SEASON 2 - EPISODE 114 - JUNE 19, 2024

ONCE (again)

In this episode, Kimberly Rhodes hosts a discussion with Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, the co-founders of 37signals, about their newest product. And the best news? It will be free and simple to use.

Watch the full video episode on YouTube

Key Takeaways

00:26 - The next ONCE product
02:52 - The excitement of easily sharing free information in book form online
07:02 - Simplified publishing software that you completely control
12:12 - Starting a new product from scratch creates an open space for new ideas
15:55 - The various authors and enthusiasts that may want to use the new product
22:10 - Making the case on why this product is free
25:27 - Q&A from X (Twitter)

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 we recently were talking about founder-led marketing. Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, co-founders of 37signals have done some founder-led marketing talking about their latest ONCE product. In case you missed that on Twitter, I thought we would talk about it today. Jason, do you want to get us started? You’ve talked about what our new product is, give us the details.

Jason (00:26): Yeah, so the working name is Workbook. I don’t know if that’s ultimately going to be the name, but that’s the name we’re going with right now. Essentially, it’s a way to publish web-based books in the simplest possible way. It’s really easy to publish short form content. There’s a million places to tweet style things, Twitter threads or X whatever. And then blog posts. You’ve got WordPress, you’ve got Medium, you’ve got Squarespace, you’ve got all these other blogging systems. Strangely, it’s actually quite hard to publish a collection of things like a book-style collection of things like with a cover with title pages, with this idea of chapters, that kind of thing. Which of course the world is full of books. It’s like the oldest medium we have in a sense. Yet it’s really hard to do on the web and you kind have to go down a custom road.

(01:14): You can kind of modify WordPress so you can do things to sort of kind of get there, but why should you have to work that hard just to publish 20 essays together under a single thing that is like a cohesive hole that you can just send a link to someone and there’s the book online? And turns out we have a handful of these books. We wrote Getting Real. We wrote Shape Up. These are both public online books already. We have the 37signals employee handbook. And we had to make a custom format for these things and it probably holds up so many people from publishing either free books or paid books, whatever, online it’s too hard to lift beyond writing the thing itself. That’s hard enough. So this is just the simplest, it’s comically simple, as it should be, to publish a bunch of essays, pages, whatever you want to call them together and we’re giving away for free.

(02:04): So this is the first ONCE product that’s totally free, although it’s funny seeing all the excitement around, I’m like, maybe we should have charged for this. I don’t know. That said, what’s cool about this model is we eventually we could give it away for free for the first year and then whatever it’s, but right now it’s free and we’re very excited to get it out. I think it’s going to lead to a lot of people publishing and this idea is that the web is kind of the last independent medium there is in a sense. And this is truly that in that there is no gatekeeper. We’re not hosting this. Of course, you host it yourself, so this is independent publishing. Of course we give you the tool, but you even get the code, you get the whole damn thing and it’s all you. And I think there’s something really special and unique about that that we’re excited to be a part of.

David (02:51): What’s so cool about Workbook is, as Jason says, it’s the celebration of what the internet is, the best of what the internet is, is that you’re finding this information that someone put out there just because they couldn’t help but sharing. This is also one of the reasons that the version that we’re putting out is just for free content. It’s for free books, it’s for free distribution. Could you put it behind a paywall if you wanted to do that? Totally. That is absolutely a path you could pursue. But the default is for people who just want to share on the internet because the internet is this magical place where that’s possible. And combine that with the notion of books. When I think of the thousands of essays I’ve written over 20, 30 years of writing for the internet, those have had some impact, but not the same kind of impact that a collection of thoughts compiled into a book has had.

(03:44): When you look at the impact that Jason and I have had publishing Rework, over a million copies sold around the world, it just does something that a blog post never could. It does something that these one-off essays never could. It allows you to impart an entire way of thinking because you get to look at something from multiple different angles but with the same values, with the same perspective on the world at large. And I think that’s just really important. And I want to make sure that for us, we don’t lose that. In fact, that there’s an invitation to do that, make it so easy to compile and publish a book that you do it more. The last book Jason and I wrote was now five years ago. It Doesn’t Have To Be Crazy at Work. Again, awesome in a way that one of the blog posts that are in there, there are whatever 80 essays never could be, but also it’s been five years.

(04:43): We’re talking about writing a new book now and we have a new idea for doing it, but I think if it was easier, it was more accessible for us to write a book that was maybe 20 pages, 40 pages, 60 or a hundred. We’d probably do it more, but it feels like such a project. And the comparison I feel directly connected to is when we introduced HEY World, we it so damn easy to write an essay for the web, easier than it’s ever been in any other publishing platform I have ever used. And I have written in almost all of them over the course of 20 plus years. But now I write all the time because HEY World makes it just so easy. Can we get that level of close to two friction where it’s almost nothing and you can compile these things and they look beautiful out of the box.

(05:33): There’s not something you have to be a Ace designer to make something look presentable? No, we’re going to ship workbook with a beautiful design and it’s going to be a beautiful, stable sort of one off design. Multiple books will look similar, but this was one of the things I think when Jason and I originally jumped on Medium, really appealed to us. Medium, especially in the early days before the endless pop-ups and popovers and paywalls and whatever else they got going now, was just really nicely designed. The presentation was nicely designed, the editor was nicely designed, the whole thing just felt like someone considered it, yet it all looked the same. Someone’s medium post looked the same as someone else’s medium post. That was not a bug. That was actually a bit of a feature, that you could get access to beautiful design style without having to do anything. Who cares if it looks like the other one? So, Workbook is really a cross section of all these things that we care about. It’s about independent publishing, it’s about open source, it’s about giving back to the web, it’s about writing, it’s about long form writing, the best long form writing there is, book length writing and encouraging more people to write more books.

Kimberly (06:42): So this is the second product under this ONCE umbrella. So I’m curious, David, this might be for you, what has stayed the same between these two products? They’re very different. One a chat component, this is for publishing content, how are they different or what have we taken from one product to this next one?

David (07:02): The entire infrastructure is the same. So the way we distribute the software, the way it’s all wrapped up in a container, the way it’s a one line install. This is one of those magical things with Campfire that felt like a bit of a leap into the unknown, a bit of a gamble even first, can we make it so simple to install your own software on a server that you own that it’s literally just one line and then I mean maybe you could do that. Maybe that wasn’t the hard part. The hard part was can we make it so resilient and reliable that if a thousand people do this, we’re not inundated with support requests for debugging your Linux installation. We basically had almost nothing of that. There’s been a little bit of the edges, but way, way, way less than what I dared hope for.

(07:50): The model has been incredibly successful in terms of how easy it is. And this is one of the, I don’t know, side effects we hope to gain from this. By making workbook free, we’re introducing a much broader audience to the idea that you can run your own software and hopefully teaching them that is so much easier than they might fear. And if they can get convinced that, oh, I can run Workbook, well maybe I could run a Campfire too. Oh, that totally now makes sense in a different way I couldn’t contextualize before because what we’re trying to do here is essentially teach an entire market how to use software in a new way, how to use web-based software, but you own it and you control the data and it’s your machine. But then people think, but now I have to do a system administrator, now I have to know all these things.

(08:34): No, you don’t. You have to know copy paste at least to get started. And I think that model just have such long legs. If we can show people how far it can go and there’s no better way of showing someone something than saying it’s free, check it out. And it has all the other benefits of Campfire as well. We’re giving you away the code. You’re going to get not just a free piece of software, the source is included. You can open check it out, see how we build Rails applications. This is a smaller application than Campfire and as Jason says, it’s almost ludicrously simple in its structure. So alright, you’re perhaps not going to learn quite as much as you would from buying Campfire and looking at the source there, but still there’s not a lot of these examples. There’s not a lot of commercial grade software out there that you can just take apart.

(09:21): Most of the things that people look at when they look at open source is infrastructure and it’s Rails and it’s database libraries and all these things a lot of people want to see, but how do I build an application? And Workbook is going to have that just like Campfire did, and hopefully again, it’s one of those things where, hey, you get the first book, in Harry Potter for free and you’re like, oh my shit Hogwarts, this is amazing. And then book number two, all right, is there for sale. And obviously we’re going to hope that that’s going to be part of it too. We’re a commercial software shop, we give a ton of stuff away for free. This is the first commercial application you can run yourself that we give away for free. And of course we’re going to hope that that eventually turns into sales, Campfire or other software that we do. But it’s just great giving back to the web in this form. And I think it also allows us to set the bar, the scope, not really the bar, the scope for what this product needs to be a little bit lower than we’d otherwise explore. If we were like, oh, we’re going to charge a ton of money for this. Oh it needs this bell and it this bell and this whistle. No, this can just be so beautifully simple. Books on the web. You publish yourself, easier than anywhere else to do it.

Jason (10:32): I was also going to add on the UI side, there are things we’re pulling through. So the general sensibilities, the degree of refinement, the degree of barely any interface things being black and white, very straightforward, wordless for the most part. A bunch of the setting, there’s actually, I shouldn’t say a bunch, there’s one setting screen, essentially. It’s the same structure as the Campfire screen. We’re honing in on what ONCE style product should look and feel like. And you can do that once with the first one, but until you do it a second time, you don’t really have a trend. And now I think we’re getting to a trend in a place where we realize we can make very functional products very, very simply in a very straightforward way where it’s all just intuitive and it all just makes sense and that’s a really nice bar to hold over everything that we do moving forward.

(11:26): Why can’t much far more sophisticated products like Basecamp and HEY have that degree of simplicity. They do but not quite at the same level and they’re never going to quite get there because these products are so much simpler, but it’s still another model that we can look at and go, we’re able to do this over here very simply. Why don’t we take some of those ideas and bring 'em over here? And that’s one of the beautiful things about making more stuff is you get a chance to rethink, redo, reconsider, and then bring those ideas in their own way. You don’t have to copy the ideas, but there’s an influence there that goes back and forth. That’s one of the beautiful things about starting from scratch with a new idea or a new model, whatever, is you have the opportunity to start over and then you have the leverage of having started over and seeing something new for the first time and then bringing it over across other things.

David (12:12): It’s just a beautiful lab too. Yeah, a great lab for exploration, both on the design side as Jason says, we’re trying quite a novel approach to the wordless design and the stark design and on the technical side as well, we’re trying a bunch of new things we would not try in something like Basecamp, a codebase that’s been around for 10 years. There is something magic about that green field and you should have both, because if all you do is green field and you only work on it for three weeks, you’re never going to see the consequences of your actions. Rails is so good because we have had to live with the consequences for literally two decades of how the system is designed. Oh, does this actually pan out over time? Not just is this nice to work on for three weeks? It has to still be nice 10 years later.

(12:55): And having that mix of both of it really gives you just a beautiful perspective from both angles on how systems should work, how we should set it up. It’s already feeding a bunch of stuff into the Ruby on Rails development. We have a bunch of ideas for how Rails 8 is going to be influenced by some of these things and it’s just fun. It’s fun to go like, alright, throw away everything. Clean sheet of paper. You can draw whatever you want, you can draw it whatever you want and however you want to put it together. It doesn’t have consequences for this huge long running application where we can’t just completely rewrite everything all the time. So I think it hones our creative skills on both the design and programming side in a way that continues refinement of existing products just never can. That doesn’t make it bad,

(13:43): I mean we love making Basecamp better, we love making HEY better, but I think we actually get to make both HEY and Basecamp better when we spend some time in the green field, when we spend some time just going like, alright, complete open mind here. It’s funny, Jason took me to see this guy he knew at a car company’s design shop where they just work on out their ideas, not something that’s going to turn necessarily into the next production car. And I thought there’s something really beautiful about the established company going blue sky, think whatever you want. Try crazy things, try installing… we’ve been selling software that’s hosted, we host it, we operate it. Let’s just try selling it directly to the customer. These kind of wild things you can do in a skunk works, tiny team, small investment, small risk factors, really beautiful. And I think that’s what we’re seeing here too is these teams, the Workbook team is three people.

(14:43): Three people. There’s one designer, two programmers. One of the things we’re developing here is a brand new editor for Markdown. So Markdown is this way of creating content that’s not WYSIWYG. What you see is what you get. It uses underscores to make things italic. It uses hash marks to make things headlines, and it’s something that a lot of, especially technically minded people have really taken to. It’s a great way of writing. We’re using that in workbook and to do that, we created a new editor called House (MD). See if anyone gets the connection there, that’s going to take that. And that’s part of it too, right? In the tiny team of three, we are developing sort of fundamental new things like an editor. We’re not just taking something off the shelf, we’re plugging it in there and they’re making amazing progress and we’re doing it not in like, oh, let’s spend a year on this, but let’s spend two cycles on this.

Kimberly (15:39): I think I asked you guys this when Campfire launched, but I’m curious for this product, who do you think this product is for? Obviously people who want to self-publish a book on the web, but I feel like there’s some other people who might find a use for this.

Jason (15:54): My answer is always it’s for us and then it’s for whoever else wants it. I mean really, I tend not to think about the market. I’m surprised by how popular this is actually right now. The post I put up on X kind of blew up and LinkedIn it kind of blew up. It’s just hugely influential around some people. They really are into this idea and I just got an email this morning, can I publish a cookbook on this? I’m like, oh wow, hadn’t thought about that. People want to publish comic books. I got a note from a public library who says they are having a really hard time with publishing free eBooks, like open source public domain eBooks for their members. I dunno what you call, what do you call someone who goes to a library? Citizens… anyway

Kimberly (16:40): Humans?

David (16:42): Nerd.

Jason (16:44): They’re just struggling because the software that exists is just no one’s touched this world in forever and it’s horrible and complicated and they can’t do it. And I’m thinking to myself, you can just do this so simply to publish stuff like this, especially open domain stuff. Now as far as access, there’s a whole bunch of questions there, but it was very interesting to hear from a library. I’m hearing from people who want to publish technical manuals. We support code blocks but not as well as we possibly could perhaps at some point. There’s some people asking about that. Graphic novels, just a lot of stuff. I think we’re going to find that a lot of people have a lot to share, but there’s sort of this latent demand, but there’s this barrier to entry. And so this is the idea of actually non-consumption, which is sort of Clayton Christensen’s thing in a sense.

(17:33): People are trying to do this but there’s nothing really for it and they’re ready to do it, but they’re held back because too hard. Basically right now you have to make a website to make a book. That’s just over pretty much everybody’s head in a lot of ways. I know there’s a lot really great free tools to do it, but it still doesn’t really get you where you want to go. So I think there’s going to be a huge number of people who are publishing stuff which is going to benefit everybody and the fact that it’s free is going to really, I think spread the word quite a bit. I think there’s going to be a lot of interest in this, but again, to get back to your initial question, we made it for us. We have a handful of things that we’ve made customized.

(18:10): There’s also things that we haven’t published in a book style for example, we have this thing called, I was just thinking about this during this session, but the 37signals Guide to Internal Communication. We’ve got some of these things that are actually published as one super long form page that actually might be nice in a book style format. And we have these, one of the page types is this just headline text type page, and I can imagine this book having a cover, a little intro and then the 30 some odd things as individual pages and then it’s at a URL and it’s more interesting to look at and to share and the whole thing. There’s a lot of things we can redo in this format and I think a lot of people will. So that’s my answer.

David (18:49): One of the domains that we looked at internally when we were reviewing what we would use this for is handbooks. Obviously we have the company handbook, but then that’s public and we publish that for all to see. We’re going to convert that to Workbook. But then we also have a series of internal handbooks. We have a handbook for programmers. We had a handbook for operators. I think one of them ran just straight off GitHub, which is actually surprisingly doable, but kind of janky, wasn’y meant for it. It’s certainly not beautiful in any shape of the word, and I think a ton of companies have that problem. They have a body of knowledge that either a single department or even the whole company needs to know and where do you put that stuff? You could sort of hack, I don’t know, a Notion thing together for it maybe.

(19:36): You could hack a bunch of things together. You could hack, you could hack a book out of something else. This is meant for a book. This book is literally in the working title right now, Workbook. So if you want to make a book that’s a handbook, a programmer book, an operator book, a design book, design guide style book, any of these kinds of domains that tons of companies have internally you’re in a sort of clutching together in a variety of ways is perfect for this. Absolutely perfect. Our programmer book and our operator books, for example, they run on our VPN, they’re not generally accessible to the world. You can totally do that. You get the software, put it on your VPN, just run it internally on your network if you are a classic company that have those sorts of things. And I think what’s so powerful about it being free and about it being source included is there’s no one to ask for permission.

(20:30): If you are the system operating team at some mid-size or large company, you don’t have to go through procurement to figure out whether you’re allowed to use this. You’re already using open source for everything. So you can just install this, you can just start using, it’s the ultimate in rogue software to some degree, but it’s the kind of beautiful rogueness where it’s actually more secure probably than the thing you bought, right? Let’s say you bought some big Salesforce installation or you bought Slack and they just announced last week that they’re going to start training their AI on all your internal communication. This kind of rogue software is the kind of rogue where you take your data home. You put it behind your own damn firewall or your own damn protections, which to me is a really nice, coherent, congruent way of going rogue that is compatible with security and data protections.

(21:22): One of the areas where this is really huge is obviously in Europe. The GDPR just runs things on that continent and Workbook allows us to have such a clean story there. Oh, what’s your process of data? None of that shit, you just run it on your machine. There’s literally nothing. You doesn’t call out anywhere. There’s no telemetry, there’s no ad thing, there’s no AI looking at it, there’s nothing. It is literally a piece of software with all the code included that keeps the data wherever you want to keep it, that is about as perfectly fit for the modern European world. And I think to some degree that also rubs on other places of the world, even if the Europeans are the craziest when it comes to this stuff. So there’s just so many factors that feel like this is the moment for that kind of software.

Jason (22:09): The other thing I want to add about that is the pricing model, which of course is free, but let’s say it was a hundred bucks or 500 bucks or a thousand bucks. Let’s just say it was for a second. You pay for it once, which is all you should pay for something like this. The fact that let’s say you used a Notion or whatever, it doesn’t even matter, but some other tool to publish basically static information. Why should you have to pay to host that static information on a SaaS tool in perpetuity? It’s not changing. You don’t need more features. You are not going to maybe change the copy, but you can do that anyway. But the idea that you have to pay for the right to put that static stuff on someone else’s system. Now in some cases you might want to fire up a shared host system, you’re going to have to pay 10 bucks a month or 15 bucks a month to host a page on Workbook for example.

(22:57): But you also might have your own servers running or you don’t have to pay anything. But to pay a lot of money and to set up a lot of users to access this information month after month after month is just absolutely ridiculous. So I think this is going to be liberating financially as well. And whenever that happens, you tend to see more people do things that they wouldn’t have done before because not only was it hard to do, but the price was in the way. So I think this is hopefully going to open up a lot of things for a lot of people.

David (23:25): I think the other thing I love about this is the same thing I love about the HEY World posts. You look at one of the HEY World posts, I mean I put out a lot all the time. You go to one of those pages, it’s like what the web used to be. There’s no cookie overlay because we don’t set a cookie. There’s no banner, this, that, and the other thing. AI I think to me is appealing to a lot of people right now because we’ve made the web so shitty. You go Google and you search for something and you click on a result and it’s just like, ugh. It’s like trash. You land on so many trash pages that the web is littered with and then they’ve been SEO optimized out the wazoo such that the trash is what you find first. And AI kind of goes like, yeah, okay, I’m not going to show you of the trash, I’m just going to show you the answer.

(24:18): The AI might’ve made up the answer. You don’t know where the answer comes from. There’s a lot of issues with that problem, but I think the core appeal of AI is the appeal that we made the web an unpleasant place to be for a lot of people and for a lot of content. And we’re designing Workbook in the same ethos and spirit as we’re designing. HEY World. This is about just the words. There’s not going to be all the things. It’s not going to load like 500 beacons and trackers and little brave counters not just going to go crazy when you go to this site. There’s none of it, literally none of it on there. And if the web was like that, I think a lot of what people wouldn’t be as excited about AI as they currently are because the web would just provide the information and you’d see who published it and you’d see the ownership of what’s the source of this information. And even if it doesn’t happen and AI takes over everything, all right, then at least we’re putting human knowledge out there for AI to look at and incorporate into their models. And someone who puts the time together to put a beautiful book together for the web is going to train the next generation of artificial intelligence, which also sounds kind of nice to me.

Kimberly (25:28): Okay. A couple of logistics questions that we got on Twitter about this Workbook release. We’ll, each Workbook instance support multiple books.

Jason (25:38): Yes. So you can make as many books in a single instance as you want. Some of those books can be public with public URLs. Some of them can just be private essentially, which is only accessible to users on your account. You can make as many users as you want. Of course it doesn’t cost anything to make a user. So you could technically have your internal runbook, which 43 people who work at your company can see, and those are the only people in the world who can see it. They need to log into the system to be able to see it. And you can also alongside that host, a public book for 7 billion people to see as well. So yeah, one instance, multiple books.

Kimberly (26:11): Another question from Twitter, is there any email conversion, commerce or paywall built in to protect the content?

Jason (26:20): No. And protect, I know it wasn’t your word, but we’re not about that. This is about sharing, but you could, again, as David mentioned, you get the code, it’s hosted on your own system. You could build a paywall that has a private URL and there’s all sorts of authentication things you can do. You can sell an access code that you could then create a front end for. There’s a bunch of stuff you do if you want to do that. That’s on you though. We actually had talked about this early on and we just decided against it. This is a free thing for free content. If you want to charge for it, you figure it out, but you certainly can. There’s nothing hard about that. If you know anything about how to set it up, you can definitely do it yourself. There’s also no email newsletter, there’s no notifications, there’s none of that stuff. There’s no collaboration in the system, even though multiple users can use it together. It’s not really a place to write collaboratively. You should probably write somewhere else. You can write here, but you can write somewhere else and just paste it in. This is the final resting place for final copy. And we actually went back and forth earlier on, we had a whole diff system where you could see changes and stuff and just felt like this isn’t that. This is a place to put finished text essentially and publish to the world.

Kimberly (27:33): Okay, and then what about updates? I know with Campfire people were buying once and getting updates through that one version. What about this one where it’s free?

Jason (27:42): Same thing. David can talk to it. Yeah.

David (27:44): Yeah. It’s the same system. And this is one of the nice things about having spent as much time as we did on the campfire infrastructure is we can just reuse that. So there’s a security issue we got to fix. Great. We’re going to push it out. The system is going to be set up just like Campfire where every night it’s going to pull an update down if there is one. It’s automatically going to integrate it and run it, and you’re going to be on the latest system. You don’t have to do anything for that to work as the default out of the box. Now we’re also gunning for Workbook to be finished software in the same way that Campfire is getting close to being, or at least has the aspiration of being where this is done. Absent of any security issues, we will obviously push out patches for, this is meant to be done. It’s not meant to be SaaS that’s constantly adding new features every single month to it. We’re aiming for these to be small tools where you’re like, yep, that’s the grip. This grip feels good. Let’s just keep the grip.

Kimberly (28:40): And then last question that we received and I think is important, where can I join the wait list?

Jason (28:46): There’s no wait list. You can follow me or David on X or on LinkedIn and you’ll hear about it there. So that’s the way we’re doing that.

Kimberly (28:54): Any estimate for when this will be launched?

Jason (28:56): Weeks, not months basically is the plan.

David (29:01): It may be 16 weeks, but not months.

Jason (29:03): There are

Kimberly (29:04): 52 weeks or

Jason (29:05): So. You just blew the whole secret. No. Yeah, soon we’re wrapping it up. I mean, the wrap up stage is always like, oh, we could try this, could try that. There’s a few things we’re going to play with. So I would say weeks not months away. Yeah.

Kimberly (29:17): Okay. Well with that, you can find more updates about Workbook, it’s working title, from Jason or David’s Twitter feeds. I’ll link those in the show notes. 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 and we just might answer it on an upcoming show.