIn or you go on Twitter or you go on wherever you go, you start with basically zero. And it’s hard. So you naturally go, well, if I can buy people, I can buy an audience, I can buy eyeballs. But who are these people? You haven’t earned them at all. You’ve just bought them. They’re incredibly fickle and we’ll go to the next person. Nothing rooted, they’ve not rooted into you because you haven’t done anything for them other than buy their attention for a moment. So I think the only way to really do this long-term is to build a brand that stands for something that people trust, believe in, want to hear from, and I think the way to do that is to be just to share and to give away versus to buy.

Kimberly (21:45): I also think there’s something about building a community. I mean, we have this Basecamp community recently, but getting people who are followers together is also I think a game changer. Really.

Jason (21:57): Part of this is, I’m going to use another word I don’t like, but I don’t know is engaging with people on, David and I have been using Twitter and now LinkedIn for quite a while now, and we comment, we don’t just, the thing is if you schedule posts, if you’re using something like Buffer or one of these other tools and you schedule your posts and they go out, you’re not even there when you wrote it. And so most people who do that, they’re not actually also responding because they don’t care enough to post the thing. They just line it all up and go. When we do stuff, we write it up, we’re there, we engage, we respond, we argue, we defend, we promote whatever it might be, but we’re there because we’re actually having a conversation in the moment where we posted the thing because we posted ourselves.

(22:41): That’s another little small thing. I think that’s why the whole content marketing scheduling thing, it’s only half the picture, which is, yeah, you can throw stuff out there, but you’ve got to be there to respond. If someone, I mean, imagine having a conversation with someone where you unload on them, everything, you stand in front of them and they ask you something back and you just blank stare. That’s what happens when you schedule posts. You put something out there, people respond, and then you’re not there. That doesn’t, I mean, look, you can do that, but I don’t think that’s really how you build the community and you sort of build the conversation. I think what’s also unique about not unique, but maybe in our general vicinity, relatively unique, is that you can reach both David and I, we own the company. We’ve been here and you can talk to us. Our email addresses are public. We will respond to you mostly if you write something that requires a reasonable response on Twitter, on LinkedIn, on email, we’re here. So it’s not this faceless company. It’s not just this corporate entity that’s spewing stuff. It’s actually we’re talking. That’s to me what the community is. Even though we have the separate Basecamp community, the community at large is the people who listen and people who we respond to and interact with, and I think people appreciate that about what we’re doing,

David (23:53): And I think this is one of the advantages of being a small company. It’s so much easier to have the people who are actually making the key decisions be available, be the ones who are putting the stuff out there rather than hiding behind a brand. There are some brands that do this successfully to some degree. I think we’ve talked about RyanAir in the past. I love their TikTok because it’s so irreverent in a way that feels almost like naughty for a company of that size, for a brand of that size to be insulting its own customers, including me. I fly Ryan Air all the time in Europe, and I think it’s fun and okay, that works. It’s such an outlier. The vast majority of brands will play it safe. They’ll play it anonymous, they’ll play it bland, and they will buy the attention. When you’re a small company, it’s so much easier for the founders, the people with the competence, the people who started this thing, that run this thing where if you write them, they could do something about the thing to be the ones who are signing the messages.

(24:54): I think this is one of the things where we sort of over the years have tried a different few different tags where we can, we put more of this into the brand because there are appeals to the idea of it being in the brand and not for example, on the shoulders of Jason or I to be pushing this message forward. It feels like you’re building brand equity. It feels like maybe it’s more stable, but I think we’ve ultimately come to the conclusion that it’s very difficult to do in this authentic, this is one of those other marketing words that I have very mixed feelings with, but authentic ways where it feels like it’s a human that’s behind this, right? And you know who the human is, and you as Jason can say, you can reach the human, you can interact with the human can you interact with the brand, you want to interact with the brand. I think there’s just something there that’s a fundamental mismatch to this way of doing. I was again, also about to say marketing, but as Jason says, sharing, can you share in that kind of way? I think you can try, but I think it works much better, and this is one of the few areas perhaps where small companies just have a fundamental advantage over large companies.

Kimberly (25:59): Okay, well, you guys have been sharing from the beginning. If there’s someone who’s listening, who’s an entrepreneur who maybe hasn’t gotten into that yet, do you guys have any advice like how to jump in and you guys have been blogging and you have a podcast and you’ve written books. If someone’s just like, I’m starting out, any tips that you can share with them?

Jason (26:15): I would say do what you’re good at. If you’re really great on camera, do that. If you like to write, do that. But the thing is, you don’t have to, and this Gary V talks about this, you don’t have to come up with something to say you’re doing things anyway, so document, just document. You don’t need to create, you just need to document, and if you’re making something every single day, you’re making choices, you’re making decisions, you’re doing something that required a choice. Write it up, share it, video, whatever, doesn’t matter. Don’t think you need to do it in a certain way, but this stuff is essentially a byproduct of what you’re already doing, so make it easy. If you’re just great at just picking up your phone and doing a selfie and talking to a video and uploading it to whatever, do that. And you don’t need to worry about lighting and all this. Just don’t worry about any of that, just do it. Just go. That’s how you get started. Don’t make a checklist of things you need to do. Just do the thing and go, it’s enough. Start there, and by the way, eight months in, you might realize that maybe I do want to get more professional. Maybe my lighting sucks. Okay, then fix it then whatever. But don’t put all these obstacles in your way just to do that first thing

David (27:22): And also realize that everything is interesting if you scratch hard enough. This is when I don’t have anything interesting to say. What are you talking about? If you are good at something and hopefully you’re good at something, if you’re running a business that’s interesting, I guarantee you there are other people who are not as good as the thing as you are who don’t even know what the things are. This was the thing I learned from Mr. bag maker. Like, oh, I had no idea that the stitching had this influence or that the grade of metal or how it’s put together that that’s what composes a quality bag. I didn’t know that those were the things. You’ve now talked about things. I am grateful for you, and next time I’m in the market for a leather bag, I’ll look at you first.

Kimberly (28:02): Well, that is all great advice. Thank you guys for sharing that. REWORK is a production of 37signals. You can find show notes and transcripts on our website at 37signals.com/podcast. You can watch full video episodes on Twitter and YouTube, and if you have a specific question for Jason or David about a better way to work and run your business, leave us a voicemail at 708-628-7850 or send us an email to rework@thirtysevensignals.com and we just might answer it on an upcoming show.