HP has joined Best Buy and Yahoo! in an attempt to turn back the clock on remote working. Like the other two wounded, flailing giants, HP undoubtedly yearn for the late 90s, when they all were flying high. But reenacting the work principles of decades past is not likely to make mana rain from the sky again.

Neither is the hilarious corporate doublespeak that’s being enlisted to make the case. Here’s a choice bit on just how important employees are to the Vapid Corporate Slogan of The Day.. uhm, I mean HP Way Now:

Belief in the power of our people is a core principle of the HP Way Now. Employees are at the center of what we do, we achieve competitive advantages through our people. HP has amazing employees who are driving great change.

So we have great people, but we can’t trust them to get anything done unless we see butts in seats from 9-5? Who cares whether all these great people have designed a lifestyle around not having to commute long hours or live in a given city. That’s all acceptable collateral damage in the “all hands on deck” playbook for sinking companies.

Here’s a few thoughts: Perhaps HP isn’t sinking because Jane works from home, avoids the commute, and has more time to spend on hobbies and family? Perhaps HP is sinking because of strategic and managerial mismanagement? Perhaps morale won’t actually improve until the beatings stop?

It’s sad when you see once-great companies reduced to this smoldering mess of mistrust and cargo culting. But hey, at least we know now the pitch of the whistle that says its time to abandon ship. It’s “all hands on deck”.

Today we introduce a new miniseries: “Remote Works,” a collection of short interviews with folks at companies who made the switch from office to remote work. If you’d like to share your story, get in touch.

Name: Abhishek Rai
Title: Founder
Company: Shack Co.
Based in: New Delhi, India
Established: 2007
Employees: 7 (4 local; 3 remote)

What does Shack do?
We build and maintain community knowledge tools. We just launched Beanbuffs, a community of coffee lovers focussing on coffee, music and food. We also run a knowledge games platform called KnowQout.
Why did you make the transition to remote work?
We didn’t start out as a remote company — in fact, we started based out of New Delhi, in the northern part of the country. Then last year we transitioned from a web services company to a product and content company.
One of the inspirations (to transition to remote work) was Getting Real and Rework. 37signals has been a huge inspiration for us. Another was Bo Burlingham’s Small Giants: Companies That Choose To Be Great Instead of Big. A few of my favorites from the list are Clif Bar & Co., Union Square Hospitality Group, Zingerman’s and Anchor Brewing. 
When we first thought of developing a tool for ourselves, we hired a consultant who worked on the tool for nearly a year. What we got in the end was a disjointed software which had all the features in the world, but it was useless. I spent time reading and soul searching and came to the conclusion that it’s only us who can develop a tool for ourselves, not a consultant. This is when remote working as a concept helped me. I managed to get the right people to work with. 

Did the transition to remote work coincide with your transition from web services to products and content?
We decided we’ll build our own product, and I started looking for designers and writers for the platform, and we could not find them here. We found someone who was located in western India, and someone who was based in the southern part of the country. We met them; we liked what they were doing. But we were scared because we’d never worked like that before. We just gave it a try, and somehow it worked for us.
Why were you scared?
The kind of work I’ve been doing, I always supervised people. They used to sit in the same place. We used to hold morning scrum meetings where I would assign tasks to everyone, and they would report back to me in the evening with the end of the day report. You had to sit and show that you’re working. I also believed that if you’re not sitting there, staring at your screen, then you’re not working. If I hired someone somewhere else, I don’t know if that guy is texting throughout the day or spending time on Facebook. Most of the bigger companies in India block Facebook; they block Twitter. I’m against that; I’ve never done it, but I did have this fear that if people are not in front of my eyes that they’re not working.
So that was one big reason, because I was used to supervising. But I had to give that up, and I’m very happy that I don’t have to supervise; it just worked. I don’t care if they’re watching movies, if they’re listening to music, if they’re going out — as long as they get my work done I’m very happy.
What do you see as the major benefits of being a remote company, and of letting employees work offsite?
Number one is less supervision — things are set out very clearly. You have to say things so clearly that others understand it and finish the job. Everyone knows what needs to be done when.
Number two is the availability of professionals. Now the world is open to me. There is a very interesting agency in London called Rule of Three, and they write very interesting copy. So I approached them; I would like to work with them. Earlier I was not willing to do that. That’s the flexibility I have now.
Number three: Things get done on time.
Any advice for other companies who are considering going remote?
They must — it’s as simple as that! They should. That’s the way forward, as long as you have connectivity, which is still an issue in smaller cities in India. For a country like us, it will take a lot more time. Nearly 60 percent of our population have mobile phones in their hands, but not even 10 percent have broadband connection in their homes. For something like this, you need broadband connectivity. Phones are very cheap, but connectivity is very costly in India right now and that’s something that needs to change.
Visit Shack Co.

Smart people in white coats have extensively studied commuting — this supposedly necessary part of our days — and the verdict is in: Long commutes make you fat, stressed, and miserable. Even short commutes will stab at your happiness.
— from REMOTE: Office Not Required, in bookstores Oct. 29

Are you commuting your life away? Email us with your sob story — we’ll publish the best (worst?) of them here on SvN. The winner (loser?) will receive a $100 gas card and a signed copy of REMOTE, to be mailed directly to your CEO!

Alexander Torrenegra is cofounder (along with his wife, Tania Zapata) of VoiceBunny and Voice123. This Q&A is part of our “Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud” series which profiles companies that have $1MM+ in revenues, didn’t take VC, and are profitable. It has been edited for length and clarity.
Tell me a little about VoiceBunny and Voice123.
Voice123 is a marketplace and VoiceBunny is a production house.

With Voice123, when you need a voice actor, you can post a casting call or you can perform a search, and once you find the voice actor you like, you talk to the voice actor directly and you transact directly with the voice actor.

In Voicebunny, you can post a casting call, you can search voices and you can also opt to simply give us a script and we’ll pick the voice for you. You pay us, and then we pay the voice actor fees that we have agreed upon with the voice actor previously.
How did you get started — what got you interested in this particular field?
I cofounded multiple companies. Then I met my wife, and she’s a voice actress. And I learned about the voice industry and how cool it is, and how widespread it is. If you pay attention, you’ll realize that every single day you probably listen to 100 different professional voices in radio, in TV, phone systems, broadcasting, video games, hotlines, anything you can think of.

By knowing Tania, I learned that finding a professional voice used to be really cumbersome. You had to go through a casting director, and a talent agent, and auditioning studios, and recording studios, and the union, and people who were in the middle of the process just to audit the payments and royalties. We realized, you know, maybe we can do this online and make it faster and actually allow people to talk to each other directly.

Both businesses ended up taking off relatively fast early on. That’s why were able to bootstrap. We didn’t require venture capital, since we came up with business models that we could have cash flow from the get-go.
So how did you fund yourself at first?
We had saved $30,000. Back in the day, we were consultants, doing online marketing consulting full-time. The rest of the day and on weekends, we would work on Voice123. Eventually Voice123 grew and we launched VoiceBunny. We invested our savings on pay per click, and that’s how we got the initial traction.
Can you tell me a little bit about the period between launch and profitability? Who were your first customers?
It took six months for us to become profitable. Initially, the first three months, the service was free, both for buyers and sellers (the voice actors). After three months we realized it was going to be quite difficult to charge money to the buyer, because they were not used to paying for the casting service, or the search service. We realized we should charge the sellers a subscription fee instead of a transaction fee — we don’t want to be in the middle of the transaction, because of the industry requirements. Usually there is a lot of paperwork signed between the voice actor and the client.

The other benefit of going with the subscription fee for the seller is that usually when a seller pays a subscription fee to participate in the marketplace, they are paying you, the marketplace, based on the amount of money they expect to make from the marketplace in the long term. That is great for a bootstrapped company because it gives the company cash flow early on, even if you don’t have a lot of buyers in the marketplace yet. So we took that money, and then we started looking for buyers. And since we had a great product, buyers came in really fast, and the word spread quite fast.

Before VoiceBunny and Voice123, getting a professional voice of 30 seconds used to take $3,000 and three weeks. After we launched, very quickly, the price average came down to around $400 and it took less than three days to complete the entire process. Now, today, it’s $200 and takes 24 hours with Voice123. With VoiceBunny, it’s $50 and it takes around 20 minutes. It’s way faster now than before.

If you listen to the free version of Pandora, most of the ads are created with the VoiceBunny platform.
What is your culture and work environment like?
We have an office in San Francisco and we have an office in Bogotá, Colombia. Research, development and operations and ops is done in Bogotá. Project management, marketing, and sales is one out of our office in San Francisco. We are almost a family. We always have lunch together at the offices. We hang out a lot after work. We make sure that every time we hire a person, we hire people that we would like to hang out with. We hire people that we would like to be friends with.

Because we have two offices, we invest heavily in making sure that we are highly connected. We communicate pretty well — for example, we have 24-7 video conferencing between the two offices. So we can simply come to the screen and wave hello. In fact, sometimes when we need somebody in a rush, we simply go and yell the name of the person and they’ll come running to the screen.

I hire people who are smarter than I am and do things better than I do. A good way of doing that is trying to hire former entrepreneurs. They usually have good advice, and they have experience. They value a lot the fact that we have been able to build a company bootstrapping it.

Why San Francisco and Bogotá?
We have offices in Bogotá because I’m Colombian and I went to college in Colombia, and that’s where I know most of my friends and tech people, so it was natural for us to build our tech team down in Bogotá. The fact that Bogotá doesn’t have a strong startup culture yet actually makes it easy for us to attract really top-notch top talent. We are kind of the 37signals of Colombia.

How many employees do you have? Are you growing your team?
Thirty. We are hiring tech people in Colombia and marketing people and sales people in San Francisco. Over 1,000 voice actors make most of their income thanks to Voice123 and VoiceBunny.
How is the company doing financially?
One of the benefits of being private is that we don’t have to share numbers. But something we are proud of is that this year we are doubling our income.
Congrats — how’d that come about?
The success we have had — great marketing people, having a great team. I usually try to hire people who do things much better than I do. When you do that, you surround yourself with really intelligent, amazing people, and the consequence is we are doubling in size this year. We expect to do the same next year as well.
What’s your ultimate vision — do you see yourselves selling the company in the future?
There is a quote by Thomas Edison: “My main purpose in life is to make enough money to create ever more inventions.” And that’s how I see the company. Our passion is to innovate; it’s not necessarily to make money. Making money is just a consequence of being really good at innovation. And whether we have the cash flow to continue innovating or whether we sell the company, as long as we can continue innovating, in this field or other fields, we are going to be happy.
What’s been the biggest challenge you’ve had to overcome as a company?
Learning how to be a leader. It’s very challenging. A good leader is a person who can share his or her dreams with others and have those others — the people listening to your dreams — make those dreams their own dreams, and work at trying to accomplish those dreams as hard as you do. And it’s not easy to achieve that. At least for me, it’s been difficult to learn that. Especially because I’m a tech person. And my logical intelligence is higher than my emotional intelligence, and leadership requires both. Fortunately my wife has a really high emotional intelligence, and I have learned a lot from her. I would not have been able to start this business without her as cofounder.
Is there anything you would have done differently, knowing what you know now?
I would have gotten mentors earlier on. There is a misconception that you [should seek outside capital] because angels and VCs are going to come with good advice, and I think they don’t have to be tied to each other. You don’t need to raise capital in order to get good advisors. You can and you probably should look for mentors and capital (if you ever need to raise capital) independently.

I didn’t look for mentors early on, because I thought people would only give me advice if I gave them the option of investing in the company. But later I realized that it’s not the case.

Today I have a really good board of advisors, not only for me, but for other executives of my team. The executives of my team, all of them have access to advisors, and if they want an advisor that we don’t have, I’ll try to find him or her for them. That has helped us a lot, because we ended up learning a lot of lessons the hard way just by hitting the wall. Mentors have allowed us to avoided many mistakes that we would have committed otherwise.
Has anything surprised you along the way?
How slow large enterprises are at adopting technologies. Initially I though that the success of companies like ours, and even companies like 37signals, was to get enterprise-level customers. It’s better to go after small businesses, early adopters. If you can convince them to use your service, eventually enterprises will follow, because they’ll realize that they’re going to have to adopt or they’ll lose. I was surprised to know that going after enterprise clients is not necessarily the best business approach. It’s actually smarter to go after the small clients.

I’m also surprised by the effect we’ve had in the lives of many people — we have many voice actors that are fulfilling dreams that before Voice123 and VoiceBunny they could have never fulfilled. Before Voice123 and VoiceBunny, the only way you could have done it was by moving to LA or New York City. Now you can live anywhere on the planet. Not only the fact that we have been able to achieve that, but how much they love us because of that — they really love what we have done. It’s a great surprise, to every now and then be hugged by somebody at a conference — they know you, but you don’t know them. It’s really nice.
Visit VoiceBunny and Voice123.
Read Torrenegra’s op-ed for Wired about immigration and bootstrapping.

Name: Chris Nagele
Title: Founder
Company: Wildbit
Established: 1999
Employees: 15 (10 local; 5 remote)
37signals user since: February 2004

Wildbit creates and supports web products that help businesses collaborate and communicate more effectively. Their main products are Beanstalk, a hosted service offering Git and SVN version control, collaboration tools and instant deployments for web apps, and Postmark, which helps businesses deliver and track transactional emails. Wildbit is among 37signals’ earliest customers, so it was an honor to speak with founder Chris Nagele about his company and how they use 37signals products. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You’ve been a Basecamp user since the product first launched, in 2004. Do you remember how you first discovered it?
I used to follow the 37signals blog before they did products, back when Jason was doing the 37better project. They would do something like, “here’s FedEx’s home page and what it looks like now, and here’s our take on what it would be if we designed it.” It was a really good way to show off their skills and build some marketing around it. I started following the blog and when they launched Basecamp, I thought it was a cool product and signed up.
What did you use Basecamp for, at first?
Wildbit was completely different from what it is today. Back then we used to build products or applications for other people, so we were mainly just a consulting company — we were using it to manage our projects with clients. It wasn’t until late 2009 that we switched away from consulting and focused on our own products.
When you’re building products for other clients, there’s much more of a service toward communicating with the client, to make sure they always know where you are in the project, how far along you are, whether you’re getting into scope creep or the project is going to cost more. So there’s more accountability in terms of communicating with clients or customers as you’re building the project. We would have milestones and a lot of to-do lists, and a lot of the discussion was around getting approval on certain concepts or discussing roadmaps and things like that.
We don’t do consulting anymore at all. It’s very similar to what 37signals did, where they built and designed products for other people, and then as their own products grew decided to focus on them 100 percent. That’s kind of the same path that we went.

What kinds of projects have you managed with Basecamp over the years?
We have two main products. The high-level description of what our products do is they allow software developers to collaborate more effectively.
One is called Beanstalk and it’s a version control and deployment service. Software developers around the world use it to collaborate as they build software and write code, and then as they write code and builds the products, they use Beanstalk to review and discuss with their team. Once it’s something that’s ready to deploy to servers and their customers, they also use Beanstalk to ship the code out to their customers.
Postmark is more of an infrastructure product. It allows software developers to send all their application email through Postmark, to make sure that they’re delivered to the inbox. Initially it sounds like an easy thing to do, but if you’re sending things like invoices or welcome emails or password resets or comment notifications like in Basecamp, getting an email to the recipient is extremely important. There’s a lot that goes on in the background.
So you used Basecamp to build both products?
Absolutely, yeah. As we were building Beanstalk — especially in the early days before bug tracking systems and things like that — we used Basecamp primarily to discuss the new features we were working on, to schedule milestones and to-do lists, roadmap planning, all of that. It’s interesting that the new Basecamp has evolved into less of a project management tool and more of a communication tool, because that’s how we evolved into using it anyway.
Can you give me an example of how you’re using Basecamp as a communication tool these days?
One thing we did for the summer was called ‘quiet days.’ We said ‘let’s set Monday through Thursday as regular work days, and then every Friday we’ll call it a quiet day.’ It’s a day you can work on something that’s not related to our road map, whether it’s reading a book on a new programming language or a new design process, or working on an open source project. So every Friday everybody would work on something they were interested in, and on Monday they would go into Basecamp and post what they did that day, what they learned. Basecamp was huge for that because they would post something they worked on, present it to the team, and the whole team would say ‘this is awesome!’ or discuss different ways to use it. A lot of ideas and new features came out of those quiet days.
How has your use of 37signals products evolved over time?
These days, since we’re focusing our own products, I would say the biggest difference is that we have different systems for managing tasks and bugs and things like that, and we primarily use Basecamp for communication and ideas. So as new ideas come up, or as we’re planning things internally in the company, we’ll use Basecamp to discuss them or plan around the calendar. It’s much more discussion-based than it is milestone or project planning.
We’re not using Basecamp Classic anymore because we never really did time tracking. We got completely away from milestones. These days it’s more for internal communication: vacation days in the calendar, any internal policies we have, project ideas and stuff like that.
We’re starting to use Highrise, because we started doing more customer development. Beanstalk is almost six years old; it’s grown very organically. We don’t do much advertising, we don’t really do any marketing, and we’re just now starting to say, ‘what else can we do?’ And that’s where Highrise came in — all these customers use us, and the only time we talk to them is when they have a problem. I want to reach out to customers more when they’re not having a problem. I just want to hear from them. So we’ve started to use Highrise a lot more to kind of keep a log as we reach out to customers — who they are, what they do, are they launching a product soon? And if they are, maybe we can congratulate them on that and send them stuff on their first anniversary.
What’s your work environment like, and how do 37signals products contribute to your culture?
Back when we started using Basecamp we were a 100 percent remote company. It was just myself and my wife here in Philadelphia, and the rest of our team was in Bulgaria, in Serbia, Russia, Ukraine, Germany — really, our entire team was spread out. Since we’re all not sitting in the same office, we use Campfire as that way to feel like we’re all together in the same room. We used Basecamp to communicate, and with a remote team that was extremely important. If somebody had an idea or wanted to discuss something they could do that while we were sleeping and then we could wake up and continue the discussion.
These days we actually have most of our employees in Philadelphia, but our use of tools like Basecamp and Campfire hasn’t changed. Even though we are all in the same office, we still carry the remote team mentality of respecting each other’s quiet time. By using Basecamp, we can post messages and request feedback that people can respond to when they have time, instead of yelling across the room or walking up to their desk. The funny side effect is that our office can be eerily quiet during the work day. A remote team has been a big part of our culture and tools like Basecamp make that process possible, even when some of us might be sitting right next to each other. But that’s been an interesting transition for us. You’re used to remote work all the time and being on your own, and now you have to actually interact with people!
It’s been such a crazy experience for us to have people in the same room, but also maintain the benefits of a remote culture. We used to really enjoy quiet time all day long, and now with everybody in the office, it’s productive but at the same time you kind of find it hard to escape sometimes.
That’s kind of the opposite path a lot of companies are taking now, going from remote to an office versus the other way around.
Totally, yeah. I think there’s tons of value in remote work, and I think it’s really important that people understand the value in it. But there’s also tons of challenges in it as well, but you can’t figure them out until you try it.
What kinds of challenges did Wildbit face?
The biggest challenge for us has always been hiring the right people to fit into our culture, especially being remote. When you’re hiring remote people you have to hire someone who is really a self starter — kind of a mix between an entrepreneur and somebody who wants to work for a company. Finding that type of person is really difficult. Over the years, we’ve definitely learned how to build and grow a remote a remote company better, but with a lot of trial and error as well.
What discoveries have you made about that process?
Being able to know when somebody either doesn’t fit in with the culture or isn’t working out — a lot of times that process is a lot more delayed than when you’re sitting next to somebody in the office, or working with them day to day. Trying to pick up on those cues through things like IM and Campfire and tools like Basecamp is a little more difficult, but over time you start to understand personality through more digital communication.

Visit Wildbit.

In Latvia, Draugiem is as much a household name as Facebook is everywhere else.

The majority of the world’s Latvian-speaking population — more than 1.2 million people — uses Draugiem.lv, a social networking site that launched back in April 2004, right when Facebook did.

“We are the last country in Europe standing against Facebook,” says Draugiem Group founder, Lauris Liberts. “We’re still larger than Facebook in Latvia.” He posits that’s because Latvians prefer homegrown brands: “Facebook is very international, Draugiem is very local. Latvia is a very small country. It’s unique. We don’t have room left to grow. All the people who might have joined are already using it.”

In 1999, Liberts was bussing tables in New York. The Internet bubble was at its peak. Intrigued by the abundance of startup fairytales, he wanted a piece — but he didn’t have a clue about the industry. He’d worked at a bank back home in Latvia, so figured he’d stick with finance and copycat a Latvian version of the Lending Tree model.

It didn’t go so hot. Liberts managed to scrape by and make enough for food and rent, until he met some small investors. They took out some small loans themselves; they started brokering their loans. But not everyone paid them back.

His first foray into online entrepreneurship may have been a dud, but Liberts is a hustler at heart. “I think my inner being is experimenting,” he says. “I just love to explore things, and I have to actually back myself off in order not to pursue every idea that comes into my mind.”

On the side, he’d come upon sites offering customized shirts — so he built one of his own. Customers could enter text, preview it on the shirt, and place their order. It was a one-man operation; production was outsourced. The shirt business was small, but more successful than the Lending Tree lookalike.

“I needed to advertise but I didn’t have any money,” Liberts recalls. “So I thought, ‘OK, let’s build something myself that is popular, so I can advertise my shirts.’” He explored different dating sites and social networks, and found Friendster (aw, remember?). “That’s when I got the bug,” he says.

Undeterred by his first inauspicious copycatting attempt, Liberts and his partner, Agris Tamanis, built a simple, invite-only site based on the Friendster format. “Initially, I thought if I get 10,000 people, I could advertise my shirts, he says. “That’s how it all started.”

“We obviously invited our friends,” Liberts says. “Those friends invited their friends, and we saw these little communities springing up all across the country. ... I think on the first day we registered a couple hundred. On day two we registered 1,000. From then on it just snowballed. For the first three years, we were struggling enormously keeping up with traffic. Our servers crashed; we didn’t have any knowledge of how to scale.”

For instance, the script triggered by a new friendship request had to run through all the relationships in the database, and the site was so slow it could take up to three days to accept it. Draugiem hired some hotshot programmers and decided to rewrite the entire site from PHP to C++, but not before the original site completely broke down. “We had not finished the new version,” Liberts remembers. “I just made this leap of faith that for three days we would be offline.” He sat up on Christmas night, fretting about competitors and wondering whether the venture was doomed. “It was lonely, yet a very interesting time.”

That vulnerability — the threat that despite its early popularity, there were no guarantees it would last — galvanized the company’s first efforts toward diversification. Their first startup, the GPS system Mapon, was established in 2006 and laid the foundation for the Draugiem Group. In 2008, they launched the SMS service that became Text2Reach.

Liberts and Tamanis were approached by VCs, but never really took the bait — “VC funding is not that popular back in Europe,” Liberts says. Of all the startups in Draugiem Group’s incubator, only Vendon, a remote vending machine service, benefited from outside investment. The group also partnered with Lattelecom, Latvia’s largest internet and telecom service provider, for a short while: back when Draugiem was having trouble scaling their servers, they agreed to hand 30 percent of their income over to Lattelecom in exchange for hosting on their service. The barter didn’t work out, and Draugiem bought itself out of the agreement. They’re currently running on about 200 servers of their own.

Today, Draugiem Group is an umbrella organization that along with Draugiem.lv, houses 16 startups including a daily deal site, a time tracking app, even a custom bracelet company, among others. Last year’s revenues totaled more than €14 million (Latvian law requires public financial disclosure even for privately held companies), and profits of nearly €800,000. Most of the group’s 100+ employees work out of the company’s swanky office in Riga, Latvia, although a couple work in the satellite office located in Burbank, Calif.

Draugiem invests substantially in employee wellbeing and morale, with shorter hours in the summer, office catering, and company parties and retreats. Liberts and Tamanis are both late sleepers, so it’s not unusual for them to roll in around 11 a.m. “That’s an acceptable hour,” Liberts says. “You can get burned out. It’s not sustainable in the long term if you are putting in 10- to 12-hour days.” He describes the culture as open and flat, so “anyone can stand up to anyone” and no one is more important than anybody else. “We want people to make stuff they’re interested in,” says Liberts. “If you’re not fond of doing this particular job but you … want to switch to phones, learn a new language, we encourage that.”

Such liberality comes easily when you’re basically building companies for fun. “Work is not all about maximizing profit,” Liberts says. “Work is a lifestyle.” He encourages anyone who wants to start a business to go ahead and do it, “if they think that there’s a chance of them succeeding — but avoid all the buzzwords that are out there on there on the Internet: cloud, big data, social monitoring. When you have these new technologies springing up, like Twitter, there are hundreds of wannabe services. In the end it’s not the best service that wins, it’s the most well-connected, deep-pocketed business.”

What’s worked for Draugiem is a sustained effort to find under-the-radar, unique niches that can still flourish as a business, Liberts says. “We kind of have a key to the Latvian soul, and that might be what’s working.”
Visit Draugiem Group.

“Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud” is a Signal vs. Noise series highlighting profitable companies with $1 million+ in revenues that didn’t take VC.

Customers don’t just buy a product — they switch from something else. And customers don’t just leave a product — they switch to something else.

The last workshop sold out in just a few days, so if you‘d like to attend, register now.
It’s in these switching moments that the deepest customer insights can be found. On the 27th of September, a select group of 32 people will attend a unique, hands-on, full-day workshop to learn about “The Switch”.

Most businesses don’t know the real reasons why people switch to — or from — their products. We’ll teach you how to find out.

The workshop will be at the 37signals office in Chicago. The cost to attend is $1200. The workshop will be led by 37signals and The Rewired Group.

You’ll participate in live customer interviews.

You’ll learn new techniques for unearthing the deep insights that most companies never bother to dig up.

You’ll understand why people switch from one product to another and how you can increase the odds that the switch goes your way.

And you’ll be able to put everything you learned to immediate use.

There’s only one simple requirement: You’ll be asked to bring something with you. It won’t be a big deal. Details will be provided one week before the workshop.

Spots are limited. Only 32 people will be able to attend and participate. Want to be one of the 32? Register now. We will see you on September 27.

Last December, Sam posted the following in our “37signals Newsroom” Basecamp project:

I’ve been trying out an experiment over the past few workdays: when someone asks me for help with something, I show them how it’s done.

In an on-call case, it means copying and pasting the console transcript, cleaning it up a bit, and adding some descriptive comments. ... Other situations call for a different approach. Jamie came to me with a JavaScript problem this afternoon, so we took an hour and paired together on a solution via screen sharing.

Now, the other party might not fully understand the explanation, but I think it’s a positive change to assume that everyone is curious to learn how things work rather than too busy to care. Repeated exposure to these explanations might spark an interest that would otherwise go unexplored.

And obviously there is a practical limit to the amount of time and effort we can put into such explanations. In theory, though, spreading the knowledge means the people who ask you for help are more likely to be able to solve those problems themselves.

So I invite you to try the experiment with me. The next time someone asks you to do something, walk them through your process, or write it up for them to read.

Jason chimed in:

Yes please. This is a great initiative. Whenever someone does something for someone else, let’s make sure it’s taught, too. It’ll be slower in the short term, but faster and better in the long term. 

Since then, we’ve all gotten a little more conscious about teaching one another to fish. Recently, I was frustrated I lacked the skills to update basecamp.com. Mig jumped in and offered to show me some HTML and CSS basics. It’s “one of the most empowering things anyone here at the company could learn,” he told me. “I’d be more than happy to show you the ways.” Rad. Thanks, Mig.

Everyone in the company works at least one day a month answering support tickets, and the support team buddies up with non-support folks to share solutions for the more complex cases. Programmers often share the code they used to solve a problem with support, which encourages support to try to solve similar issues themselves next time. Designers and programmers swap intel all the time. Here’s what Jonas has to say about working with Trevor:

He’s continually helping me get better at programming, and has been super patient and encouraging. He frequently suggests that I tackle certain problems, takes time to help me out when I have questions, and reviews my code when I’m done.

I’ve tried to return the favor a bit by helping him work through some design problems and CSS.

I think this mutual learning approach and easy back-and-forth has had real benefits to the app, too. Even though it seems like it would be counterproductive to take the extra time, I think we’re ultimately more productive because we can work on different projects simultaneously, then chat a few times a day to figure out the remaining tricky stuff.

We weren’t not working this way before, but it wasn’t an institutionalized value or anything. Making a conscious, enthusiastic effort to work with, not for, each other, has expanded our horizons, empowered us with new skills, and made us a more well-rounded company.

I’m a huge geek when it comes to the Apollo space program. I’ve got an autographed photo from the Apollo 11 crew hanging in my office alongside a piece of the parachute line from that mission. My grandmother worked with the NASA team in Huntsville, Alabama, in the 1960s so every time I see her I try to get another story of that era out of her.

Recently I’ve been reading “Chariots for Apollo” from Charles Pellegrino and Joashua Stoff. It’s one of my favorite books on the race to the moon.

One section tells the story of Tommy Attridge, a Grumman test pilot assigned to the lunar module (LM) program. The Grumman Corporation received the contract to build the craft that would carry astronauts down to the lunar surface. However, the LM team kept second guessing themselves with their designs and decisions. Their line of thinking was, “This craft would put a man on the moon so it had to be perfect!”

When he arrived at the Grumman plant in 1967, Attridge focused on one question – “Must we build it better?” And he learned very quickly that better is the enemy of best.

Enter LM-3 (lunar module-3). An engineer finished installing the landing radar on it only to tell Attridge, “We have the best radar in the world today. But tomorrow, I can make it better because just yesterday they invented this new transistor. And if I can put the new transistor in here and add this integrated circuit. You know, now we that we have integrated circuits, we can build it better.”

Tommy answered, “Sure. Why not? We can keep putting a better one in every day. Let’s see if we can’t stretch this thing out till 1990.”

Every new day brings new gadgets and gizmos. Whatever project or product you’re working on, there’s probably something that will make it just a tad bit better tomorrow. And a little bit better the day after that. And a smidge better the following day. But for every thing that makes it better, it means one more day of not shipping.

That engineer ended up going over Attridge’s head to get the landing radar replaced. With the “better” choice came new problems as it kept locking up on itself, which made the new tech worthless. That choice ended up delaying LM-3 so that Apollo 8 launched without it. The Apollo teams found themselves even farther behind in the space race.