There are many good reasons to be concerned about whether the internet industry is in another bubble. Once shaky, unproven businesses hit the NASDAQ, the chance that granny is going to lose her pension fund goes up big time. That’s the direct economic consequence that you’ve probably heard already.

What hasn’t been discussed as much are some of the secondary effects that a bubble has on the industry. Like how it gets harder to hire good people as a consequence. Sure, you may have heard of The War for Talent, but it’s much deeper than that. This is not simply about the latest tech darling not being able to find programmers in the Valley.

When bubbles inflate as fast as the most recent one, support infrastructure can’t cope. There just aren’t enough programmers, designers, operations people, and other warm bodies to man all the hot air balloons. So you have a predictable effect: Rapidly increasing demand for an only steadily increasing supply. Thus, inflation.

All this new demand is being fueled by the endless flows of cheap cash being pumped into the Valley (and everywhere else it can go). So the circle goes like this:

And every time we do a round, more talent gets trapped in the bubble, chasing things that can be flipped for the most money. Now in theory this is all good and well. Resources are allocated to the pursuits with the most economic value. So if Instapintora is worth $2 billion, of course they deserve to be able to hire 1,000 web builders, right?

That’s the same argument you’ll find for bridges to nowhere and other pursuits void of inherent economic and public value. Sure, people are being employeed, money is changing hands, but come Monday morning, the hangover is that we spent a bundle to build a lot of shit that’s not going anywhere.

As a result, we missed out on doing other worthwhile things. All those smart and talented heads, and all those benjamins, didn’t progress the economic base in a way we’re going to care about tomorrow. And that’s a damn shame.

We’re looking for another teammate. This time we’re looking for someone who is completely focused on improving conversion and retention. You love moving the needle, one small step at a time. This job is all about seeing untapped potential.

Conversion could be financial (get more people to start a trial or complete it – what we consider a “sale”), or outcome-based (inspire people to create more Basecamp projects by showing them creative ways to use Basecamp they never thought of before). Or something else.

Retention could be reducing cancellations, or reducing unsubscribes from our mailing list, or increasing the number of people who log into Basecamp every day. Or something else.

You should…

You should be great at figuring out which words or phrases hook people instead of letting them get away. We believe the right words at the right time can make all the difference.

You should look at a sign up form like… …and already know three ways to significantly improve conversion.

You should be great at understanding what motivates people. This requires deep insight into the decision making process. You should know why people buy, why people don’t buy, why people buy more of something they already have, and why people who bought decide not to buy any more.

You should look at a screen like… …and think to yourself – “if they rearranged this, highlighted that, or renamed this other thing, they’d increase sales by at least 25%.”

You should be great at knowing how to help people find value in something they already have. There are always more ways to use something than the ways you already use it.

You should look at a new project like… …and say “no, no, no… a better way to get someone started on a new project is like this…”

Or you should look at an email like… …and think “You’re missing a big opportunity to get more people to take action here. If we…”

Ideas and execution

This is not just a job for an idea person – it’s about ideas and execution. You’ll be expected to write the copy. You’ll be expected to implement the designs. You’ll be expected to shepherd ideas from start to finish – not just to toss them out there for other people to worry about.

You should love to propose, experiment, implement, execute, and measure. You may not be able to take everything on 100% yourself, but you try your best before you hit your limits and have to ask for help.

The challenge: Double our sales

We’d like to double sales over the next 12 months without making deep material changes to our products. We don’t believe it’s possible. Change our minds. Convert us.

Can you do it?

If this sounds like something you’re great at, we’d love to talk to you. This is a new position at 37signals, so you’ll be in charge of making it work.

You’ll be part of the best overall team in the business. From ops, to programming, to design, to support, to data, to video – we’re ready to work together to see your bright ideas through.

To apply

Send an email titled [Conversion] to [email protected] telling us why you’re the one. How you tell us is up to you.

Our office is based in Chicago, but our team is spread out all over the world. You can work from anywhere. We just require a few trips to Chicago a year when the whole company gets together.

We’ll be accepting applications until June 4.

This is a chance to do the best work of your career. We know you’re out there. Get in touch.

A year ago we put Sortfolio up for sale.

We entertained a variety of offers, met with a few potential suitors in person, and negotiated numbers. Ultimately nothing came together. Then we shelved the process so we could focus all of our efforts on designing and building the new Basecamp.

Sortfolio continued to run itself for another year, generating over $200,000 in profit for us during that time.

Our paying customer count continues to hover consistently in the 170s, each paying $99/month to be listed as a premium member.

The price

We’ve put Sortfolio on the clock: We either sell it by July 1, or we close it down. And we’ll make it easier this time so there’s no guessing: The price is $480,000, cash. No special deals, no partial payments now the rest later, no equity in your company, etc. $480,000 cash and it’s yours. Considering how much hands-off free cash flow it generates, we think that’s a very fair price. We just want it to go to a good home.

We’ve put next to no effort into it over the last year… If you put some effort in you should see significantly higher sales. With over 10,000 free accounts, there’s tons of untapped opportunity here in the existing customer base. And of course plenty more on the outside or in entirely different industries.

What you get

You get the design, the branding, the code (it’s a Rails app), the customers, and the steady cash flow. Since Sortfolio is hooked up to our centralized billing system, you’ll need to write your own code to charge customers. Also, since Sortfolio is hosted on our server cluster, no hardware is included (but you can run it on a cheap server or two – the hardware requirements are next to nothing). We’ll also be happy to announce the sale here on SvN and on our very well subscribed email newsletter.

Interested?

If you’re interested at $480,000, please email me direct at jason@37signals… Thanks.

“Oh, that’s not my job,” is the sound of doom. Maybe not imminent doom, but doom indeed. It’s the magic inflection point when a company becomes too big (even if only psychologically) for any single employee to give a rat’s ass about job numero uno: Making shit work.

No profession is immune. You can have designers who oh-thats-not-my-job to get the JavaScript they wrote to work, programmers who cry for operations to make their slow code run on time, operations people who refuse to answer customer complaints from their network outage, and on and on. Once the mentality cements, everything is eventually someone else’s job, and they’re being a toad for inconveniencing you with it.

And besides, it’s easy to put it on somebody else, right? Everybody else’s job is easy!

Departmental hedges grow fast and tall if not trimmed with vigor. It’s the natural path unless you take steps to fight it.

That’s why, at 37signals, we all chip in when lots of customers have questions after a new product launch and customer support is overwhelmed. It’s why programmers will wake up in the middle of the night if a sql query tipped over and needs an urgent rewrite until faster servers can arrive.

Don’t let your company culture become one where certain people are too good to do the jobs that need doing. Making shit work is everyone’s job.

The signs are all here: There’s now an incubator on every corner, even your uncle is donning angel wings, and IPO expectations for Facebook are exceeding the hype for a new Twilight movie. But that’s all circumstantial evidence. What we needed was some public testimony to really put everyone in the right frame of mind.

Enter our trusted troubadour of bullshit, TechCrunch:

My best guess is that it is about to get crazy. And, only fools sit on the sidelines. Many strong and older entrepreneurs that I know are wealthy today because they made intelligent decisions during the dot-com bubble of the late ’90s. Success was not easy then, and it will not be easy now, either. But, the likelihood of a great outcome is much higher in a boom.

There are a lot of newly minted entrepreneurs that pursue their dream company in a halfhearted way. You may tinker with your idea while toiling at a day job. You may refuse to put in the work required to recruit the best talent. You might be afraid of launching an imperfect product. Or, you may put a mediocre effort into fundraising.

Let me translate: Dude, you’re going to miss riding this bull onto the bubble if you do not get on it RIGHT. FUCKING. NOW! Didn’t you see that someone just made A BILLION DOLLARS? Why wasn’t that you, lazy schmuck? Don’t answer that—there’s no time to look at the past, just quit your job, and come out here to the Valley post-haste. Sand Hill road just scored a fresh load of loot.

Now I get the basic psychology. Someone just won the billion dollar startup powerball and now everyone wants to make sure they bought a ticket for the next drawing. And why not? While the past season of tech IPOs has been full of duds, we still have the big baller Facebook coming up for a shot. And if red 32 hasn’t hit for the last few IPOs, it’s bound to do for this round. COME ON LUCKY 32!!!

But let’s calm down. Sooner or later, the market is going to sort these things out, and all will be right as rain. That’s evident with the Groupon fiasco. They’ve restated their accounting numbers endlessly and the stock has finally tanked. At the end of the day, the rules of accounting will blow through all the smoke and the mirror will show a face with no make-up.

Are you calm? Good. Now get ready to rage right back up. The new JOBS Act that was just passed with the help of a thousand VCs stomping it down the throat of Congress undoes all that. Matt Taibbi from Rolling Stones reports:

Ostensibly, the law makes it easier for startup companies (particularly tech companies, whose lobbyists were a driving force behind passage of this law) attract capital by, among other things, exempting them from independent accounting requirements for up to five years after they first begin selling shares in the stock market.

The law also rolls back rules designed to prevent bank analysts from talking up a stock just to win business, a practice that was so pervasive in the tech-boom years as to be almost industry standard.

Now isn’t that swell. Enable people with an extreme financial incentive to spin the truth, or outright lie about the numbers, a 5-year get-out-of-jail cover, and what are you going to get? JOBS, silly! Duh!

Buckle your seat belt, Dorothy, ‘cause Kansas is going bye bye.

About three weeks ago we launched the all new Basecamp, and it’s been an exciting few weeks.

Since I’m a numbers kind of guy, I wanted to share some things I’ve seen in looking at the new Basecamp that are particularly exciting:

• This has been our strongest product launch ever. The new Basecamp is our fifth “big” product launch, and it’s our strongest yet in terms of signups in the period immediately after launch. With two weeks in the books, we had more than 3x more signups than we had in the same period after our last brand new product launch (for Highrise back in 2007). If you go all the way back to Basecamp’s original launch in 2004, signups for the new Basecamp were more than 30 times higher.


• We’ve brought in lots of new customers. About a third of new Basecamp accounts immediately after launch were from people who migrated their existing account, and about half were from people who previously held some sort of 37signals account before. While we’re thrilled to see so many of our loyal customers enjoying the new Basecamp, we’re even more excited to see so many new people trying Basecamp for the first time.


• Usage is fantastic. On a per account basis, new Basecamp accounts are creating twice as many projects and todo items as on Basecamp Classic, as well as more attachments, messages, comments, calendar events, and more.


• We have a great new marketing site. Jamie, Mig, and Jason F. really knocked it out the park with our new public site at basecamp.com. We’ve sustained substantially higher traffic levels from all kinds of sources more than two weeks after launch, and conversion rate is up 76%. We’re always testing new ideas here, but the early results are bright.


• Basecamp Classic continues to perform well. Plenty of existing customers continue to use Basecamp Classic. Retention rates haven’t dipped, and usage levels are right where they were before we launched the new Basecamp. This is great news – our strategy of maintaining two separate Basecamps (Classic and new) seems to be working so far with no ill effects.

We’re excited and encouraged by the first few weeks of the all new Basecamp. We have lots of great improvements planned for it in the coming weeks and months – we’re hard at work on a few already.

If you don’t have an account, get started with a 45-day free trial now, or join us for a free introductory class about the new Basecamp.

What if every question you asked your customers was multiple choice? And every question had an “I’m confused” option. How often would your customers choose that option?

If your whole business was laid out flat – every product, every promise, every price, every rule, every condition all on one surface – and you superimposed a heat map layer over it, where would the confusion hot spots be?

Everything you do as a business includes multiple choices for your customers. It doesn’t matter if you give them the choices – they have the choices. Features, benefits, prices, promises, support, etc. They can love it, hate it, be indifferent, etc. But they can also be confused. And “I’m confused” is the worst option of all. If your customers are confused, you’re in deep trouble. “I give up, unhappily” is next.

This is what clarity is all about. It’s about eliminating “I’m confused” answers. Lots of people think simplicity is the opposite of confusion (“It’s confusing, let’s make this simpler”). It’s not. The opposite of confusion is clarity.

Wow, what a week. The whole company was in town to launch the all new Basecamp. Launches are a mixture of exhilaration, stress, thrills, anxiety, joy, pride, surprise, and flat-out exhaustion. We’re experiencing all of these emotions, and plenty more.

All things considered, the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. We’re humbled by that. That’s not to hide the fact that there were rough spots, some confusion, and some questions. It’s been all hands on deck helping our customers with their questions and concerns while also listening intently and patiently to their praise and criticism. We have a lot more listening to do.

Where’s time tracking?

What was most interesting to us was the reaction around the lack of time tracking in the all new Basecamp. The people who rely on the time tracking feature in Basecamp Classic really rely on it. It’s still there in Classic, of course, but huge numbers of people already want to switch to the new Basecamp. That’s awesome. However, since the new Basecamp doesn’t offer time tracking, they don’t feel like they can make the switch yet.

We had nearly 1000 beta testers using Basecamp over the last few months. We heard about the lack of time tracking, but the lack of time tracking didn’t stand out as unique against the total field of feedback. Further, time tracking was only used by around 14% of paying Basecamp Classic customers in 2011. Based on beta feedback, and usage statistics, we didn’t anticipate such a strong visceral “no time tracking is a deal breaker” reaction. This was definitely a blind spot for us.

Deep understanding comes before designing

Our values have always revolved around designing the best software in the world to solve problems we intimately understand. The new Basecamp is the perfect representation of those values. It’s excellent at what it does. It’s our best work and it’s only going to get better.

However, since we don’t track time at 37signals, we don’t have a deep understanding of the time tracking problem. Plain and simple, this is why time tracking isn’t in the initial release of the all new Basecamp. We simply don’t understand it well enough.

We didn’t want to shoehorn anything into the new Basecamp that we didn’t understand well enough to feel confident in our design. We could have done something that might have simply satisfied people who were used to time tracking in Classic, but we’re not here to just do the bare minimum. We’re not here to simply satisfy. We’re here to make the best products in the world for our customers. We’re here to delight beyond expectations. We’re here to give people a combination of things they can’t get anywhere else.

Help us understand how and why you track time

Before we can commit to saying yes or no to adding time tracking in a future version of the all new Basecamp, we need to understand the problem better. It’s time to observe, study, learn, and understand how and why our customers track time.

If you’d like to help, we’d love to hear from you. Over the next few months we’ll be talking to customers 1-on-1 (via Skype video chat) for a more in-depth understanding of how people use time tracking.

We’d like to talk to you 1-on-1

If you’re interested in helping us understand how you track time, please fill out this survey. We’ll be contacting a select group of customers for the 1-on-1 interviews. We’re anticipating a lot of responses, so we won’t be able to talk directly with everyone, but we’ll do our best to come away from this experience with a deep understanding of what people need, expect, want, and dream about time tracking.

Thanks for reading, understanding, and helping us know your world a little better.

After a ton of very hard work, and lots of debates and decisions, we’re thrilled to be able to share the all new Basecamp with you.

This has been a company-wide effort. Every designer, every programmer, every sys admin, and every support team member were involved in building this product.

It’s completely new. Reimagined, rethought, and redesigned from the ground up. Everything was reconsidered. Every idea, every flow, every concept. Nothing was sacred – every idea and every feature had to fight for its place in this first version.

The new Basecamp features an entirely new innovative interface. All new code. Brand new tech. And some serious hardware backing it all up.

This is our best work. And it’s just the beginning. We have a lot of great ideas in store. But first we wanted to focus on the basics. Nailing the foundation so it’s strong and steady, easy and fast.

In many ways, this is our second chance to make a first impression. For many of our customers, Basecamp was the first time they’d ever used a project management and collaboration tool. Most used email. Or the phone. Or lots of in-person meetings. Basecamp was a whole new idea, something brand new, an opportunity to get organized and keep everything together.

This new Basecamp is a return to our roots. It’s focused on the basics. It’s even simpler and clearer than before. It’s super fast. And it’s useful for a whole new group of projects – short projects. Most project are small and short. The original Basecamp was overkill for most kinds of projects. The new Basecamp is perfect for projects of every size.

We think a whole new generation of customers will be introduced to a new way to manage their projects when they use the all new Basecamp.

Continued…