Years ago I read a book about guitar effects pedals. Something the author wrote in the intro stuck with me: “Tone is in your fingers.”

He went on to explain: You can buy the same guitar, effects pedals, and amplifier that Eddie Van Halen uses. But when you play that rig, it’s still going to sound like you.

Likewise, Eddie could plug into a crappy Strat/Pignose setup at a pawn shop and you’d still be able to recognize that it’s Eddie Van Halen playing.

Sure, fancy gear can help. But the truth is that your tone comes from you.

I often think of this story when people fixate on gear over content. You know the type: Wannabe designers who want an avalanche of fancy typefaces and Photoshop filters but don’t have anything to say. Amateur photographers who want to debate film vs. digital instead of what actually makes for a great photo. Startup folks that worry more about software and scaling issues then how to actually get customers and make money. They all miss the point.

Aspiring podcasters consantly ask Gary V about the tools he uses. He responds:

It’s not the camera that I use, it’s not the blogging software, it’s not the widgets, it’s not the SEO. It’s the two C’s: content and community…There are so many crap podcasts out there with billion dollar cameras and editing tools for days. It’s about giving from your heart with content you really understand and, more importantly, giving back to the community that supports your show.

Figure out what you have to say that’s interesting and then unleash it. Use whatever tools you’ve got already or what you can afford cheaply. Then go.

It’s not the gear that matters. It’s you and your ideas that matter. Tone is in your fingers.

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

37signals suite
Zendesk integrates with Highrise and Campfire
“You can now lookup customer information in your Highrise CRM application directly from a Zendesk support ticket. Say you receive a support ticket from a Michael Johnson. This may be the first time Michael has contacted your help desk, but if he is a customer of yours you probably have some information on him in your CRM system already. With this new integration you can populate the ticket page with that information.”

Branding agency uses 37signals tools to stay small and stay connected
“The benefits are that they allow us to manage our clients and their work, and our time and our ‘stuff’ more efficiently, and quicker, and easier. They essentially allow us to get on with what we are paid to do, help solve our clients problems with minimal problems…We have found that by spending less time and effort managing our business, we can spend more time and effort helping our clients to run their businesses.”

Campfire
Neat Campfire tricks: Graph your usage and autocomplete names
“Probably my favorite, undocumented feature, of Campfire is using the @ in chat to auto-complete someones name. It is something I have found myself using in other chats besides Campfire, just to find that it does not complete their name for me!”

Basecamp
Periscope: Basecamp control on your iGoogle homepage
Periscope (stil in beta) provides “Basecamp control on your iGoogle homepage.” The extra is made by Ten Seven, Interactive.

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We had a blast last week answering Q&A for about an hour during the first 37signals Live session. We hope you enjoyed it as much as we did. Thanks to all 1000+ people who stopped by to watch or participate.

Next Show: Wednesday, August 13 at 11:00am central time

We’re ready for the second show. Down the road we’re going to do more focused Q&As around specific topics, but we want to do another round of general Q&A this time. So please join us at http://www.37signals.com/live at 11am central on Wednesday, August 13th. We’re going for the morning so more of Europe can join us. We’re excited to see you there!

37signals Live: New and improved

We got a lot of feedback during and after the last show. We’ve taken some of this feedback and made some improvements.

There were a few issues with the first show:

1. Spammers cluttered the chat window.
2. The chat flew by so fast that we missed a lot of questions.
3. The chat itself was distracting.

We thought a lot about how to resolve these issues. We liked the spontaneity of real-time question asking via chat, but the spamming and general noise hurt that experience.

A lot of people suggested an option to pre-submit questions. We could even have digg-style voting to move questions up or down on the list. This sounded like a good solution on the surface, but if we just had a list of questions ahead of time it would kill the “live” part of 37signals Live. Questions in advance kill spontaneity. It kills the magic. We might as well just record the answers on video ahead of time and play the video later.

What you’ll see: Video & question submission

Here’s what the new on-air screen looks like:

Live video on the left. No more chat, but question submission on the right. Enter your name, location, and your question. A few of the questions we recently answered will be listed below.

What we’ll see: Review, approve (or reject), and answer

Behind the scenes we’ll see:

On the left we have the approved queue. On the right we have the incoming queue. As questions come in, someone else from 37signals (generally Matt) can approve, reject, or edit (fix misspellings, edit so it’s easier to read, etc.) the question. We can also ban the questioner if they’re just spamming. We’ll approve just about anything as long as it’s above the waist.

Once a question is approved it shoots over to the left side in big type so we can see it on a second screen positioned at the other side of the desk. After we answer a question on the left we just click it and it turns dark grey and moves to the bottom of the screen so it’s out of the way.

Excited to give it a go

We’re pumped to give the new system a go. We hope you’ll join us at 11am central on Wednesday, August 13th at http://www.37signals.com/live.

How’s this for tenacity? John Dane is 58 years old and has been trying out for the Olympic sailing team for 40 years. He finally made it this year with his son-in-law, Austin Sperry.

Dane missed qualifying for the Olympics 4 separate times, each by a few minutes. He didn’t give up after each loss, he just improved his sailing skills. It would have been too easy to give up after losing one or two qualifying races. John Dane took the more difficult route and persevered.

You can watch him sail with his son-in-law to hopeful victory August 15-20.

(Here’s a fun video of their team practicing.)

Mark’s new license plate! Who knew you could get an @ sign on a license plate?

As much as I respect Apple, Unslow, one of their new iPhone 3G television ads, has me wondering how they kept a straight face when they put this on the air. Try to follow along with your own iPhone 3G:

Web pages load immediately. GPS picks up instantly. Files download about 3x faster than I’ve ever seen a file download — even over wi-fi. I don’t think standing on top of a 3G tower antenna would even deliver such an experience.

This ad borders on bait-and-switch and it’s disappointing to see Apple go there. If the ad wasn’t about speed it might be a different story. If they were just showing off as many features as they could in a 30 second spot it would be understandable. If they exercised poetic license and cut out a few frames to make a different point we’d understand.

But Unslow is about selling speed. Speed that isn’t for sale at any price. It sets the wrong expectations. It leads to a disconnect between the iPhone in the guy’s hand on TV and the iPhone in your hand. When they don’t deliver what they demonstrate people end up disappointed.

UPDATE: Someone compared the ad to the real-world performance (full 3G reception in Boston):

I never liked the idea of the “for Dummies” or the “complete idiot’s guide to” book series’, but their sales success have certainly demonstrated that plenty of people identify with being a dummy or a complete idiot. Self-deprecation is fine, just realize that there’s a dear line between embracing your own ignorance and ensuring a prophesy of certainty.

This extends well beyond the kind of books you’re buying. I’ve met far too many people who seem so certain of their lack of abilities that they curb their chances of success before they’ve walked the first step. While there are probably plenty of geniuses out there, most of the interesting people I’ve talked to are of average intelligence, but above-average aspiration. Stop believing in the myth of triple-A people as a different kind.

Just because you don’t know how to program or design or lead or do anything doesn’t make you a dummy or an idiot. Mastery is probably closer than you think.

I didn’t start programming for real until I was 20-something. Rails was my first project in Ruby. Jason didn’t train to be a designer, but got a degree in finance. The world is filled with people who didn’t know jack not too long ago about whatever it is that they’re doing and are now highly regarded in their fields.

If there’s something you don’t currently know how to do, please decide not to be a dummy or an idiot. You’re as smart as you always were, you’re just looking to learn something new. Set your ambition to that of equality: There’s no reason I couldn’t be as good as that guy or girl doing what I want.

Some new features are sexy. They come with shiny new interfaces, extra buttons, more power. These are obvious and easy to spot. They are fun to develop and fun to release.

However, there’s another side to improving a product that doesn’t get as much respect. It’s the optimization. Nothing new, but everything better. Small tweaks here, hardware upgrades there. Everything runs more smoothly but you don’t really notice it. You feel it, but there’s nothing pretty to point to as evidence of the hard work.

The speed initiative

We want to treat speed as a feature. It should be one of our best features. So, for the past few months Jeremy and Mark have been working hard on speeding up our apps through software optimizations, caching, and network and hardware improvements. They deserve a huge round of applause for the results. They’ve made a big difference.

Let’s talk about Basecamp

We’re rolling these optimizations out to different 37signals products at different times, but let’s start with Basecamp, our most popular product. Basecamp gets used a lot by a lot of people. It’s also the type of product that people are in and out of all day long so speed is a critical factor. We rolled out a series of optimizations this week.

Some data

Here are some charts generated by New Relic that shine a light on the results of the hard work.

These charts compare an hour of traffic this morning with the same hour last week. As you can see, the changes we’ve implemented have made a dramatic difference. Our overall response time was cut very nearly in half, meaning that pages are loading roughly twice as fast as they were for the same time period last week. At the same time, we’ve managed to cut CPU usage by about a third and database time by about half.

How we did it

These gains were achieved using a variety of techniques including:

• Analysis: We relied heavily on New Relic’s outstanding RPM performance management suite to give us insight about the parts of Basecamp that were accessed the most as well as those that were most in need of improvement.
• Caching: We’ve begun using Memcached in a variety of spots. Caching can be tricky with dynamic apps like Basecamp since different people often see different things, but we’ve implemented it carefully where it could be used to its best advantage.
• MySQL optimizations: We’ve been working with a MySQL performance consultant to help us optimize our database calls and queries. We’re still early in the process but we’ve learned a lot so far.
• Hardware upgrades: We recently made some significant upgrades to our database servers. We went from servers with 2 x Dual Core 2GHz processors, 32GB of RAM, and 6×73GB 15,000 RPM SAS drives to servers with 2 x Quad Core 3GHz processors, 128GB of RAM, and 8×73GB 15,000 RPM SAS drives. We’ve also upgraded our load balancers and have new switches coming soon as well.

Change you can feel

While you may not immediately notice speed increases like you’d notice a big new feature, we think that over time you’ll see your productivity increase due to these speed increases. Less time for pages to load, less waiting for results. Everything’s just smoother. It’s change you can feel. The more you use Basecamp the more you’ll feel it.

We asked our new payroll service if they could mail paystubs to employees. The company rep’s response:

No, but each stub is stuffed in an envelope and sealed. If you put a stamp on it, it could be mailed easily. That is what most of my clients do, when they payroll reports and envelopes arrive, they just stick a stamp on them and drop em in the mail, pretty easy.

Great tone to that reply. Friendly and personal. And, best of all, it’s a “No, but…” When it comes to customer service, a “No, but you could…” is miles better than just a flat “No.”

Update: Jud from Paychex explains why the stubs are mailed.

Lots of questions in yesterday’s 37signals Live chat about what’s going on with the new version of Getting Real.

So here’s the deal: The book is well underway. First draft done actually, but there’s still plenty of revising to go. (Rewriting is key after all.) We’re drawing ideas from internal conversations, posts here at SvN, presentations we’ve given, Q&A sessions like yesterday’s chat, press coverage (it’s always interesting to see how an objective party tells our story), etc. It’s a great read already and is sure to get better!

The new version is quite different than the original. Most of the content is new and the focus is different too. The first edition was for a web technology audience. This new version broadens the scope to small businesses and entrepreneurs of all kinds. Inventors, restauranteurs, clothing manufacturers, MBA students, IT workers, retailers, designers, artists, crafts makers, and tons of other people will all find value in the book.

(Note: Someone asked yesterday if people who bought the original book will get a free copy of the new one. Due to the volume of new content in this edition, the answer is no. The name may stay the same, but it’s really a different book.)

We’ve hired a literary agent to represent us and hope to finalize a deal with a publisher soon. We’re looking forward to partnering with a company that really gets it and can help bring the book to a mass audience. If you’re an interested publisher, drop Jason a note at jason at 37signals dot com (subject line: Publish Getting Real). We’ll forward your interest on to our agent.

Also, a big shoutout to Seth Godin for his help and advice re: traditional publishers and agents. His advice for authors is a great read too. (Also worth reading for aspiring authors: Secrets of book publishing I wish I had known by Mark Hurst.)

We’ll keep you posted as things progress. Stay tuned.