A company is essentially two things: a group of people and a collection of decisions. How those people make these decisions is the art of running a business. This page details how we do it at 37signals.
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Jason Fried
@jasonfried
Founder & CEO at 37signals (makers of Basecamp and HEY). Non-serial entrepreneur, serial author. No DMs, email me at jason@hey.com.
world.hey.com/jasonJoined April 2008
Jason Fried’s Tweets
BTW I may be writing about a variety of things during my time away from work.
If you want to follow, subscribe to my newsletter over on HEY World here:
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Today's my last day of work for a while. I'm headed out on sabbatical. Aside from a short trip to New Zealand and Australia, nothing's planned beyond basic family obligations. Eager to have open space, and an open mind. Cya back here in March.
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Always a blast to talk with on his 20VC podcast. We just caught up for another wide-ranging episode about leadership, teams, running to/from things, no goals, office politics, and a bunch more. Fun one for sure.
Here's the episode:
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Really loved chatting with about figuring it out as you go, the power of independence, working remotely, and doing things no one would ever give you permission to do.
Episode here:
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PODCAST: Customer success and the role of community – Interview with Elaine Richards of 37signals, makes of and Hey bit.ly/3jj4qo4
Check it out. It's a doozy to finish the year on :)
Hat tip to and
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Starting off the new year by shipping three new often-requested Basecamp features: To-do Templates, Group Autocomplete, and Required 2FA.
Full details here:
updates.37signals.com/post/new-to-do
All live in your Basecamp 4 account today. Also available to all new customers who sign up now.
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if you’re a founder looking for strong signal in all the noise, is it.
we’ve successfully put many principles talk about to work.
principles *known* deep down, but in need of affirmation.
I’m grateful!
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INTERNSHIPS: For the first time in years, we are opening up three engineering internships this summer (June 5 - Sept 1). These are paid internships ($2000/week, 4-day weeks), and fully remote.
Full details are available here:
apply.workable.com/37signals/j/41
We're excited to meet you.
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Strong agree. We read this article from a few years ago and moved to basecamp with a focus more on long form writing. Basecamp in general is less distracting and more focused on async comms.
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This is the portable laptop standing desk product I wanted to invent. Glad someone else did it. Been using this for a couple days so far and finding it simple enough, effective enough, and good enough. Has its quirks, but it's solid.
Well done:
designnest.us/products/levit8
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How lovely! Thanks for sharing that pic, thanks for being a customer, and all the best to your family in 2023.
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I don’t know if you can tell, but we’re big fans of @heyhey! Lovely gift of merch from the wife. 
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A feature doesn't work, so you fix the bug. Or did you?
Where's the bug?
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Beauty of Numbers
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...plus, running is the only job I'd ever want. Luckily it's the one I have. Wouldn't leave it, or trade it, for any other job anywhere.
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And, to be clear (since people are asking), I'm both disinterested and unqualified to run a company of thousands of people. I have the profit thing down (23 straight years!), but I'd be lost in a sea of abundance with that many people. Small and scrappy is my thing.
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Out of all the people publicly vying/crying/begging for the Twitter CEO job, which ones have run a profitable company? Or run a company that was profitable for at least 3 years in a row?
Twitter doesn't need to turn a personality, it needs to turn a profit.
cc:
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NEW PODCAST: Customer success and the role of community – Interview with Elaine Richards of 37signals, makes of and Hey bit.ly/3jj4qo4
Check it out. It's a doozy to finish the year on :)
Hat tip to and
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Note: At this time, this promotion only applies to hey.com accounts, not HEY for Domains (custom domain/business) accounts.
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Hey! Help us spread the word about HEY and we'll pop some credit on your account. Here's how it works: updates.37signals.com/post/new-in-he
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If you're a small business owner & have yet to read Rework by & , you should. Here's a page that hits a crucial nail squarely on the head. The book is a big word hammer designed to beat the shit out of bureaucracies & popular/crappy business ideologies. Read it 👊🏼
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"When discussing software design techniques, actual code should be a mandatory ingredient... Most takes on software design techniques make such comparison impossible because they don’t include real code. By real code I mean code extracted from real apps."
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"You don’t cut corners or quality, you cut scope, and if you can’t, you scrap the project", from Your Estimates Suck. 37signals.com/podcast/your-e
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"Humans are terrible at estimating anything complicated that involves novel attempts at problem solving. So getting out of estimates and into appetites is the single most important thing we have done. You don’t cut corners or quality, you cut scope."
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Hey for Work is as game changing as . IMA got invite and set up last week (easy). I then took 5 days off. Logged in this morning & breezed through hundreds of emails (screened out a ton!) & now have all my Reply Laters cued up. Thanks ! I love work email again.
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New in HEY: Something you may not notice directly, but things will just seem to work better every day. tells the story.
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Really nice to see an "Unsubscribe" block in standard body copy size rather than the lightest possible grey at the smallest possible size hidden in a paragraph of unrelated text. No obfuscation here. This one is from Zingerman's. Bravo for clarity.
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The iPhone, 2007: An iPod. A Phone. An Internet Communicator.
The Casio QL-10, 1980: A Calculator. An Alarm Clock. A Lighter.
Who wins?
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When building something new, always start at the epicenter (basecamp.com/gettingreal/09), but start weird, novel, and unusual. You'll rarely get a second shot — especially later in the project — to try the unusual. The further along you go, the more conservative product dev becomes.
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“How do you validate if people will buy it to not?”
“How do you validate product market fit?”
“How do you validate if a feature is worth building?”
“How do you validate a design?”
You can’t.
You can’t.
You can’t.
You can’t.
VALIDATION IS A MIRAGE:
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You've heard of the 10x programmer, but it's really the 10x environment that brings you the biggest collective gains.
In this 37signals Dev Blog post, Alberto explains why he's been able to get more done here than anywhere else he's worked:
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Makes you wonder.
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You may never know the answer, but you'll always have a reason.
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"Were you able to shrink your operations team by moving to the cloud? That's the crux of the issue. Is there so much more productivity in the cloud that you can do the same with fewer people? No." dataprotectiongumbo.com/168-why-you-sh
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Game changer for KakarikoHerald.com since we have a limit on how long we're allowed to retain certain information. Up until this point, we've just used Google Drive or Dropbox, but now we can consolidate all that into BC4.
Thanks Basecamp team 💜
Cc:
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You'll also notice that Michelle takes full advantage of our fully remote work setup. Over this last cycle of work, she worked from Greece, The Netherlands, Switzerland, and Canada.
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Michelle, a product designer here at , takes you through how she spent a week working on bits of design, code, copy, and accessibility on a number of different projects for Basecamp and HEY.
And it's all on video:
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Very clever and interesting move from GM: They're repairing Teslas at GM dealerships.
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“Since deploying these interruptible exports, programmer toil (relating to exports) has gone down significantly, from a dozen failed exports per week, to zero.”
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