2005 / March 12^th/ Upright.

Or, how to jump head first into the deep end of the pool and land snow-skiing down Mt. Everest. If that last sentence didn’t make sense, maybe you better ask the guys over at 37 Signals to give you a hand, they seem to make sense out of everything. Lately I’ve been really getting hooked on 37 Signal’s Signal vs Noise. It’s one of those blogs who have actually had the power to change how I think about the web. Again.

So, to get back to this whole pool and Mt. Everest nonsense, I was aiming to use that as an analogy to 37 Signal’s. 37 Signals makes things that work.”)business plan. They’re a smart company. What do I mean a smart company? When you see commercials for IBM, they are constantly telling you that you have to “think on your feet” with modern business and be willing to adapt to the ever-changing world. Unfortunately, when IBM says that, they really mean buy a ThinkPad. But when I speak of thinking on your feet, I’m referencing how 37 Signals has managed to take a mediocre business plan and turn it into a gold mine.

If you haven’t had a chance to read Jason’s recent interview then I suggest you do, it’s a good read about how a company can change. To understand this in a larger context, you must first understand the company’s evolution, and I do use that word quite appropriately.

We wanted to launch a web design firm that was focused on clean, fast, usable designs, and our manifesto was a series of statements covering our feelings about web design.

- Jason Fried (37 Signals)

This was 37 Signal’s approach to their business in 1999. But if you look at them today, in all honesty, they do very little web design at all. In fact, you might say web design is the least of their services offered. If you look at a quote of how Jason describes their workload today, you can see an astounding contrast.

We spend about 80 percent of our time on our products and 10 percent on client work. The remaining 10 percent is reserved for whatever we need to spend some extra time on.

- Jason Fried (37 Signals)

What 37 signals did was saw a big hole in the web design world. They noticed that most web sites don’t work. They noticed that major players in the online world had terrible user interfaces, and that they were loosing customers because of it. So what did they do? They set out to offer services to help companies make their sites better. And you know what? They kicked the crap out of the web design world with utter simplicity and seldom-targeted goals like making applications simpler, rather than more complex.

Unfortunately, while this was a good idea and earned them some credentials, it wasn’t an amazing idea. It wasn’t Basecamp. It wasn’t Ta-Da Lists. Those were amazing ideas. 37 signals took a genre of applications that were becoming so involved with charts and graphs that the real use of them was beginning to fade into the distance.

Then they did something extraordinary. They ran with it. I know, it may seem stupid - but web design companies rarely release software. And, never before in my personal experience have I witnessed one company turn such a simple application into such a gold mine. Now, don’t get me wrong - Basecamp is a thing of genius - it is something that could only come from 37 signals - but it’s about as simple as an application gets. It doesn’t dynamically generate charts of user activity based on what country you came from and how many posts you’ve made. It doesn’t categorize products and automatically generate order reports and send out shipping slips to 12 factories around the globe. You know what? It just works. No extra features, no extra complication.

Here’s where I think 37 signals will continue to excel. They are now most definitely known as a software development company, and not a web design company. They are not known as the people who redesign FastWeb. They are known as the creators of Basecamp. Instead of pouring hours and hours into features, 37 Signals pours hours and hours into cutting out features. Feature creep is out. Feature hack is in.

So what have I taken from 37 signals personally? I’ve learned that while jumping in head first is a good idea, sometimes it’s smart to poke your head above the water and notice what you’re doing right that no one else is. Maybe you’ll even create your own Basecamp I expect nothing but the best from 37 Signals, and no doubt they will continue to amaze me. They are a continued source of inspiration, and have made me think about user interaction more carefully, and have made me realize that great user experience is not easy. It’s one thing to make a flash piece that will awe and ooh your audience. It’s another to make a piece of software with 10 features that beats out comparable pieces of software with 1000x the code, and 1000x the features.

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