SEASON 2 - EPISODE 122 - SEPTEMBER 11, 2024

Dare to Be Basic

This week, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, co-founders of 37signals, examine why it’s advantageous to keep things simple — in both products and business. They challenge the idea that complex or bespoke tools are the best way to go and lean into not overcomplicating things.

Watch the full video episode on YouTube

Key Takeaways

00:34 - The power of keeping things simple
10:55 - Why small businesses don’t need to act like big businesses
12:04 - The beauty of embracing what you don’t know when starting something new
18:01 - Building products with depth versus surface area
23:09 - Knowing when to listen to customers for product input and ideas

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, and I’m joined as always by the co-founders of 37signals, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. This week we’re talking about keeping things basic. In fact, David recently just wrote on his HEY World a writeup called “Merchants of Complexity,” which he writes, “Few people have the courage to admit their life and work isn’t that complicated.” David, let’s start with you. Kind of jump in and tell us a little bit about this whole premise of things being overly complicated these days.

David (00:34): It’s funny you say these days because I think this has been a natural instinct or draw for humans since probably the beginning of time to make things more complicated than they need to be, despite the fact that almost every human will commit in public to wanting things simpler. Very few people are saying, look, I want something really complicated. I wish it just did a bunch of more stuff than what it needs to do. So we all have this sense that simple is good and we wish things were simple, but we have a very difficult time following through on that. And I think one of the reasons as I described in that post is that there’s a connection between simple and basic or unsophisticated or not worthy of whatever, and that’s where the courage part comes in. The courage part comes in when you realize that so much of what we work on simply just doesn’t need to be fancy.

(01:27): There’s nothing special here about a ton of things that we work on at 37signals, the way we work on it, nothing special about it, it’s just work that needs to be done and that is a problem for a lot of people, that lack of specialness in their work. We all like to feel special. We all like to feel unique and you see that in software actually most pronounced as companies get bigger. As they get bigger, they get this inflated sense of ego. We can’t use off the shelf tools, we can’t use a cheap piece of software. We need something enterprise. We need something that is six digits a year because it needs to be tuned just for our peculiarities. Why? Why are you more weird or special just because you’re a thousand people versus a hundred people? Are your problems suddenly that unique? I contend that in most cases they’re not, that they’re just as simple, they’re just as basic, but you are now puffed up by the fact that you have this big organization and all this revenue to think that you need something bespoke.

(02:40): Just even that word in itself is something we’ve been using this week internally. We have a number of internal tools that we’ve built for ourselves. Bespoke tools. Sounds fancy, doesn’t it?

Kimberly (02:50): Sure does.

David (02:51): Sounds like a bespoke handbag or bespoke car. That’s something we should all aspire to. In fact, I feel just the opposite and it was one of drivers behind that essay is I hate bespokeness when it comes to our business. I want as little bespokeness in how we operate as possible. Every single time we do something bespoke, it’s a smell. It’s a smell where we think we’re different or special in ways I am usually highly skeptical that we actually are. In almost all cases, it’s just covering up over a fussy understanding of an actually basic problem. And that to me is a great enigma here with simple. Simple sounds like it’s basic.

(03:33): It sounds like it’s sophisticated, but in fact it’s quite the opposite. It is the greatest sophistication of all, to reduce a fuzzy, vague, unclear problem into something that is tight and that is clear. It’s the same thing with writing. Lots of people are capable of writing sorts of flowery language that obfuscates what they’re trying to do or trying to say rather than clarify what they’re trying to say. And it’s actually quite difficult to write in a basic language, to write in a clear way where you are using small words when they all do and only occasionally reach for a big one. In fact, I have to fight that all the time. I have this sort of instinct. I want to use all these fancy words. I know all these fancy words and I have this sentence and it sounds so sophisticated. And whenever I get that sense, I get a little smirk when I write a sophisticated sentence and then usually I notice that smirk out of the corner of my eye and I go like, damnit, damnit, it’s got to go.

(04:35): I got to kill our darlings here. The sentence got to go. And it’s not just a sentence, as I said, it’s also in all this stuff we work on internally and externally that sometimes I’ll get a smirk at a clever way of structuring a piece of code and I go like, damnit. Got me again. This shouldn’t be sophisticated. Very few things require that level of sophistication and I just need to keep going. And if I keep going and if I keep rewriting and keep honing, eventually I’ll end up with simple. But trying to convince people to buy simple, to be simple, to embrace simple is a lot harder than you would think when you listen to people be so appreciative apparently about simple because they don’t always buy it very often they don’t buy it. And very often they don’t want it when that’s a way of working.

(05:24): So, we’re fighting against this sort of internal nature that people have that they’re pretending not to have, which kind of makes it double difficult to defeat it because they’re not even owning up to the fact that yes, I want things convoluted and complicated and sophisticated. They don’t want to say that. So, it’s a really interesting way to try to navigate both your own relationship with work and the products that you put out and the market in term, which is why I guess simplicity is really rare. Simplicity at scale is really rare. I’ll give you one example of how I really appreciate this. I remember when maybe we’ve talked about this as example before, but I love it so much I’ll bring it up again. Pinkberry. When Pinkberry, they make frozen ice cream, when they first came to LA, there were lines around the block for their locations and what they sold were two flavors.

(06:19): That’s it. You could get frozen ice cream I think in the tart standard way that I find delicious, and then they had one other flavor, maybe it was, I don’t know, chocolate or something. That’s it. And the entire enterprise, so simple. One of the reasons I liked that was not just because the frozen yogurt was delicious, but because I could just imagine all the benefits that organization had from just offering two things. The procurement, the stocking, the inventory, the learning of new employees, everything just collapsed under its own, well not collapsed, imploded in terms of its general overhead. There was so little overhead in that business because they were able to keep it simple. Now of course, with most than anything, that’s simple, it didn’t last. I don’t know if either of you’ve gone into a Pinkberry these days, but there’s a billion things, a billion toppings, a billion flavors, and now it is like any other whatever, dessert business, hugely ludicrously complicated and there’s no longer a line around the block and I no longer appreciate that business.

(07:24): And I keep thinking, what if you just always stayed in that place? You had two flavors. Your business was really simple. You didn’t have all these layers, you didn’t have all these complications, and that becomes, for me at least, sort of the north star of, whenever we drift, which we always do, every single organization that lasts for more than five minutes will start to drift towards complexity and convolutedness and self-satisfied sophistication. And then I think, nope, got to get back. We got to get back. I got to arrest every damn little smirk I have in my own work. I got to arrest all the smirks we have in our bespoke tooling, in all of our sophisticated, how can we get back to simpler and simpler? I think a great example of this, Jason, maybe you can talk to it. We’ve been talking about redesigning our product homepage like basecamp.com. Basecamp.com has literally existed for 20 plus years, accumulated subpage upon subpage and upon everything, how do you go back to two flavors? And Jason’s ideas is essentially, I’ll let you tell it, but what if we just had three pages? What if everything you had on that site could just be right now, I don’t know if you’ve counted them, Jason, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we have 200 pages.

Jason (08:35): Yeah, north of 70 pages, for sure. And the thing is, and I’ve got some stuff I wanted to say based on what you said, but I’ll start with this, is that the way I’m thinking about this is if we were launching tomorrow as a new company, we wouldn’t have 70 pages on our website. We’d have like two pages, three maybe, I dunno, maybe one? Why do we need to carry around what we’ve had? And part of it is because we have it, because it’s been indexed by search engines, which by the way could be a valid point, but all the excuses actually, literally the easiest thing to do is to not reduce 70 pages when you redesign your site. It’s just to make three new ones. That’s actually the easiest thing, but it’s almost too easy and you feel like you’re giving up too much, but that’s what we’re about to do.

(09:21): We’re currently redesigning the site that’s going to be three pages, a homepage, a pricing page, and then a testimonials page, which is basically social proof and a list of customers and what they’ve said about the products. We have over a thousand, so it’s a really powerful page and it’s meant to be a page that no one ever reads because it’s literally 70 scrolls worth of people saying things about Basecamp, but it’s about the sheer mass of it. We’re going to launch with that. Now, there’s going to be some other stuff which we’re going to convert from pages to FAQs and other things, and there might be some standalone stuff later that we bring back, but you have to somehow try to break the habit of just carrying with you everything you’ve ever had every time. It’s like one of the benefits of moving is that you can throw things away.

(10:03): That’s kind of what a redesign should be more like, right? The other thing I was going to say is the worst part about the sophistication is not when you’re blown off course because as David said, every organization loses its way in this way and it’s usually because blown off course because you’re not paying attention to it. That can happen and that doesn’t bug me as much as when when you deliberately change course and make things way more sophisticated than you need to, especially when you’re small. It’s understandable to some degree as you get bigger, there are things that have to be more sophisticated around onboarding employees. When you’re hiring 300 employees a month, there’s more sophistication there at some level I’m sure, and teams and software distribution installations and all these things. So some of that. But when you’re six people and you’re acting like you’re a thousand people, you’ve already blown it.

(10:55): That’s the thing that bugs me more is seeing small businesses follow in the footsteps of large businesses because those businesses appear to be successful and many of them might be, many of them may not be. Whatever it is, it doesn’t matter. You can draw zero lessons from a company of 10,000 when you have four people zero. In fact, any lesson you draw is negative. I would say. They don’t apply. They simply do not apply. And it’s that fear of just being who you are and recognizing that you have a massive advantage because you are small and you don’t need the whole alphabet. You just need the letter A. That’s all you need. That’s a beautiful thing. But people are so eager to give that up to act, to puff up, to seem like they’re more because they’re insecure. Meanwhile, most companies are small. Most people understand what that’s all about. There’s no need to run from it. You should really embrace it and take full advantage of the fact that you do not have to be sophisticated.

David (11:53): This is why I like the word courage, even though it can very easily come off as pretentious, but having the courage to follow your own ignorance. This is something I’ve been talking about in other contexts recently. The idea that you don’t know all the things that a company of 10,000 knows is absolutely positively a huge benefit. If you knew everything and were taking into consideration all the edge cases that apply to a company of 10,000, you are never going to get anything interesting done. You’re going to get sucked in and locked into that vision. I forget who, maybe it was Khosla, one of the VCs actually, usually I don’t share that many overlapping philosophies with VCs, but he made the point that every single, again, he was should probably using the VC word of disruption, which I’m not usually that happy about, but I’ll allow it for this one.

(12:48): Every single major technology disruption, basically, that’s happened over the last 30 years and there’s a couple of noteworthy exceptions, but have come from people who did not know the industry. It wasn’t, I think the example he uses, it wasn’t a taxi business that came up with Uber. The taxi business literally has a hundred years of experience in driving people around in cars. They’re not going to come up with this disruption. That’s never how it happens. It happens from people who don’t know the business, who don’t have all the lessons, all the premises, all the false ideas about how the world works that have simply been allowed to perpetuate for a long time because you happen to be successful. No, you didn’t know any of that. And in these cases, these businesses had the courage to follow their ignorance and there are drawbacks potentially for that as well.

(13:38): But I think as Jason said, you have to embrace that ignorance. You have to embrace that you don’t know it all, and that is why you’re doing things differently and this is why people are going to be choosing you. And just so much on the other side, you need the courage to stay connected to that as you grow, as you get more successful. I think of this all the time, as Jason said, when we’re redesigning the page, it actually takes an act of courage to throw things away because what if it was valuable? What if this page was the one that brought all the SEO juice and then you throw it down and then now you don’t have the SEO juice. That sense of loss aversion is what makes it so difficult to do anything but just accumulate more and more and more. You accumulate decisions, you accumulate products, you accumulate bespoke tools, you accumulate pages on your website, you accumulate bad ideas about how to work because throwing any of it out feels like a real big risk versus adding to it.

(14:37): I mean that’s easy. Just one more policy, just one more page, just one more tool. Each individual contribution doesn’t feel like that’s a risk when in fact, if you zoom out and you think if we just kept every idea and every experiment and every page we’d ever done over 20 years, we’d just collapse under the weight of our own hoarding. That is not actually feasible. And to some extent that is the explanation of sort of the circle of life and business that eventually businesses will just collapse under their own hoarding of bullshit that they’ve just accumulated. And you simply have to start from scratch. Now, I’d like not to do that. I think this is an aspiration we have at this company to think of the company as a product in itself that sometimes you’ve got to cut some features and sometimes you’ve got to say, here’s a market that’s not going to be one we chase.

(15:31): We’re going to cut down on and we’re going to slim it down from period to period. And I also think that connects to one of the reasons why founder-led companies have a better chance of being able to do this. If you’re being brought in from the outside as an executive or otherwise, and suddenly you’re running this thing, first of all, you don’t understand why half the fences are where they are and maybe you’re a little hesitant about pulling them out even though they no longer apply. They’re guarding you from threats that have long since passed. You don’t have the context, better leave it. Better leave it put, right? Plus your mark on the organization, everyone tries to put one, is usually in terms of the adjective, right? I got to add something into this, I got to inject my part. This was my bit of it. And again, you just end up getting more and more stuff. So, I remember quite a few years ago now getting really enamored by Marie Kondo, where her perspective on looking on say a piece of clothing and looking at that piece of clothing and saying…

Kimberly (16:30): Does it spark joy?

David (16:32): What did she say? Thankful that you were in my life. Thank you for giving me whatever coverage on my body for the whatever, three times I used it. But now I say goodbye and then bye-bye. Off you go. I really wish to say bye-bye off you go to bespoke tooling, to too many pages, to too many ideas, to too much stuff that sort of just accumulates. And I find that it sounds a lot easier than it is, as anyone who’ve tried to clean up a house when they have to move. Sometimes it’s not that easy to sort of boil it all down. But then after you’ve done it and after you move to, you’re like, why did I have all that shit? Why did I just have so much crap? And as Marie Kondo would say, you actually literally feel lighter when you get rid of it. So there’s that whole thing. Bezos phrases this as day one thinking. We should constantly be in that fresh mode of thinking. We’re not thinking about all this stuff we’re carrying forward. We’re just thinking about, it’s very hard to do, very difficult to do, but if you don’t at least aspire to it, I mean you’re starting the clock and eventually you’re just going to collapse under all the shit that’s in the business you’ve accumulated.

Kimberly (17:44): So Jason, let me ask you this because we talked about the basecamp.com website, 37signals. As a company for the actual product, how do you try to keep that basic? When we’re wanting to add new features, customers are asking for new features, how do you go about making sure it still stays simple?

Jason (18:01): Yeah, this is a real challenge for something that’s been around for a long time. The way I’ve been thinking about it lately is about depth versus surface area. Surface area is adding a big new thing that everyone can see and it seems to make the product bigger. Improving things at depth doesn’t make the thing bigger. It makes the thing better in very specific ways. So there might be a feature, I’m just going to make something up, automatic check-ins which is a feature in Basecamp. And we could probably add another feature, but we could also say, how can we make automatic check-ins better? Maybe we could add more recurrences, so it’s not just every other day or every day, but it could be twice a day or every three days or every other week. There could be depth. That’s like depth improvements. And you can make that announcement and go, hey, we’ve made this better.

(18:44): It doesn’t feel like the product got bigger though, which is at some point as you’re launching something, bigger is better in a sense. People want to see it grow and develop. But then there’s a point where it’s gotten too big. And then I think people want to see depth. But what ends up happening with software is that because software has no natural physical forces pushing back on it, it can just continue to balloon and balloon and balloon and balloon. Unlike a physical object. If something was way too big, you’d go, that’s just too big. I can’t even pick that up anymore. Or we need to add another handle and there’s no room for it. There’s just obviousness that pushes back and go, this doesn’t make sense. This isn’t viable anymore. I can’t even get this out my front door. It’s too wide now. You would know that that wouldn’t work, but in software you don’t have that.

(19:29): So it’s up to you, the product manager or the people working on it or whatever to be the physics essentially to push back on the thing and not let it get too big, big enough but not too big and then go deep. So that’s how we’ve been trying to manage that. That’s it, it’s still really hard. And then there’s other things you can do where you can do, occasionally, we just launched one a few days ago, an occasional nip and tuck basically on the interface to tighten it up a little bit more. Either remove some space, for example, on the project pages in Basecamp where we have all the tools for each project. We used to have a gap between each tool. So each tool stood alone. What that did though, so these are basically, let’s call it six squares. Well, if you have six squares that aren’t touching, you have a lot more negative space.

(20:09): You have space in the left of one and the right of one and the left of one and the right of one. There’s a lot of more elements, even though they’re not designed elements, they’re gaps and your eyes and your mind registers those. So we got rid of those gaps and made the grid larger, made the tools bigger and took out all the space between them. So now they butt up together with just a single border between each one instead of border space border. And it’s not a big deal, and it’s not like we’re going to sell more product because of this, but it is a way to trim and tighten things in a subconscious kind of way that over the course of a product 50 screens, you do that here and there, it just starts to feel simpler again. There’s just less mental overhead in a sense, even though these individual changes are small.

(20:54): But it’s a way to do that sort of thing. So to eliminate in a sense, even if you maybe can’t get rid of a feature, you can get rid of the way features are presented in some cases that create extra overhead. So that’s what we’re trying to always think about. And then, the other exciting thing is you make new products. So there’s a point where, and we’ve done this with Basecamp over the years where we started a brand new version of Basecamp or now we’re working on multiple new products that are not Basecamp or , and we’re approaching these very differently than we would’ve in the past in that we’re keeping them remarkably simple from the start. And the intention is to kind of keep them there as long as we can. Versus I think when we launched Basecamp, the intention was like, we didn’t even know what the hell was going to happen. We launched this thing, it’s a hit, and we had all these new ideas to pack into it, which have worked well. But I think these other things, we’re thinking about how do we keep the service areas small from the beginning and keep it that way as we go.

Kimberly (21:43): And the new products that you guys are working on under the Once brand, I think would kind of lend itself to be more simple because it’s downloadable. It’s not something that we’re updating every few weeks like the other SaaS products.

Jason (21:57): Yeah, David likes to talk about these as finished software, basically. Like most things you buy, almost everything you buy is finished when you buy it. You buy a water bottle, I guess I could change the, I don’t know, whatever rubber thing, but it’s done. I don’t expect that to get better.

(22:13): It just is. But software has this thing where people are always expecting it to get better. And then if you say it’s done, people are like, what happened? Is it dead? It’s like, no, it’s actually what it should be. It’s achieved its ideal form essentially. Maybe there’s going to be some tweaks here and there, just like a company might release a new version of this that’s slightly different. For whatever reason, they learn something about how breakable it is and they change the formula of the glass or the silicone sleeve or whatever. But essentially it’s kind of a done thing. And so with once product specifically, we’re trying to get to done software, Campfires had about eight or nine I think releases maybe a few more actually than that. Small little tweaks, whatever. But that rate will slow down as it sort of calcifies in a sense. That’s how we can come back and crack it back open and if we have a brand new idea, we can add it in or change something in a material way. But the idea is not to constantly make this thing expand like a balloon.

David (23:09): And I think the reason why that is so hard and why that is not the natural path is that customers have a very easy time articulating more. They can accurately describe the extra feature that they want, the extra options that they want, the extra settings that they want. They’re very rarely able to articulate the value of simplification, of what they would remove, what they would take out. That is your job as a product designer. That is why they’re paying you. I mean, customers have great ideas for stuff to add, and a lot of them are very valid, but if you listen to the aggregate of all of them, you’d end up with a piece of shit, literally. I mean, it would just have so much stuff on it from all these different angles. None of it would mesh together. None of it would have cohesion.

(23:59): The only way you get cohesion is you take all that in and you cut out most of it, and there’s not a lot left. But what there is left is acting on behalf of a ton of people. You get a hundred people suggesting a hundred different things, and you find a way to see through that and say, there’s three features here in a hundred requests, all described in different unique ways. There are actually three main themes that if we zoom out a bit, we can solve those problems in a simple way. And all a hundred people go like, yeah, that’s what I was asking for.

Kimberly (24:32): Well, I will link to David’s writeup on his HEY World blog. Until then, Rework is a production of 37signals. You can find show notes and transcripts on our website at 37signals.com/podcast. Full video episodes are on YouTube and Twitter. And if you have a question for Jason or David about a better way to work and run your business, leave us a voicemail at 7 0 8 6 2 8 7 8 5 0. You can also text that number. We just might answer your question on an upcoming show.