We’ve got a problem. We don’t know how to describe to average civilians just what it is that 37signals does.
Like when we’re at a cocktail party and someone asks, “What does 37signals do?” The answer typically starts with “a web software company…” and goes to something like “that helps small businesses organize information…” and ends with the other person snoring.
What do you think our hook should be for average people? What’s a good way to quickly describe what 37signals does that doesn’t put non-techies to sleep? How would you make what 37signals does sound interesting to civilians…in under 20 seconds?
Figure out the absolute least you need to do to implement the idea, do just that, and then polish the hell out of the experience.
David is interviewed in the piece and explains why “having a price is really cool for making profits.”
“[Hansson:] “You have customers, they pay you money for the product or service, and you get profits! It’s almost too simple to work.” Of course, 37signals didn’t come up with this idea on its own, either: “I’ve heard that over time—hundreds of years actually—this has been how most businesses have made their money. But somehow that notion got lost in the Web world.”...
“People tend not to look closely at the odds,” Hansson told me. “There will always be people winning the lottery, but that doesn’t mean a good financial strategy is to go out and buy lots of lottery tickets.”
Instead of taking a heap of venture capital money—lottery tickets—in the hope of one day getting a huge payout, Hansson says that Web entrepreneurs would be better off starting their businesses in the way most offline entrepreneurs do: Use a small amount of seed capital to make a good product that appeals to a client base that is willing to pay you for it. Then, over time, use the money you make from your customers to improve the product or to create more products—allowing you to attract more paying customers, which then lets you invest more into the business, and so on. It’s a cycle that has proved quite successful over the millenniums that humans have engaged in economic activity.
Also recently published: Die Kraft des Mittelfingers [brand eins] is a recent article (in German) on 37signals. Even if you don’t speak German, you may be able to get the gist:
David Heinemeier Hansson ist vulgär, und das ganz bewusst. Seine “Fuck you! ”- und “That’s bullshit”-Sprüche setzt er dosiert ein, wenn er Gesprächspartnern seine Sicht der Dinge nahebringt.
Amazon launched “Frustration-Free Packaging,” a new initiative designed to make it easier for customers to liberate products from their packages. The initial focus is on hard plastic cases (“clamshells”) and those secured with a large number of plastic-coated wire ties, commonly used in toy packaging. (Disclosure: Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is an investor in 37signals.)
This initiative oughta make
David Pogue happy: “Over the years, these sharp-edged, steely-hardened acrylic crypts have broken countless scissors, ripped flesh and wasted ridiculous amounts of people’s time.”
We’ve been slowly trickling some of our internal projects onto GitHub, making them more widely available in the hopes that (for one) they’ll be as useful to others as they are to ourselves, and (for another) that people will contribute patches back to make the projects even better.
Today I moved our CachedExternals plugin there. You can read all about it in the README, but read on for an overview (and justification).
Bokeh (derived from Japanese boke ぼけ, a noun form of bokeru ぼける, “become blurred or fuzzy”) is a photographic term referring to the appearance of out-of-focus areas in an image produced by a camera lens using a shallow depth of field.
Today we’re excited to unveil an enhancement that makes using Highrise even more convenient: The sidebar search-for-a-person feature is now significantly faster than before.
Searching for a person or company from the sidebar on the Dashboard or a person/company’s page is the most frequently used feature in all of Highrise. Highrise is about getting to a person/company’s page so you can enter a note or look up a previous conversation or grab a phone number. Now you can do that a whole lot faster. More speed and less wait time makes this experience markedly better.
Making this faster on the user experience side wasn’t the only goal here: The new sidebar search also reduces call-backs to the server. That lowers the number of requests to the database which, indirectly, makes everything else a little bit faster too.
Watch this video to see it in action
Sam Stephenson, one of our developers here at 37signals, has been working hard to make this a reality. And now that we’ve launched it, he put together a video showing you the before and after:
We hope this helps makes using Highrise an even better experience. Thanks for your continued support!
