SEASON 2 - EPISODE 183 - February 11, 2026

You've launched... now what?

The confetti’s settled. The product is out in the world. So… what happens next? Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson share what the days after a launch actually look like at 37signals. They discuss not letting early numbers steer the ship, making space for rest after the push, and remembering that shipping is just the start, not the finish line.

Watch the full video episode on YouTube

Key Takeaways

00:10 - What happens shortly after launch
02:09 - Dialing the team back
05:10 - Product touch ups and enhancements
06:16 - Returning to a familiar work rhythm
07:16 - Balancing the product push with real breaks
10:39 - Not letting early signups call the shots
20:32 - Sticking with what works for your team
22:00 - Putting the product ahead of quick money moves
27:26 - Why launch buzz doesn’t last forever

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 with Jason Fried and David Heinemeier-Hansson, co-founders of 37signals. This week we’re chatting a little bit about the second step of a launch process. So we’ve recently launched a new product Fizzy. Thought we’d talk about what happens next. Things are live. We’ve tweeted about it. What’s the next part of this phase of the launch process? So you guys jump right in. We had a big, telling people about it. Now things are kind of back to normal and we’re at a regular cadence.What does the day-to-day look like at this point?

Jason (00:37): Well, I think you first have to maintain enthusiasm for the platform, the product, wherever it is that you put out there. So, one great way to do that is to share some examples of how we’re using it. Every time we launch a new feature, share that. Because it’s open source, we can highlight and celebrate other people who are contributing and are merging in their pull requests and getting that thing out there into the world. So there’s a lot of that that has to continue to happen. You have to continue to cheerlead and promote without feeling like you’re just spewing ads. So these things have to be sort of realistic. So there’s that. And then on the product side, there’s of course a bunch of feedback that flows in. A bunch of stuff comes in that you knew was going to come in. A bunch of stuff comes in that you didn’t know was going to come in.

(01:14): And I think it’s best to kind of wait for a little bit and not knee-jerk and do anything aggressive in the first few weeks. And by that, I mean, don’t make any big changes if people complain about something. Of course, if something’s broken, you fix it. But for the most part, people are getting used to something if it’s new. So it’s an old idea, brand new application, brand new execution of this idea. Some people are going to come at it and bring their other expectations and go, “Well, why doesn’t it work this way? Or can we lose this? Or can I rename that? Or I don’t like this being open, or why can’t I only open two things?” And it’s like, I hear all those things. Give it five minutes, give it a few weeks, give it a few months, see how you adjust to it, see how it feels, whatever.

(01:51): So I think that’s important. And then we still will have some ideas that we didn’t get in for V1 launch that we either held back, didn’t feel great about, that we then can implement now, which we’ve already begun to do and sort of refine at the edges without making any massive changes early on. So that’s sort of where we’re at on the product side at this point.

David (02:09): There’s also the aspect of coming down from the surge that always goes into a major launch at 37signals, and probably anywhere, where we pile in a bunch of people to help get this thing out into the world. And with Fizzy, we had, I don’t know, the last eight weeks or maybe even slightly more than that, we had more people on it than we’re going to have now that it’s launched. And that’s been true for every major piece of software, any piece of software we really launched, it’s just, people help out when it’s time to push pedal to the metal just for that last stretch and get it out into the world. You can always have these plans and everything’s going to be sort of nice and calm. And I think most of the development cycle should be that. And then there’s that last phase where you keep finding things that you thought were done or that were done, but you don’t like them and you got to tweak and pivot on some factors.

(03:08): And we’ve now done that and we have the thing out in the world. And therefore some of the other aspects of the work that we do, whether it’s general on- call work or whether it’s work on Basecamp can now resume with its more natural staffing levels. So in the last push to get Fizzy out the gate, I think we at peak probably had, I don’t know, six, almost seven programmers in variety of capacities working on helping getting it out. And now that it is out, we’re getting it back to sort of its original team size, which is two developers and two designers. And we’re even probably going to take one of the designers off, which will leave it with what sounds crazy I think for a lot of other companies, two programmers and one designer moving this thing forward. But for us it’s actually a completely normal team size, so even slightly larger than we sometimes do.

(04:04): We very often do teams that work on features, which is one designer and one programmer. But we’re also exploring some additional infrastructure on the tech side for Fizzy, so we indulge ourselves and have two full-time programmers on it, along with the designer on it. And that’s the more natural rhythm where we continue to make things better. We continue to review the inbound request. We have a bit of a backlog, if you want to call it that, of things that we want to get out. One things that did not make the cut, for example, was passkeys. We currently just, it’s a very nice way of plugging in, but still just have magic links through email, but we’d like to have passkeys as well. This is something I’ve been very excited about adopting after initially thinking, “Eh, I don’t know about this standard.” And then realizing, oh, when you paired with Magic Links, it’s actually quite nice.

(04:54): So we’re going to push that forward and we’re going to get that out and there’s a bunch of other things we’re going to do. But we could do all that with a team of just three people and that’s who’s going to work on Fizzy going forward and the rest of the surge crew can return to more of their normal duties.

Jason (05:09): The other thing we did was we followed in the original Basecamp footsteps, which is that we launched Basecamp back in 2004, we couldn’t bill anybody. So we said we have 30 days to get billing in place because we had a 30-day free trial. And so we put all of our energy into other things because we didn’t need that. And then we eventually got that done within 30 days. So the same thing is true with Fizzy. We couldn’t bill anybody. We have a thousand card free thing, which is longer than 30 days for most people, but we couldn’t bill anybody. If someone to pay us, we couldn’t accept their payments. So we had to do that as well. So we knew that we didn’t need to do that ahead of time. We could take that effort and move it somewhere else and redirect it to something else inside the product.

(05:46): But now, of course, people are starting to use up their cards. So it’s time. It’s still early, but time enough to get billing in place so we can get that done. So that was another thing that we did post launch. And it always surprises people that we didn’t do that prior to launch. I think it’s actually one of the best things to leave out.

(06:02): It’s kind of really lets you focus on everything else. And then you kind of have this nice scramble to get billing done within a few days, few weeks. And you tend to just make it simpler also. And that’s kind of a nice side effect as well as waiting can really help.

Kimberly (06:15): So we’ve talked many times on this podcast about how we work in six week cycles, typically. That’s not the case for new product development. Now that Fizzy’s out, are we going back to those six week cycles with Fizzy or how does that look?

Jason (06:30): Yes, at some point. We’re not quite there yet, but yeah, we will slide back into the traditional Shape Up rhythm where we’re going to shape projects up and decide if they’re going to take three weeks or two weeks or six weeks, wherever it is. But we kind of have a different version of Shape Up that we use around new product launches, which is kind of no breaks in between cycles, just kind of a little bit more like a Tetris style thing where you just fit things in and put a bunch of different people in different places because it’s actually a much faster way to run, but you can’t keep that up. Some companies do, but we don’t feel like it’s a good thing to keep up. So we will fade back into more traditional cycle-based work with some breaks between cycles and a little bit more planned work and less sort of reactive, “Oh, I’ve got an idea. Let’s try and do that” or “let’s tweak this and let’s change that” kind of vibe.

David (07:16): I think where Shape Up really helps us well is when you no longer have 100% of the executive bandwidth available to making decisions within a single day, multiple times, all the time. When Jason moves on to working on Basecamp 5, for example, or I’m off working on some other things, there’s more of a need for a cadence and some ceremony around like, “All right, let’s sit down, make some decisions about what we’re going to work on next.” And then the team can just run with that on their own. The push, especially the final crunch phase towards launch, you have Jason’s available right there. You just ask him anything at any time in the day because the majority of his focus is going to be on this product. And I think Shape Up really helps when you no longer have that undivided attention, that undivided bandwidth to making those snap product decisions.

(08:12): And then it becomes easier to do the management over a longer period of time. And I think also just the calm of it. I think part of it is it can be very exciting and accelerating to be in that crunch phase and to have that very short feedback loop that’s sometimes happening within a single day or within a single week. But it’s also quite exhausting, as Jason says. I like to get really deep into various projects at various time. And I think people, at least sometimes, do enjoy that intensity of it, but also would think like, “Do you know what? If I had David in my team for a whole fucking year, I’d go, goddamn nuts. I cannot work like that. “ And even I can’t work like that. I’ve learned that about myself too, that the intensity of a project like Omarchy, for example, where it was just all out for three months, I don’t want to keep that up forever.

(09:05): I don’t want to sprint like that forever. The same thing with Fizzy. The last crunch phase of it for the team was pretty intensive. If you just say, “That’s how we’re going to work all the time,” I think it’s actually quite shortsighted. And even if I am not in the camp who views burnout as predominantly being about overwork per se, I do think there’s perhaps not burnout, but an exhaustion that can set in if you’re just constantly sprinting, sprinting, sprinting, sprinting, you’re never doing cool downs, you’re never kind of just taking a breather. And I think it’s just important for us to be able to do all those things. If we want to continue to work with the same people for five, 10, 15, 20 years, you can’t do that just running all of it at the red line all of the time. You got to take some time to rebuild the engine to cool down and so forth.

(10:01): This is something I believe we talk about in REWORK as well when this sort of macho image of fighting to win all the time, borrowing sports metaphors about going all in tend to forget is that even in sports, even at the elite level, there’s a lot of cool down. There’s a lot of rest. There’s a lot of downtime, off season, all these other things. And if you want to be able to operate at that level and be able to occasionally go into the red line, you kind of need to have a bit of buffer. You can’t just be there all the time and believe you’re not going to pop a cylinder. You absolutely will.

Kimberly (10:40): Okay. And then I’m curious about numbers. Are you guys looking at how many people have signed up for the new product, how many cards people have? How invested are you in the status of the product?

Jason (10:52): We have a very, very basic dashboard setup. It’s not something we do all the time. So Mike, who’s one of the programmers on this, just built something kind of quickly because I was curious, who’s signing up? How many signups do we have? It’s not like we’re plugging in this whole suite of tools and looking at retention. I think we about 18 and a half thousand accounts or something like that, which is nice. We’re closing in about 20,000, which is a great start. We don’t have expectations though going into things. So I mean, it’s not like we’re I was expecting to have 20 or 10 or whatever. It’s like, 18’s great. This is good. And then we can see the top 10 card counts because we give a thousand cards away for free. So it’s like, is anyone even close to that? The most basic possible questions, we don’t have anything like which features are being used most or any of that.

(11:39): There’s no instrumentation beyond total accounts and number of cards per account, basically. So that’s it. And that’s enough to be interesting to look at occasionally and be like, “Oh, cool.” And you can also see how many signups we’ve had in the last 24 hours. So is it accelerating, decelerating? Where is it at? But the thing is, whatever the number is, it is. It’s not like, “Oh my God, we need to do more of this or we need to do less of that. “ It’s just like, that is what it is and now we can see it if you want to look at it. That’s the extent of our interest in that at this point. We’re just a few weeks in and we’re just doing the best we can and things are going to be what they’re going to be, but there’s not this measuring up or measuring down of the numbers.

Kimberly (12:18): And is that kind of the philosophy for all of the products that you guys have launched? Just kind of a, we know the information, but we’re not super analyzing it. We don’t have expectations about what those numbers should be, or is this product different in some way?

Jason (12:30): I mean, it’s essentially the way we’ve always done it. We’ve had some better dashboards in the past. We used to have a really nice dashboard way back in the day. I don’t know if it was built into Queen Bee or it was like a separate, I forget what it was called. Maybe it was called Dashboard. I don’t even know. But we had these charts and stuff and you could see number of up… this for early version of Basecamp, you could see upgrades, but it wasn’t something we launched with. It wasn’t something we desperately wanted to have initially. It’s just like at some point it was nice to know. And it was actually a cool design project to make this graphical dashboard. Just as me speaking, I’ve never really been driven by that kind of stuff. It’s interesting to see, to know, but I’m not looking at that all the time.

(13:08): Just like I wouldn’t want to be a day trader, same way. I want to know, am I roughly going up? Am I roughly going down? What’s the general long-term trend here? But to look at things throughout the day, every day, all the time, there are moments though when you get really excited and you launch something new and it’s fun to share the numbers and whatever, there’s some of that, but that’s just like, it’s kind of a vanity thing. It’s just kind of fun and exciting to see people are interested in what you’re doing. But I don’t make different decisions because of that. 18,000 versus 16,000 versus 23,000, it makes no difference to me right now. I wouldn’t do anything differently had those numbers been 20% more or less or whatever. So that’s just me. That’s my curiosity.

David (13:49): I think that’s the crux of why we actually now do less data analysis on usage inside the products than we’ve ever done since the earliest days. We had quite a long phase, maybe even as much as 10 years where we had several very talented data analysts who really dove into the data and tried to figure out the correlations and how many to- dos new accounts are creating or messages. And can we find some thread here that’s going to lead to some pivotal insight that’s going to take the whole thing to the next level? And from 10 plus years of trying to do that, I can count on, I think, a single finger the number of times we discovered something pivotal in its use that felt like it was so crucial I wouldn’t have done without it. And I’ll actually mention the explicit example. It was a redesign, not even of the product itself, but of a marketing page.

(14:53): We had a different team running Highrise for a while, a CRM system we’d built many years back, no longer sell to new clients, but have an existing customer base on. And they redesigned the homepage and it took us six months to realize that that redesign was catastrophic. I think we were down 20% on conversion or something crazy, large enough that even if you don’t pay attention to the fine details of the numbers, you would want to know. 20% is a fifth of the conversions just disappearing. And we did find that six months after the catastrophe of the launch and corrected it. But if I look at all the analyses we have done on the products themselves, how would you use all the telemetry and instrumentation that we used to have, I struggled to find even a single anecdote where I go like, “Yep, that really pivoted our decision making.

(15:47): We took a different path. We rethought something.” At the best of times, it lined up with our intuitions. One of the longest studies we did was really analyzing how everyone used the product and what it turned out to be for Basecamp was that the two most important features were messages and to-dos. And I’m like, “Okay, I guess that’s nice to have quantified, but I could also have told you that. “ Maybe the quantity by which these two are the most important features was mildly interesting to see, but in no way did it really drive what we then did the next Monday. And I think that’s the problem with so much of the analytic firepower that’s being thrown at products. Unless it’s going to change your mind, unless it’s going to change your decisions about what you do next, why are you doing it? Are you in fact just doing it for vanity?

(16:40): Are you doing it because that’s what you’re supposed to do? Are you doing it because it doesn’t feel professional to trust your gut on product decisions? And if so, rethink that. Your gut is an amazing data muncher and cruncher and you will usually find if you have fed it a steady diet of inputs and experiments over years that you’re, and maybe not even years, that you’ll make great decisions. I mean, some of the best decisions we’ve made on the product side were decisions we made right around launch in 2003 when we knew nothing about running a SaaS business. Ignorance, in fact, is vastly underrated when it comes to novel decision making. You don’t know what you don’t know, you don’t know where the lines go, you don’t know what the box is supposed to look like. And what quantification does it really draw out the boxes.

(17:33): Here’s where it goes, here’s if you move this lever, it’s going to do this. Yeah. Okay. You’re examining all the stuff that you can quantify. You’re examining all the stuff you can measure and some of the stuff you can measure and some of the stuff you can quantify is important to some degree, but unless you’re weighing it up with all the stuff that can’t be measured, all the stuff you can’t quantify, you’re going to get a really wrong picture of your business. You’re going to get a wrong picture for customers want. You got to get a wrong picture of what future customers who aren’t even talking to you might want. All of that relies on intuition. All of that relies on gut instinct. And I found that when we had a really high powered data function, it was quite often at odds with that way of doing things, even from just a professional pride of people who are really good at crunching numbers, A, like to believe that the months long analyses that they do are worthy of doing because they’re actually going to impact decision making.

(18:34): And time and again, we would greet a report like that with serious curiosity, “Oh, I’m really interested in that.” And then we wouldn’t do anything that it said we should do. We would just go with the direction that felt right. Oh, that’s a bit of a frustrating work environment, I think. Well, I know because I had one-on-ones with many of these former data analysts, because I also liked the numbers actually, right? It’s actually taken me maybe more than 10 years to realize that when we launched Fizzy, for example, that we did not want any instrumentation at all. And it required me to be disappointed time and again with the amount of impact that these analyses could have and did have on our business and my faith in what they even should have. And now we don’t really have that. We have not a data analytics function as much as we have a financial function that can do some data analytics stuff.

(19:32): We have Ron, our head of finance, who’s very good with numbers, is not a trained data scientist in terms of the other capacities that we had before, but it’s enough. Ron would have caught if we redesigned the homepage of Basecamp and for six months we were 20% off our conversions. That would ping out in the numbers. So I have a great respect for the bean counting in that regard. Someone should be watching the beans, maybe not like every hour, but probably like every week. I’d hate to go more than a week if the beans are just all wrong, right? Someone’s got to manage those beans, but from the perspective that like, I’m counting what you are doing, I’m not telling you what you’re like, I’m not reading the beans like their tea leaves and then telling you, you got to go west or you got to go south or wherever you got to go. I’m just telling you what’s what. You want to redesign the page? Great. I’ll tell you where the beans are next week.

Jason (20:32): The other thing I was going to add to that is that I’m willing to concede that some other team that’s super data driven could find something we haven’t found and do something we haven’t done and sell 15%, 20%, 30% more Basecamp. It’s certainly possible. At the same time, the way I tend to look at things, and it doesn’t make a lot of sense, I know to many, is just like, we’ve got a pretty damn good business just doing it the way we want to do it. And we’ve built a great business and we employ great people and we take home a lot of money and we pay people well. And whatever it is that we’re doing is working out really, really well enough, more than enough for us. So could we squeeze 15% of growth out of something that we can’t grow any further than what we can grow naturally?

(21:17): Maybe so, but what would that do to us? Would we want to work in that environment? Would we want to be that way? That doesn’t excite me personally. So yeah, I’m willing to concede that there might be more juice to squeeze, but like, so what? And as long as I think you have, like we’re in a good position because we have a very profitable business and somehow we’ve hit on some formula that works really, really well for us and for our business and for the size we want to be. But if you don’t have that, maybe you do have to go seeking out the numbers and squeeze this and squeeze that to try to find your thing. But once you found your thing, there’s also a place where you’re like, “We figured out what we are really good at. We want to run a business that way and that’s what we’re going to do. And it’s one of the beauties of just running your own thing.

David (22:00): This is the luxury of running your own thing, is you’re not accountable to the full squeeze. You’re not accountable to the full return. You can leave something on the table, you can leave some juice unsqueezed. And I actually have more self-confidence in that model than I’ve ever had. And the reason why is that we keep seeing time and again, the people who want to squeeze everything for the maximum return flaming out spectacularly, burning up great businesses that have decades of history behind them because they did little games, they did little tweaks, they optimized this quarter. I think actually the parody of capitalism is private equity, is MBA thinking, is all of this stuff where like, “I don’t care what I sell, I just want to sell a little more, a little quicker at a higher profit.” And it turns out that that’s not even good financial advice because you end up destroying these companies and maybe you get some short-term benefit.

(23:06): And in some cases, you know what, the company wasn’t worth saving or couldn’t be saved, but in plenty more cases, it absolutely was. One of the examples that come to mind is Toys R Us. So Toys R Us was this amazing American retailer that’s been around for a really long time. And I remember taking trips in there and going like, do you know what? As a former kid, existing kid, current kid, I like being around a lot of toys. And just, what a loss. What a loss that that business got plundered by private equity, loaded up with debt and instruments and blah, blah, blah. And it just went to shit. Jason and I were discussing this at lunch the other day. How many times have a founder handed over the reins to someone who were really good at counting those beans as we’ve talked about?

(23:54): Howard Schultz did it with Starbucks. I think he’s done it twice and twice has had been a bit of a disaster. Michael Dell handed it over and Sergei Brin was actually the example that came to mind. This is a curious case where we don’t know all the facts behind the scenes, but it does seem that Google’s current high riding trend in AI where they’re really getting back into the game is powered by the fact that Sergei’s back in the arena and he’s running essentially as a shadow CEO. There are countless example of this. There’s countless examples of founders handing over to someone who’s good with the numbers, who could do a little more squeeze, who could find something, and then it looks maybe okay, maybe it even looks good in the short term and in the long term it looks like total crap. I wrote a wrong post about this citing Intel and Boeing as two of the American giants that have been hollowed out by this private equity, MBA, short term thinking. And it’s even hard to defend against people who take those examples and then charge capitalism with being this extractive way of working, having and running an economy

(25:03): Because they really are just, they should piss everyone off. Even the most ardent capitalists is like, this was dumb. Not only did you besmirch the name of capitalism by running it so poorly, you injured the goddamn shareholders that are supposed to be at the center of why you’re doing all this stuff because of your stupid short term thinking. This is one of the reasons I’m such a big fan, and again, this is self-serving as hell, but of founder run businesses, that they could do these things where like, do you know what? I don’t know how to quantify it right now, but this is the right thing to do. We’re not fucking taking any of the peas out of the pea soup. I don’t know how many are in this pea soup, but you could take two of them out and we could save like 1.74 million over the next year, but we’re not doing that.

(25:49): You don’t mess with the goddamn recipe because you don’t know what’s the load bearing in here. You don’t know of what time when you try to squeeze once more was once too many and suddenly customers go like, they’re off. They’ve failed. They’re not the same anymore. You lose that intangible brand affiliation. And I feel like that happens way more, way more often when you have that MBA private equity thinking, running the ship, rather than someone who gives a fuck about what they’re making and why they’re making it and how they’re making it. And it’s okay with these kind of fuzzy concepts of like, I want to make something good. Let’s put more into it. Let’s make the inside of it look nice. Let’s produce it in a way where we just smile, right? Let’s put in some fucking Easter eggs. Let’s have a little fun music.

(26:37): Let’s have something that’s unprofessional, just fun, just whatever. Oftentimes these are the things that just spark that magic, that connection to a customer, and they will reward you with a very nice business, if you can do that consistently over a long period of time. And if there’s one thing these MBA heads, and I’m really putting on the stereotypes, there are plenty of people who A, know business and can also not be total shit heads at the same time. I don’t know how big the vent diagram overlap is, but it’s there. And you know what? You’re even bad at the thing you’re here to do. You’re bad at the beans, you’re bad at the long-term thinking, you’re bad at the equity increase of rewarding stockholders. So sometimes just like maybe just sit down and let some people who don’t count all the things run the ship.

Kimberly (27:26): Okay. Last quick question before we wrap it up. We’ve talked about this being a founder-led company. In previous episodes, we’ve talked about founder-led marketing and we’ve also talked about marketing being the transfer of enthusiasm. So I’m going to bring those all together. How do you guys, after you’ve launched a new product like Fizzy or any of the other products you guys have launched, keep the enthusiasm going? How do you yourselves stay enthusiastic enough about it after launch to then transfer that enthusiasm to other folks?

Jason (27:55): Well, I mean, you got to be excited by the thing you made and you can’t fake it. I guess you can fake it. At some point, people will notice, but it’s also fake to, in my opinion, it’s fake too to sustain that level of enthusiasm for nine months in a row. That’s also false. So there’s a peak here and then it kind of slides and then you want to maintain because you’re excited about the thing and you use the thing and you’re excited about new features and new ideas that you launch and all that stuff has to happen, but you can also smell fake enthusiasm. And so you have to be very careful not to be like that too. Look, you’re not going to be as pumped nine months later about the thing you just launched. You’re just not going to be. You might be pumped in spikes about a new feature you launched for the thing, but broadly, you got to chill and let other people be enthusiastic about it and let other people talk about it because they’re meeting it for the first time and they get excited about it and you can promote them and lift them up.

(28:47): I think that’s kind of the best way to do it. But I think you just ultimately have to follow what’s real about you and yourself and the product and how you feel. And there’ll come a time with Fizzy and with Basecamp and everything else, or like you move on to other things and you still love the thing, but you move on to something else. And that’s where your enthusiasm and focus is, and then you continue to nurture and maintain the other thing that you’ve made, but your enthusiasm is going to bounce around and that’s only natural.

Kimberly (29:16): Perfect. Well, we’re going to wrap it up there. Rework is a production of 37signals. You can find show notes and transcripts on our website, 37signals.com/podcast, full video episodes, or on YouTube. If you have a question for Jason or David about a better way to work and run your business, leave us a voicemail or a voice recording. You can do that at 37signals.com/podcastquestion or email us at rework@37signals.com.