SEASON 2 - EPISODE 156 - JUNE 11, 2025

Building in public

This week on The REWORK Podcast, host Kimberly Rhodes chats with 37signals’ CEO and co-founder Jason Fried about the practice of openly sharing what the company is working on, inspired by his recent teaser videos for an upcoming product, Fizzy. Jason explains why building in public fosters connection, clarity, and curiosity.

Watch the full video episode on YouTube

Key Takeaways

00:12 - The company’s history of sharing teasers and early product previews
05:40 - The biggest risk in sharing previews
13:30 - Design review videos with programmers and designers
15:46 - Today’s transparency echoes former “Building Basecamp” workshops
18:14 - Anyone close to the product can lead a sneak peek

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 Kimberly Rhodes from the 37signals team, joined by the co-founder and CEO, Jason Fried. This week we’re going to talk a little bit about building things in public. Jason’s been sharing a little bit about our new product coming, Fizzy, and doing some demos online and showing it in the process of being built. So I thought we’d talk a little bit about that. I don’t think everyone is doing that, showing things before they’re done. So let’s dive into it a little bit, Jason. Let’s kind of talk through the history. I remember back when HEY first started, you were doing this a little bit, showing things in advance. Has this something you’ve always done? Tell me kind of where this started.

Jason (00:44): Yeah, we’ve actually been doing this since the beginning. So we did this for Basecamp, the original version of Basecamp as well, and then future versions of Basecamp as well. But back then it was not video, it was just blog posts. So we would kind of share some stuff that was coming or I think we did maybe about six weeks prior to launching Basecamp, we started really revealing some of the features that were going to be there. We had a blog at the time, so it was a small audience. We don’t even know, 1500 people?

Kimberly (01:09): We’re talking like Basecamp classic days, like the original?

Jason (01:11): Classic. 2004.

Kimberly (01:12): Yeah

Jason (01:13): Way back. We would write up these blog posts just sharing some of the features and some of the ideas behind it to sort of build some anticipation and excitement. So when we launched it, we just had people who were already eager to get it because whenever you share something early, usually someone’s like, oh, can I get that? Or how do I get that? And so you just build this… it’s no different than a trailer for a movie.

(01:33): This is sort of the model we follow, which is the trailer model essentially. And even some movies have three or four trailers prior to actually releasing the movie. So we did the same thing we’ve been doing ever since. Now I’m doing it with video. And now we’re doing it a bit earlier than we normally would, but I feel comfortable with that because Fizzy will be launched in a reasonable amount of time. So I can’t tell you when because we don’t know exactly, but it’s not like it’s years away or something like that. We’re talking about months. So months is fine. It’s fine to begin to share things early. And the other thing I wanted do this time was to share work in progress actually on a weekly or every two week basis, show just what we finished this past week, what changed this last week. So it’s not about necessarily highlighting new features every time, but actually, so this got better and this got better and we got rid of this and we tweaked the way this worked, and now this has two options that have one, just to show what it’s really like to build something from scratch.

Kimberly (02:29): Ok, and I’m sure you’re getting feedback on those. These videos are posted on X, by the way, for those of you who haven’t seen them I’ll like to them. Oh, and LinkedIn. Okay. And I’ll link to those in the show notes.

Jason (02:39): Yeah, LinkedIn has a 15 minute window. If the video’s not less than 15, you can’t share it. Some of these go longer so they don’t post there.

Kimberly (02:48): And you’re getting feedback on these from viewers.

Jason (02:50): Yeah.

Kimberly (02:52): Tell me about that. Are you listening to the feedback? Are you ignoring the feedback? How does that work?

Jason (02:58): I mean, we’re not making changes because of what people say, because what they say is what they’ve seen and they’ve only seen a small sliver. And so I think the best feedback you can get from people is people who are actually using something, not people who are looking at something as if it’s a picture or moving pictures and assuming all the things. I don’t blame them by the way. We’ve only given ‘em short little video clips. Mostly when we launch V1 of something, it’s our own version, it’s our own take. It’s just us. It’s what we think. We don’t really do a lot of public beta work or anything like that. We just kind ship V1 when it’s ready and then people start to use it for real and then we get real feedback and that’s the only kind of feedback that I think is really worthy.

(03:37): There’s a lot of questions now. Does it do this? Is it part of this? Why isn’t this not in Basecamp? All the things. But as far as someone giving you specific feedback, it’s typically things that people don’t see yet. They’ll be like, well, can I do this? Or Why can’t I do this? Or if it was me, I would make it do this. And in my head I’m like, it’s going to do that. It already will do that. I just haven’t shown that part yet. That’s the best thing. For now, it’s just about really sharing the process of building something and making changes and tweaks and adjustments and not just sharing the final version of something when it’s all done and perfect, you know. Oftentimes you’ll see when a company does a rebrand or something like that, they’ll post this long, precious post about their new logo and all the different variations along the way and all the things they did to get there, but they’re always sharing it at the end, and so they can really be very specific about what they want to share. I think it’s more interesting actually to just share as you go, as you’re building the thing and realizing some of the stuff we might show might not even make it in the final thing. We don’t know. We’ll find out at the end. I just find it to be more real and more interesting and more engaging, frankly, more fun for me to do than just to wait until the end to do one video.

Kimberly (04:47): I will say there was one, speaking of it, feeling real. You did a video where you’re like, oh, this isn’t actually working the way it’s supposed to, which was from a viewer perspective was like, oh, this is real life, which kinda was fun to see.

Jason (05:02): Yeah, I don’t do any editing on these, so I just kind of hit record and just go, and I have an idea of what I might want to talk about, but I just go and I’ll run into some issues. It’s like this is unfinished software, and sometimes that happens, and that’s the whole point. It’s not about polishing something yet. It’s about showing something in progress and with all the warts and all the ums and all the ahs and all the, oops that didn’t work, and wait, how do I do this and whatever. I find myself going to the wrong place sometimes, I’m like, oh, shoot, the button’s over here, but I went over here and no one’s going to know that, but I know it. And so in my head I’m like, screwed that one up too. But it doesn’t really matter. You just keep going.

Kimberly (05:36): Okay. So since you guys have been doing this and sharing things publicly before they’re ready, since the beginning, have there been any situations where that has backfired?

Jason (05:46): Yeah, I mean the place where things backfire is when you make promises about future deliveries or I mean, frankly, we announced earlier this year that we were working on two new products. One was Fizzy and this other one was called Know It All. Actually, I’m not sure if we even released the name, but…

Kimberly (06:01): I think this is the first time they’ve heard it.

Jason (06:02): Well, anyway… So we built a good portion of Know It All and decided not to continue on that product. We are actually going to bake a lot of those ideas right into Basecamp instead. It turned out as we got through and got into it, we’re like, you know what? A couple of things happened. We had someone leave, so we were short staffed and then we’re like, you know what? This is maybe better in Basecamp anyway. And so we’ve moved those ideas or we will be moving those ideas into Basecamp, but we’d said we were going to release two new products this year, and so if I did it again, I would’ve made promises. It’s actually not even a promise, but even a statement, we will be, that’s almost a promise. And so I try not to do that. So that’s when I regret things. If you’re going to use the word at all, I think it’s best to be a little bit like, hey, we’re working on this thing and we don’t know where it’s going. And then you can just, when it’s done, you just announce it versus saying, we are going to do this thing and it’s going to happen this year. A few minutes ago I just said Fizzy in a few months or whatever. It could be a few is a good number, not a couple, it’s a few. It could be a while. I don’t know. We’re actively developing it and very much using it internally, and that’s always a good sign that this is going to actually happen.

Kimberly (07:07): Okay, so tell me a little bit about, I mean, I feel like I know the answer to this, but listeners might not. You’ve mentioned it’s kind of this building momentum. You could consider this a little bit of marketing, but do you have a plan as you’re doing this? Is there a calendar of I’m going to do this video then ‘cause this is all part of a bigger plan?

Jason (07:30): No, I’m not organized like you, Kimberly. No, it’s like basically I want to do a video roughly once a week or every two weeks. And it started out sharing the core of it, which was this collection view with these two columns and this sort of bucket at the bottom kind of thing. That’s where I started. And then I talked through some of the mechanics and then last week I did a video of the home screen or the activity screen, which was a screen I hadn’t shown before. The next video I’ll probably do, I’ll probably show some of the early designs, some of the stuff that the way it used to look when we first started building it maybe a little bit…

Kimberly (08:09): Oh, like the original Fizzy.

Jason (08:11): The original genesis of the idea first of all. And then some of the earliest screens and some of the issues that we ran into. We were excited and we ran into some issues and we changed it again and ran some issues and eventually we moved into the current design. But I’ll probably maybe do that next week. I don’t know, or this week I guess it would be, unless something else comes up that we just ship in the product that it’s more interesting to share at the moment. We don’t know every week what’s going to be changing. So for example, we are working on our new text editor, which is not that interesting really to look at. It’s interesting actually ultimately, but it’s not a great, doesn’t make for a great demo

(08:48): because it’s just a text editor. There’s some things you can do in it now that you couldn’t do before, but I don’t know. I’ll share that at some point, but I don’t think it’s the next thing I’ll share. So I’m trying to think about what the next thing might be. And I do think these previous designs will be kind of a good next collection. And then after that, I don’t know, we’ll figure out what the next week comes, what it holds and what we do and where we go. And at some point there’s another couple of features I’d like to wait for to be done before I show some of this other thing that I want to share. I know I’m being very vague right now, but there’s something that’s not done yet that I want to share or it’s done, but it’s not done quite the way I want it, so I can wait for that. So in my head, I do have not a calendar or schedule, but some things that are like this, I’d like to show I’d to show this. I don’t know when I’m going to do these things. I dunno when it’s going to make sense, but there’s some sense maybe of what I want to share next.

Kimberly (09:35): Okay. So a lot of our listeners are small business owners, entrepreneurs, software developers. Talk to me a little bit about just the concept overall. Separate from Fizzy, but the concept of just sharing as you go. I would imagine there’s a bit of vulnerability to put yourself out there with something that’s not finished or something that’s in progress. I mean, the fact you’re just clicking around going, oh, this actually doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to, could derail someone to think, I can’t do that. Talk me through how you get to that place of just being comfortable with it.

Jason (10:10): It doesn’t feel vulnerable to me to just share what we’re working on because that’s what everyone’s doing. Everyone’s working on something, everything’s always in a state of progress in the middle of something. So it’s just work. It’s just sharing your work. It’s fun to share the final thing that people can sign up for obviously, but if you only did that, you’d share what five things in your career. So most of work is just doing the work, and I think it’s kind of cool to show that. I’ve always enjoyed watching videos too, of people who are making something and building something because I think it’s a great way to learn a technique or an approach when they show how they’re doing the thing, not just the final product. I used to watch in the early days, people who were really good at Photoshop learning how to retouch a photo or something.

(10:54): Imagine if they just showed the retouch photo before and after. You’re like, okay, that looks amazing, but how’d you do that? You just want to learn. The how’d you do that is more interesting actually, ultimately than the final thing for people who are making stuff. So I just think it’s important. I don’t see enough people really getting into sort of the day-to-day nitty gritty of making something, and I’m not sure that I’m actually doing that specifically, but I’m trying to get closer to that. There is a place where it is just flat out boring. You don’t want to watch someone typing necessarily all day, but talking through the design decisions, why we did this, why we did that, what tweaks we made, how things changed a little bit. For example, recently I shared in the bottom right corner of Fizzy, we have these little cards, which are your notifications, and in most products, pretty much all products, the notifications are in a bell and you hit that.

(11:45): There’s a menu that comes down. We’re actually revealing them as they come in as these little cards in a tray. And it was a subtle change, but the cards used to reveal more and then they were taller and they didn’t have a color on them. And then the next week we tweaked them and we made ‘em a little bit shorter and stacked ‘em a little bit differently and added a little color and the collection name and the id. And it’s not a big deal, but it actually is on the experience side of what a few little tweaks can give you. And so I like to talk about those little things because they’re not things that you would normally ever hear someone talk about because you would just see them, you’d see the final product, well, that’s just how it is, but how did we get there? And why are these small little adjustments literally like a millimeter, you don’t really measure in millimeters on the screen, but…

Kimberly (12:35): Pixels

Jason (12:36): We’ll call it pixels, yeah, fine pixels, but I dunno, 15 more pixels revealed. It depends on your resolution, all the things, whatever. Anyway, to reveal a little bit more space and to add some color in a collection name so you can see things in a stack as it goes back, even though you can’t read all the words, but now you have a sense of what’s behind there versus before you couldn’t. All that kind of stuff really does add up. And so I think it’s just fun to show those little small improvements because they do add up and to make something good and it ultimately makes something great, but you just assume when you see a product in the final set, you assume that’s just how it started or just assume that’s how they made it. But really there was eight variations of this thing that eventually evolved into the final thing. So I think it’s fun to show those.

Kimberly (13:20): And then on a similar note to the videos you’re doing, you’ve also shared online some of our design reviews when you’re meeting with designer, programmer to talk kind of through something in progress. Tell me a little bit about those and how those are different from what you’re doing.

Jason (13:36): And that reminds me, I should do another one. I’ll do one with JZ today for Fizzy because we haven’t done…

Kimberly (13:40): JZ’s going to be like, thanks Kimberly.

Jason (13:43): Yeah, thanks Kimberly.

(13:45): That’s another thing that I don’t ever see, like ever actually, is just like, what does it look like for three or two people just to riff and talk about the work and review a product in progress and review a design in progress and just discuss it. This is what everyone does every day, but it’s never revealed outside that small little group really. And so I’ve decided occasionally we do these over Zoom because we’re remote. Why not just record a few and just share them and just share how ideas unfold and how sort of flowy these things are. There’s no agenda. We just start to go through things and we talk things through and I don’t like the way that’s phrased or the spacing doesn’t seem right here, or there’s not enough differentiation or texture here. Can we try this? And sometimes we’ll try these things live and we’ll look at ‘em together and live and reload and see how it looks.

(14:33): And I just think that’s interesting, I’d like to watch more things like that. I’d love to see an architect work with his staff or staff on some roof beam truss construction. How did they come up with that idea and what were they discussing when they came up with that idea and what were they talking about as far as how are we going to pull this off? Just I find it interesting. All this is selfish in a sense. We build things for ourselves that we want to produce things that we would like to watch ourselves or learn and see. I mean, how fascinating would it be to be able to watch a car manufacturer explore the different shapes of a steering wheel and how do they discuss that and how do they decide which one’s better and which one’s worse? And what is it like to think about that? Are they looking at how it hits the dashboard and is it round enough where there’s enough visibility through it or should it be more square or how thick should it be? All these things, I’m sure someone thinks about these things. We never get to see that on the outside. And I think it’s interesting to expose more of those things to the world, even if it might be a boring one hour for some people, but I think it’s kind of a cool thing to share nonetheless.

Kimberly (15:35): Like being a fly on the wall. I feel similarly about the office hour session we do when we show our own account, like this is how we use Basecamp. Let me show you the projects that these different departments use. I love it. I love showing that inside it is really a behind the scenes look that most people don’t give.

Jason (15:56): It is. And we used to do these workshops in Chicago called How We Work Workshop basically, or building Basecamp, it used to be called. Anyway, we would put our account up on the screen and walk through it in detail over eight hours and this is how we make decisions, let’s break this decision down. Let me show you how we wrote it up, how the comments came out, how long this thread was discussed, what the ramifications were for it. We would break everything down, but it’s always real. It’s always real stuff. And it was always private stuff. It’s like in our inner workings of our company, but there was 25 people in the room or 35 people in the room actually, and it was kind of everyone, whatever happens in this room stays in this room. We’re going to show you the real thing, but you can’t take pictures of it and blog about it.

(16:40): And it was just great because that’s where you learn about stuff is when you look at the real thing. Everything else is an abstraction after that, and then you have to kind of piece it together and what does this person really mean versus just showing the real thing. So yeah, I’m a big fan of revealing these things as much as we can and we’re doing them anyway, so it takes no effort to hit record and then at the end you’re like, was that worth sharing? Yeah, that actually was, there was a good discussion there. There’s an 18 minute discussion. In 60 minutes, 18 of those minutes were really interesting and I think worthwhile and we’re just going to share the whole thing now. And sometimes we hit record and it’s like that was just kind a dud. There was nothing, I don’t want to waste anyone’s time with this stuff, but oftentimes you’ll catch something interesting and I think it’s a good thing to share.

Kimberly (17:20): I think especially in the world that we live in now where it’s like social media is not real, all of these images and videos that people put out, I mean, myself included, it’s like this pretty snapshot. This is real, which I think is nice.

Jason (17:35): It’s good that there’s all kinds, I mean that there’s polished stuff that’s really considered and edited thought through, and then there’s good that there’s not that stuff. I think the world needs both of those things and they serve different purposes. And I think when things are all said and done with Fizzy, when we launch it, we’ll do a nice launch video as well. It’ll be a little bit more put together, but I’ll also probably still have just a me single shot walkthrough of the product with no editing and all the mistakes because I want to have that too. I think that’s valuable as well.

Kimberly (18:04): Okay, so on that note, because it is you, I think people know you as the face of 37signals and of all these products, you have a huge following on social. For other businesses who might not have that strong of a spokesperson, do you think anyone can do this? Can anyone in the company take this role?

Jason (18:25): Yes, I do think so. There’s other companies that have other people doing this, and they’re really good on camera, way better than I am, and smooth and have the whole setup and the lights in the back and the whole thing. You can do it, but it needs to come from a place of real true understanding, I think, of what it is that you’re talking about. So if you’re given a product to do a marketing video on or a walkthrough, but you don’t really understand the product, but you can put together a good video, it’s going to show through. Like Kimberly, you know the product, you know Basecamp really well, you know HEY really well. So when you do a video, it’s clear that you know what you’re talking about. But there’s lots of videos that I’ve seen from other people and other products where it’s clear that someone else made this video, they hired an outside firm or something, and you can see, just see through it.

(19:11): And I believe other people can see through it too. It’s not necessarily that it’s terrible. It’s probably a really good video. It might serve the purpose, but I think you get an extra bonus, you get the plus on the A, get the A plus basically, if the person who’s doing it really understands it and it’s coming from a place of understanding, I think people can detect that. And I think in subtle ways it’s just better, but yeah, it doesn’t need to be the owner or whatever of a company. In fact, in many cases it’s like a product manager or someone who’s really just in depth in all the details sleeves rolled up, doing the work that’s going to make the better video, frankly.

Kimberly (19:46): Yeah. Perfect.

(19:47): Well that, we’re going to wrap it up. I’ll link to Jason’s X and LinkedIn, all of those things where you’re sharing these videos. Rework as a production of 37signals. You can find show notes and transcripts on our website at 37signals.com/podcast. Full video episodes on YouTube. If you have a question for Jason or David about a better way to work and run your business, please leave us a video question. You can do that at 37signals.com/podcastquestion. We’re answering those a few at a time as we go, and I even will send some REWORK swag to those questions that we answered. Thanks, Jason.

Jason (20:20): Thank you, Kimberly. Good to see you.