SEASON 2 - EPISODE 120 - AUGUST 28, 2024

Maintaining a business partnership, simple product design, and other listener questions

This week on the REWORK podcast, 37signals co-founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson answer another round listener questions. Jason and David talk about the ups and downs of their long-running business partnership and friendship, tackle a critical question about Basecamp, and share their thoughts on starting a new company. Plus, they discuss the inspiration behind their Campfire software.

Watch the full video episode on YouTube

Key Takeaways

00:34 - How Jason and David’s partnership has stood the test of time
09:21 - A listener’s opinion on Basecamp’s shortcomings
14:56 - Advice for building a new company from the ground up.
25:35 - Creating products out of a need versus seeing a business opportunity

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 again by the co-founders of 37signals, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. Last week we started with some listener questions, and we are following up with a few more questions today. We have a text that came in from someone who said, as someone who has seen lots of friendships come and go, how have the two of you maintained your friendship and business relationship for so long? Have you had any hiccups? If so, how did you resolve them and how quickly did you bounce back? What are we on 25 years?

Jason (00:37): 20-ish. A little bit more than 20

David (00:38): 20, 21, 23.

Jason (00:41): Yeah. 23. Yeah.

David (00:42): Jesus.

Jason (00:43): Yeah, Jesus is right. There we go. There’s the answer. Jesus, how do we endure it? Oh, first of all, we don’t see each other that often, so we see each other online, but we don’t get together that often. Really probably fewer than eight times a year, I’m guessing, really? Literally. So that can be good or bad, but it’s nice we’re in the same city now for some time of the year and other times we’re not. I think a big part of it is on the business side is that we have different areas of the business that we run and we really focus on, and of course there’s overlap around fundamental ideas and principles and values around the business itself and the products themselves. So we butt heads 15% of the time, 10% of the time, something like that.

(01:24): But most of the time we’re aligned, which is really important because you just keep colliding over and over. You could say it smooths the pebble, but I think it’s probably going to shatter most relationships if it’s constant battle. So I think that’s an important thing with founders is to find someone who you almost completely see eye to eye with, but then also have a nice amount of space to ram heads when necessary and come away not feeling like anything was personal. I think we’ve over the years, had probably a few personal moments and you kind realized that was stupid and you move on, you just kind of got to move on. You have to be mature enough to move on from that kind of thing. And then again, I’ll speak for myself, but I think you have to really admire your partner and appreciate the skills that they have and who they are and how they’ve grown.

(02:11): And I mean, I have that in spades for David. David’s really grown a lot and is incredibly talented and I’m in awe many times of what he does and how he does it. So I think that’s something you need. If you don’t have some degree of that and you think that you’re pulling the weight for everyone else all the time, that’s not a good attitude to bring to any relationship, personal or business or otherwise. And then there’s luck and there’s a whole bunch of timing and stuff, all the things you don’t really understand. So yeah, I think there’s also, the last thing would be there’s just, there’s chemistry and personal relationships. There’s chemistry and business relationships as well, which is an important factor that’s hard to really define, but it has to be there and whether or not you can really put your finger on it. I don’t know.

Kimberly (02:58): David, anything to add?

David (03:01): Yeah, I agree with all of that and I’d say that that baseline of respect is easier to both cultivate and maintain when you do have this sort of overlap that is distinct, that I can look at the things that Jason does with product design, design in general, but then also product design, which to me is sort of a larger circle that includes design inside it, but product design is much bigger as in what should we build, how should it work, how should it be positioned? How will prospective customers see it? And I can look at that and go like, damn, there’s just no way I could have done that. So you look at that complimentary set and go like, we are so much stronger when you take both that and some technical expertise and then you marry those things together. Now, as Jason said, I have also really one of the things perhaps I’ve grown to appreciate, it’s like no one knows anything.

(03:58): Why is it that this works? We can come up with all these rationalizations after the fact. Oh, there’s great value overlap. We have distinctive… Why? Is that really it? I think very often people, and that includes myself and everyone else, I have this tendency of they’ll come up with an explanation. They’ll go like, that’s it. That’s how it is. That’s why that works. You see it in the financial press all the time. The market dips 2%. Oh, there’s a strong pullback, like we’re returning bears. What are you talking about? You’re literally just making shit up. No one has any fucking clue why necessarily the market dipped right at that point and none of the other point, you’re just making up a tail that makes you feel like you’re in control of reality and which way it goes. And I’ve grown far more comfortable with recognizing like I don’t fucking know, I don’t know.

(04:49): That doesn’t not mean we don’t know anything. It doesn’t mean there’s not competence and competence doesn’t matter, but how all the things interact to produce 23 years of continued collaboration and business success. I don’t fucking know. If we hit the reset button and we ran the simulation again with the same inputs, but the entropy of the universe was just slightly off because the random factor was 0.45 instead of 0.89. We could have gotten completely different outcomes and Jason and I could have blown up in each other’s face two years in and go, biggest idiot ever. I can’t imagine why I would ever work with that moron, right? It didn’t turn out that way. Now what’s interesting about when was the last time you had a big sort of blow up? It’s actually been a long time. I’m trying to remember back to incidents in the original Chicago office we had when we both lived in Chicago, and I remember a handful of product discussions around Basecamp where it was me, Jason, and Ryan Singer who used to work with us where we would have absolutely 120 degree if anyone was overhearing it, they would think the company was about to dissolve discussions about something that in retrospect just seemed so enormously insignificant, like how the fuck could we get that worked up about whether the thing was going to be here or there?

(06:16): And I just go like, that’s marvelous in a way that I can almost feel nostalgic about, right? I don’t know if I was going to say, I don’t know if I care that much about anything to that degree anymore. I think I actually do. I think I still care about we should make good software and it matters where the things go, but can I get that worked up about Jason having a different opinion about how something should be shaped? No. No, I can’t. And maybe that’s also some of it is that over those 20 years, it’s smoothed out to the point that the moving average keeps getting longer. So in the beginning you’re like, all right, we’ve only worked together for a few years. The moving average doesn’t have that much history to go on. Now we have 23 years of history. I’m trying to imagine something Jason could do that could actually dent that moving average on a day-to-day or week to week basis.

(07:07): It’s almost impossible. Almost impossible. I’ll just go, even if I think it’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard come out of his mouth, I’ll just go like, all right, well let’s see where it goes. I’m like, either it is the stupidest idea and I’m right, okay, or it’s not the stupidest idea and I’m wrong. I’ve seen both variations of that so many times over 23 years. Things where I was convinced that Jason was dead wrong. And I’ll just take one quick example. I think maybe I’ve used this before when we were rolling out HEY Jason suddenly gets the impulse, you know what, we should do it for individuals first. And I was like, what are you talking about? We make small business software. We haven’t done individual software since Backpack back in 2008 or nine didn’t go that well, I think this is a bad idea, and Jason’s going, no, I think this is the right idea.

(07:54): And I go, alright, alright, let’s try it. And we try it and fucking slam dunk success. We had 30,000 signups in just a few weeks and then later we launched that business version that I originally thought was the right thing and fucking crickets in comparison. It was such an obviously correct call that Jason just had from his sort of gut intuition in that moment, seeing the light fracture right off the product in ways I was blind to and I was just so wrong. And if we had gone with my preferred notion, HEY would’ve been a huge flop. No two ways about it, it would’ve been a huge flop. It just wouldn’t have worked. So I look at those things and I go like, you know what? Remember next time you think it’s the stupidest idea ever remember the other 10 times you thought that and sometimes it wasn’t. Sometimes it wasn’t and you just don’t fucking know and let’s just trust that if he feels this passionate about it, we should go that way.

Kimberly (08:49): Okay, our next question is a question kind of wrapped up into an insult. So you guys tell me if you just want to skip it, this came from Leo. “Basecamp’s design is extremely functional and simple, yet it seems to lack the refinement and poetic elegance that David preaches for code writing and Jason advocates for in his beautiful product letters. Why is Basecamp so good at UX but falls short in UI? Is this intentional and do you agree with this statement?” A question wrapped up into a little bit of a critique.

Jason (09:21): I mean look, design is a subjective thing. Obviously there are trends that come and go and what seems cool now is not cool in three years or five years or whatever. And then what was cool 20 years ago is cool again. So someone doesn’t like the way our stuff looks. That’s fine, that’s cool. I don’t always love the way our stuff looks. I typically do, but sometimes there’s things we don’t like so much we don’t feel good about it, we just change ’em. We just the Basecamp project page last week, just a subtle refinement. I think it makes it a little bit more elegant but better use of space, some details there. So we’re always iterating. I think the design’s good. For me, I’m not interested in making designs that look like cold museums, which to me is what most modern design looks like and a lot of current apps that are “popular” all look the exact damn same and I just don’t like that look.

(10:14): I like our stuff to feel comfortable and cozy to some degree and familiar and unintimidating and welcoming. And that’s a little bit different than what the norm is and it’s always been that way, where our stuff’s a bit sort of warmer than colder. It’s like we don’t use a lot of dark backgrounds and thin lines. It’s a different vibe. So again, it’s not for everybody, just like a piece of furniture for everybody. You can look at it objectively at a successful piece of furniture and go, I think that looks like shit. I don’t like that at all. It doesn’t appeal to me at all. It’s like, that’s fine, cool. It doesn’t make it good or bad, it just doesn’t appeal to you. So this fellow doesn’t have to our stuff. I do. And the other thing to keep in mind is that even our own aesthetic designs, our aesthetic preferences change.

(11:00): So if you look at Basecamp, Basecamp looks a certain way, HEY looks a very different way than that. Campfire looks a very different way than that. Campfire and Writebook have a similar kind of vibe, which is a very simplified thing. So we hold different design ideas in our head at once. Not everything has to look the same way. We’re not very much into consistent brand identity across all products, so some things might be more appealing to others in other ways. So anyway, that’s my answer. I don’t see it as an insult at all frankly. I think it’s just a commentary which is fair.

David (11:34): Which if anything it is curious that people feel this way and I know they do and it’s quite universal that people will make these, this is a good looking piece of software. This is a bad looking piece of software. If you move the domain and look at something like music, I think few people would have the, at least few enlightened people will go like, jazz is bad because I don’t like jazz. People have a much easier time recognizing, do you know what, there’s some real good jazz. It’s not my genre, I like rock or I like pop or I like rap that these different genres, they’re all music, they’re all within them different levels of expertise that’s being expressed in some way that people who that genre can appreciate. But for example, I’m not a huge jazz person, but I can totally look at the history of jazz and go like amazing.

(12:29): There’s some real practitioners there and other forms of design Jason mentioned furniture or house styles. I have a certain kind of aesthetic that I like for the places I live that’s very different from, I don’t know, Tuscan villas. I can appreciate them and go, I wouldn’t feel comfortable living there. Why don’t we have that way about design when it comes to applications or software in general? Is that really that different? I don’t think it is. So I think some of it is just to appreciate that as an individual you have a certain disposition to liking a certain style of music, a certain style of design, and maybe you like those thin gray lines on dark backgrounds with purple gradients. Great. There is almost infinite choice for you if that’s your, it’s kind of pop music, right? Hey, you know what, it’s a very wide broad segment of the market and we’re like, so what? a?

(13:25): Are we going for something that needs to appeal to 99% of everyone? No, we’re not. If Basecamp’s aesthetic appeals to some subset, the jazz contingency, do you know what, that’s fine. Plenty of jazz people in the world to sustain great jazz musicians, plenty of folks who appreciate our style of design to not just sustain but prosper our set up. And the final thing I’ll say is sometimes there’s almost this illusion of agreement that I find I’ll listen to someone talk about software development and how different aspects fit together at an abstract conceptual level and I go like, I’ll just nod my head and then I’ll look at the code that they actually write or the programming language that they like and I go like, wait, how did that go to that? And I think that’s one of those areas where just like with music, do you know what? You can have a discussion about music theory and what makes it good, this, that, and the other transitions of bridges and whatnot at an abstract level without having to the same kind of concrete implementation of it. I think that’s the same thing here. That’s why perhaps Leo, you’re a little puzzled when you listen to me talk about programming or Jason talk about design. You like our conceptual modeling and so on. Yeah, that’s different from the style that gets implemented in and it doesn’t invalidate one way or the other.

Kimberly (14:45): Okay, that’s great. Question from Harry. This is just a general business question for you. If building a new company from scratch now, what would you do which you’re not seeing others currently doing?

Jason (14:58): I don’t really have an answer for that. I don’t think about building other companies from scratch. In fact, if this company ever ended, I would not start another one. It just doesn’t… Building a company doesn’t interest me, so I haven’t thought about that at all. I don’t. In fact, the company part of it to me is almost a byproduct of making stuff, like something has to make the things that we make. So it’s a company and the company has things that it does, but the idea of starting a company to do other things is actually not that interesting to me in general. So anyway, that’s my unanswer.

Kimberly (15:34): David, do you have an unanswer?

David (15:38): Sort of. I’m slightly more just curious. I’m not pretending that I do have the answers to this. What I see repeatedly that I personally have a puzzlement about is that so many companies that start today when I think back of when we started, they have so much given to them. The tools are so much better. The setup is so much cheaper, the patterns have been so much more established yet I see in most of the startups that I’ve observed been involved with, I see vastly more complexity than what we had when we got started and when I think of all the things we had to do from scratch, there was more warranted complexity. It was more warranted that we got dragged into having to do all these different things. Now you’re getting handed all this somehow you’re making it so much more complicated for yourself.

(16:28): Now maybe that’s just an observation in general about the state of technology and design and whatnot, but I feel like we’ve managed to make things harder with very little discernible forward progress in that regard. And I don’t have any interest either in starting a new company, but if I was starting one, I’d try to like… How can we keep it as simple and as small as possible for as long as possible? Now that’s different by the way, from one trend there is big right now, which is indie hacking. I think that’s basically the category of solo entrepreneurs. Do you know what? I don’t want to start another company, but even less than that, I don’t want to be a solo entrepreneur. If I’m going to build something, I’m going to build it with other people, at least one other person, maybe two. I don’t need 60, whatever we have at this company right now, but I also don’t want to be just one. In fact, that vacation I just took the two months here, I played with some stuff on my own, just intellectual curiosity and learning things and I just went like, oh yeah, do you know what?

(17:33): It’s kind of boring in a way of just like I’m so fascinated by this season of reality. This season of reality is interesting because of other people and if you cocoon yourself into like it’s just going to be me and my intellect going around here, do you know what am sure that appeals to some people would not appeal to me, but there’s a nice little neat space between two and I don’t know five that to me still holds so much magic. And what’s so funny about that is I think one of the earliest essays, maybe it was in Getting Real, maybe we just blogged about it where we were accounting this, that when Jason or I were I think whatever, four or five people, we would account this. You know what, when we talked about entrepreneurs, they always think about the good old days when they were four or five or six people and we held this up because this was one time and I’m like, I’m that person now. To some extent, to some degree. Do I want this specific company to be six people? Absolutely not. 60 is already quite lean, but there is something about that. That really was appealing. But like Jason, do you know what I don’t want to replay? I don’t want to go through the same thing. We’ve done it for 23 years ago. I’m not hitting restart. No, do something else.

Jason (18:50): The other thing I’ll add to that is one of the greatest gifts of being new is having no baggage and no legacy. And one of the biggest mistakes I see startups make is they inherit other people’s legacy really quickly and baggage where they try to follow some other company’s really complicated path or they hire up too quickly and they’re too big, too fast, or they have this beautiful precious moment in the early days when they’re just small and have no one, nothing to bounce… Like one of the hardest things, like right now we’re redoing the basecamp.com site. I’m working with one of our designers on this. The hardest thing to do is to do it over from scratch because you have 60 pages, odd pages all over the place. You have previous design history that you just can’t help but clear out of your head. It’s very hard I should say.

(19:42): You want to clear it out of your head, but you basically cannot because you have a memory that lasts and so everything you’re doing is not pure and fresh and clean because it can’t be. It’s tainted by what you’ve done in a sense. It could be successful in the past, but it’s still so hard to really approach things with a blank slate. And when you’re brand new, you have that and you should have that for as long as you possibly can. Yet most companies make that as short as they possibly can. They don’t know that they’re doing it. They think it’s a shortcut to adopt other companies principles and approaches, but actually a major impediment and a real, it’s a real dark spot I think on their history actually to give that up too quickly. So for anyone who’s thinking about starting something, to David’s point too is like, as small as you can for as long as you can and avoid adopting principles from elsewhere in a sense that force you down a certain path too early and you can’t find your own way.

Kimberly (20:45): Stay scrappy as long as you can.

David (20:46): It’s more than that.

Jason (20:49): Like just beginner’s mind. It’s more that.

David (20:52): It’s actually ignorance. To me, ignorance has such negative connotations. You don’t know something. It’s a great.

Jason (20:58): Good.

David (20:58): It’s good, it’s good. And this connects to a question I often get. What would you tell your 21-year-old self? I would keep my mouth shut. Not only would you spoil the journey by revealing the outcome, it’s like sitting down for a movie and someone runs up. Do you want to know the ending? Do you want to know how it all turns out? Do you want to know who’s the bad guy and who’s the good guy and like, no, I don’t. No I don’t. The joy of going through life is that it’s novel and I think not only is that novelty sort of personally gratifying because you see something for the first time and it isn’t spoiled by everyone else’s impressions. Quick aside here, one of the things I really hate about all forms of media, whether it’s games and movies or whatever, it’s almost impossible these days to show up with something with a fresh mind.

(21:46): You see trailers, even for most movies, they reveal the entire plot. That’s how they think they can pull someone in. You see the reviews, you see the box office results. You’re bombarded constantly with this distillation of what everyone else thinks about everything else. Can I get a moment to just sit and figure out what I want to think before I get pre-programmed by what everyone else have already thought and regurgitated and boosted and amplified and whatever. It’s almost, there’s a deep sense of, well, it’s like a destruction of self fear where I don’t get to evolve as an individual anymore because the opportunity to get pre-programmed is so prevalent, so everywhere all the time that it’s so difficult to escape. And I just say embrace that and the internet makes that hard. It really does. It’s almost impossible to be a new entrepreneur today and show up with as much precious, precious ignorance as Jason and I were granted in 2001, an amazing amount of ignorance where we’re able to carry forth and therefore do very different things that people were doing at the time.

(22:59): We didn’t have, I don’t know, fucking, and this is self reverential here, we didn’t have 50 startup podcasts telling us every week how to think about this or here’s the best practices or whatever. And Twitter jamming down… Being able to be free from that is a real luxury that I think we still haven’t even found a way to properly articulate because disconnecting or whatever, it goes into a new age self-care kind of blah I don’t like, slob, that I don’t like either. This sense of doing it like embracing ignorance. I don’t want to know what other people think because this is a way for me to be personally creative unspoiled. Now does that mean you should be so ignorant to know nothing about nothing? No, of course it doesn’t. It just means if you could create more positive space for ignorance, not knowing, not negative ignorance, not being stupid, but simply being uncontaminated by other people’s ideas and trends and preconceived notions about what works and what doesn’t.

(24:02): What’s the best practice what’s not. Breaking free of that, in today’s world, that’s probably the hardest thing about being an entrepreneur today is the overabundance of everyone else’s opinions about everything all the time just fed into your veins because you have your little machine and it’s constantly feeding you think from all over. And I just go, and maybe this is where every old person feels like, man, I’m really happy that I’m not an entrepreneur today. And that thought existed in my mind at the same time where I go like, wow, everything is so much easier in a whole lot of ways that were difficult when Jason and I started. Also, I don’t want that. Give me a little resistance training here. Give me a little grit to pull on. Again, there is stuff and it’s in different ways and it’s not as categorical as that, but finding a way to create more ignorance for yourself, I think that should be a prime objective for most entrepreneurs.

Kimberly (25:02): Okay, our last question is about the ONCE family of products. This was an email from Orhan and he wrote, “Really cool to see the first ONCE launch, but it got me thinking. So far you’ve built software that you need yourself, but ONCE Campfire seems to have been born out of an opportunity you saw, less so a need per se. How are you thinking about that?” Since Orhan wrote us, we’ve also launched not only Campfire, but our newest once Writebook. So tell us where are we going with this, what we need versus just a need in the marketplace?

Jason (25:35): Yeah, I think that’s a fair observation on the Campfire side. We have chat built into Basecamp. We use the chat in Basecamp. We have been using the chat, we have been using Campfire separately for a few projects that we’re doing. So it’s not like we don’t use it, but it’s not central to how we work. Chat’s never been or it used to be but hasn’t been central to how we work for many, many years. Basecamp, the Basecamp approach, which is more long form writing and commenting in place in context is more the way we work. I think that part of what kicked off the whole ONCE thing was this frustration with subscriptions, that everything’s becoming subscription based and that companies are spending a ton of money, tons and tons of money recurring subscriptions. And as we began to look at the market, that was the first idea, which is like, this is frustrating.

(26:25): We had to build something to sort of prove this out. And we looked at what are essentially commodities in the software industry today, business software, and chat is probably the number one commodity that’s still priced like a luxury. And it was frustrating to us to hear the people are spending thousands of dollars on Slack or Teams, but let’s call it Slack because Teams is part of something else. You get it with Microsoft stuff, but Slack, which is a standalone thing essentially now Salesforce owns it, but it’s obscene. It’s just literally obscene the amount of money people are spending on this sort of thing. And so it felt like the right initial target for us to explore. It also had a self-contained nature to it and also is a kind of thing that you could still use Slack but have a spinoff Campfire room for specific use cases where you don’t want the whole company to have access to something or you want to have a backup.

(27:15): There’s some really interesting cases there and we use some of these cases, but it just felt like the right first example of the model. Self contained, didn’t require email integration initially, could significantly reduce people’s prices. Basically delivered 90% of the value of something that people are paying thousands of dollars a month for in some cases for 300 bucks once. It just felt like the right thing to explore and had some interesting technical challenges as well. And so that’s kind of where we started. And then Writebook was another thing that we built because we sort of had this sense that we were writing all these things. We have a bunch of books that we actually have and they’re built on, some of them are in custom things, some of ’em are in GitHub. This is something we should actually consolidate and simplify and make a universal version of this for us. And so that did begin with our own use case, not an imagined one as much as Campfire did to some degree, but now again, we do chat with Campfire. So anyway, that’s my general read on it anyway. David, anything to add there?

David (28:18): Yeah, I would just say that we do actually use it as it is designed and intended. I run several Campfires, one for Omakube for example, that community there. We run one for Rails Foundation companies. We’re going to run it for Rails World. We run it for a bunch of different instances where we use it, but I think perhaps deeper to the question of is it something you need versus is it an opportunity, it’s not actually in how it’s used is how familiar are you with the domain. The reason why dog fooding or building something that you need is so important is because it creates this world where you know whether something is good or not. When you’re building for other people on their behalf and you can’t discern yourself whether the quality is good or whether it has the features that it should or it doesn’t,

(29:08): that’s when you get into a different category of software development that I frankly don’t personally want to do because I don’t know how to do it well. I don’t know how to build software for domains, I don’t understand and I can’t evaluate the quality of in a way that meets the goals or standards for software that I’m interested in building. So Campfire in some ways was perhaps one of the domains we knew best of all. I mean we built the original version of Campfire literally 20 years ago in 2005. We used that as Jason said, for quite a few years as a predominant way of collaborating until we kind of realized all the pitfalls of chat first as the way of collaborating. Jason wrote a wonderful long form post called Is Group Chat Making you Sweat? I think it’s called that you can Google before and find.

(30:00): That kind of illustrates why we didn’t moved away from it, but we’re so intimately familiar with that domain. What makes a good chat system? How should it work from years and years and years of using it, even if it’s no longer the primary form that we were absolutely experts. If you were to ask me, hey, design this thing, I’d be like, yeah, we can do a very good job of that. We know the problem space very, very well. That’s the key differentiator. Do you know the problem space so well that you can discern between something that’s just good and something that’s great? Do you know even better? Do you know when to give up some of the peak fidelity here and there and still end up with a product that’s wonderful? So to me, the big distinction and are you building something for yourself or are you seeing an opportunity is kind of a derivative of that that loses some of the grittiness is, do you know the domain? Can you tell whether it’s good or not? Can you tell whether this feature is needed or not? Can you tell whether this feature is more important than that feature? If you have that, you’re in a good place to build great software. If you don’t have that, you have to build software for other people through intermediaries. That’s really difficult and most people fail quite badly at that. You see so much crappy software all over. A lot of it, if not all of it, is built by people who don’t really understand the problem.

Kimberly (31:22): Yeah, that’s fair. Well Rework is a production of 37 Signals. You can find show notes and transcripts on our website at 37 signals.com/podcast. Full video episodes are on Twitter and YouTube 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 708 6 2 8 7 8 5 0. You can also send us an email to rework@37signals.com and we just might answer your question on an upcoming show.