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So… We’ve managed to build a really successful business through word of mouth. We’ve dabbled in text ads here, and a couple display ads there, but it’s our customers who are responsible for spreading our word far and wide. In four years we’ve probably spent less than $25,000 on advertising.

Let’s try something new

We love that we’re a word of mouth business. We plan on remaining a strong word of mouth business. Trusted recommendations are gold.

But we’d also like to begin experimenting with other forms of advertising. More “traditional” forms, but in a non-traditional way. If that makes sense we’ll probably get along great.

We’re interested in significantly broadening the awareness of the 37signals brand, our unique take on software, and our products. We have a story to tell and products to sell.

Get in touch

If you’re an ad agency that’s up to the challenge of working with us, we’d love to hear from you. Our standards are high. We want great work. Innovative work. Memorable work. But above all, effective work. We love great advertising and loathe bad advertising. We’re prepared to take this seriously.

Please shoot me an email if you think you could be the ones. Send to svn at 37signals dot com and include [ad pitch] in the subject line. Thanks.

Gaboogie is organizing a contest for developers to mashup their voice-application Lypp with Highrise. There are some cool prizes up for grabs including a $3,000 Apple gift certificate for number #1 and free service from Lypp and Highrise.

They got some cool ideas to get you going, like “Integrated Conference Calling within Highrise, Scheduled Calls, Click to Call Contacts in Highrise, Call-back Task links, just to name a few”. Get programming!

The Brash Boys at 37signals Will Tell You: Keep It Simple, Stupid is a four-page article in the March 2008 issue of Wired Magazine about 37signals. It should be on the newsstands this week.

[Hansson] and his partners at software developer 37signals have backed up the big talk. Rails has continued its run of popularity; over the years, tens of thousands of programmers have used it to create countless online applications, including podcasting service Odeo and microblogging phenomenon Twitter. And Basecamp, 37signals’ Rails-powered, easy-to-use online collaboration software, boasts more than 2 million account holders. Signal vs. Noise, the 37signals blog, pulls in 75,000 readers a day. Hansson and 37signals cofounder Jason Fried are “revered,” says business author Seth Godin. “They are as close as we get to demigods online.”

As “revered” “demigods,” — come on Seth, we’re blushing! — we’re definitely pleased with the article and think it’s a thoughtful, evenhanded story. (Plus the photo makes us look like cool Euro DJs.)

What about the backlash part of the story? Well, Andy Warhol once said, “Don’t read what they write about you, just measure it in inches.” True words those. Nonetheless, let’s set the record straight on a few myths mentioned in the story…

Myth: Whoever spends the most wins

What’s more, 37signals’ ideological objections to outside funding could make them less able to withstand competition. Nicholas Carr, author of The Big Switch, says companies like 37signals won’t have the resources to fight should larger firms with huge economies of scale and backend infrastructure decide to take them on. “They’re going to have a very tough challenge,” he says.

We continue to find this argument flawed. First of all, a few rounds of VC millions won’t put us on equal footing with bazillion dollar giants like Google, Microsoft, or other masters of economies of scale.

Second of all, we’re not in the winner-take-all software world of the 90’s anymore. Thanks to the web, there’s plenty of room for lots of companies, ideas, and products to flourish. The behemoth model isn’t the only game in town. There’s plenty of opportunity, success, and profitability to go around.

Lastly, we think our biggest competitor is habit—people using the phone, email, paper, pencils, post-it notes, and fax machines. These are the people we want to win over. We believe the simple software we’re building is the best way to do it.

Myth: 37signals customers are unhappy

The Basecamp message boards are filled with complaints from unhappy users, fed up with the software’s paucity of features who have switched to competing products.

It’s too bad the article didn’t quote any of the thousands of satisfied customers who love our software (here’s just a few). Or mention the love letters we get all the time from people who’ve found our products to be a godsend for their businesses. Or mention the people who left only to come back after they realized the alternatives with all the features were better on paper than in practice.

Our customer retention rates are very healthy and, in our most recent Basecamp customer satisfaction survey, 94% of customers said they would recommend Basecamp to friends and colleagues. We’re extremely proud of that. We believe we continue to do the right thing for our customer base as a whole.

This is especially true when it comes to feature requests. The number one reason people say they like using our products is because they are simple and easy to use. To maintain that advantage you have to be really careful about how you evolve. There’s nothing easier than saying yes, but even just a few too many yeses can make a good thing go bad. Balance is key.

We consider it a top priority to keep our products simple, focused, and easy to understand. As we’ve said before, we’d rather our customers grow out of our products than never be able to grow into them in the first place.

Also: It’s unfortunate when journalists use online comments and message boards as “evidence” of anything. Really, someone wrote something negative in an online forum? What a shocker. In case you haven’t noticed, people can tend to be a teeny bit negative/antagonistic when leaving comments online. The truth is the vast majority of our customers are very happy with our products.

Myth: We don’t care about our customers

Fried says he doesn’t worry about losing individual Basecamp customers, since none of them pay more than $149 a month.

This could be taken out of context (“37signals doesn’t care about losing customers”) so let’s be clear: We care deeply about customer satisfaction and we don’t like to see customers leave us. But if we need to lose some to make others happy, we’re ok with that. We also recognize not everyone is going to like our products or our point of view. We’re ok with that too.

That’s why we’re happy to have such a diverse customer base. Unlike many enterprise software companies, we don’t rely on any one customer (or a handful of customers) as our primary revenue source. Companies with a few big clients are beholden to those customers in ways that can quickly become detrimental to the company, the product, and other customers.

By spreading our revenue source over thousands of customers — none with the upper hand on any other customer — we can make decisions that benefit the vast majority, not the wealthy minority. Since no one pays us more than $149/month, we can stick to our shared vision and provide the vast majority of customers with exactly what they come to us for: Simple software that’s quick to get started, easy to use, and provides far more value than the price we charge.

Myth: Complexity is a necessary byproduct of the modern age

In the article Don Norman says:

Complexity is a necessary byproduct of the modern age. When you actually sit down and analyze what you need to get the job done, it’s not simplicity.

We disagree. As complexity and confusion grows, simple tools become more and more valuable. And while sometimes it’s easy to think we need this that and the other to solve a problem, it’s often the simplest solution that actually gets the job done. Not everything has to be a Swiss Army Knife. Sometimes a screwdriver just needs to be a screwdriver.

Norman’s view seems rather depressing in the way it accepts complexity as an inevitable result of modernity. Dehumanization is a byproduct of the modern age too. But that doesn’t mean you just give up and surrender to it. We prefer to put up a fight.

Myth: We refuse to change

Call it arrogance or idealism, but they would rather fail than adapt.

Huh? We’re all about adapting. Our entire business and philosophy is about iteration, quick change, adaptation, and opportunity. At its core, Getting Real is about change and evolution.

Thanks

All that said, our hats are off to author Andrew Park for all his hard work on the story. While we may quibble with a few of the points in the piece, we recognize that Andrew was trying to be evenhanded and tell all sides of the story. Andrew was exceedingly professional, travelled to Chicago to meet with us in person, and, overall, was as thorough a journalist as we’ve ever met with. So thanks Andrew. And thanks to Wired for publishing the story too.

Last October I had the pleasure of taking a screen printing class with Steve Walters of Chicago’s Screwball Press. This is something like having a piano lesson from Chopin. After seven or eight hours in the Screwball studio, I had my first 11” x 17”, three color screen print: The Octophant. This unholy chimera was based on a sketchbook page (which also contained the source material for another print we’ve already discussed.) It was not a bad print. For a first try. But even before the ink was dry on it I was sure it could be done better, so it was inevitable that I’d have to revisit this pachycephalopod before long.

Some of the things I saw as shortcomings in the original Octophant:

1. The octophant just seems kind of ambivalent. Something in the expression and motionless equilibrium of his position. Also I thought the trunktacles (you heard me) required a more convincing treatment.
2. The line quality from my drawing had not translated to the black screen as I had expected. Too fine a line will often fail to make it to the paper and my drawing style is very fine-line-intensive.
3. There is a dire need to find a better approach to filling the available space other than that scraggly oval frame which was a total afterthought.
4. Being entirely new to the mixing of screen printing inks, and not having a lot of time to dither with the colors anyway, what I came out with was not really what I had had in mind going in. I’ve come to like them since, but I still can’t escape that they look like they’re taken directly from packaging for circus peanuts.

Continued…

Kottke has a great point about the stupidity of trying to cast promising start-ups as The Next Google, The Next Microsoft, or The Next Whatever.

The true giants, like IBM, Microsoft, and Google, come to life so rarely that the chances of random company X being one of them is slim to the point that we might as well try to guess who’s going to be struck by lightning tomorrow or win the lottery.

But even more importantly, the real nexts are never repeats of the last next. That’s what makes them nexts! Thus the comparison is irrelevant.

Nobody is likely going to be the next Microsoft in much of anything that makes Microsoft the company it is: the Windows/Office power-punch. Google has been billed as such many times, but its entire being has nothing to do with the defining characteristics of Microsoft.

Defining nexts seem to be less about the companies and their character than about lazy writers starved for imagination to come up with something better than a tired cliche.

Last month I posted a peek at Queen Bee, our internal unified billing, admin, and stats platform.

That post highlighted how we help our customers update their credit cards across multiple 37signals products.

Today I want to show off a bit of the stats side of Queen Bee. Now that we’ve centralized our billing, we can centralize our stats. We can get a better feel for signups, upgrades, downgrades, and cancellations across all our products.

At the top of our Queen Bee admin screen we have a stream showing the latest activity across Basecamp, Backpack, Highrise, and Campfire. It looks like this:

Note: The names and data listed are for example purposes only. These are not real customer names and this is not real data.

We use color to help us spot trends at a glance. Here’s how it works. BLUE is for a paying signup, GREEN is for an upgrade to a pay plan, PURPLE is for a downgrade, and RED is for a paying cancellation. We also use Yellow to highlight the plan name if the signup is for a paying plan.

If someone is signing up for a new plan, we also display the referrer. You’ll see that as “via…” near the end of the line. And if someone cancels we include the age of their account (“3 months old”).

Everyone at 37signals has access to this stream of signups, upgrades, downgrades, and cancellations. It’s a great way to get a feel for patterns, how things are going in general, and where people are finding out about our products.

We hope to show off more of Queen Bee down the road.

Polaroid frame
A prototype for a digital picture frame that makes sure the familiar look of a Polaroid photo lives on.

Staircase bookshelf
A “secret staircase” made of English oak, lined with books left, right and center, leading to a loft bedroom.

Ice hotel
A selection of images of the Icehotel in Jukkasjärvi, Sweden.

Super Mario mushroom cupcake
This Super Mario mushroom cupcake (below right, from this photoset) looks like it could be one of our logos.

Continued…

A Convergence of Convergences (sample above)

McSweeney’s collects convergences, “an unlikely, striking pair of images, along with a paragraph or three exploring the deeper resonances.”

How to become happier

“Happiness is not the shallow state of feeling pleased and chipper all the time. Happiness is the state of a human being that has achieved cross-level coherence within herself, and between herself and the people, challenges, and institutions around her. Happiness comes from between.”

Interview with book cover designer Peter Mendelsund

“One of the things that I find most people misunderstand about cover design on ‘the outside’ is that so much of what happens is determined editorially, or in a marketing meeting. You try your best, but at the end of the day, most things are not going to turn out the way you liked. That’s why it behooves one to do a high volume of work. The law of averages suggests that you’ll end up with something to be proud of amongst the dreck at the end of the day.” [via JK]

Paul Graham: Six principles for making new things

“I like to find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems© that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly.”

A bad business plan will trump good design

“I just think it’s odd — and slightly disingenuous — of the champions of design strategy to fall silent when it comes to the failure of a company that’s very good at practicing it. Surely, if the roles were upended here, if it was Yahoo who was the dominant player, we would be regularly extolling the virtues of Yahoo’s design expertise. Perhaps we can’t expect design to save failing companies, but if not then perhaps we should be more judicious in talking up how design can make companies successful, too.”

Continued…

This is the sixth in a series of posts showing how we use Campfire as our virtual office. All screenshots from the series are from real usage and were taken during a single week.

This time we’ll take a look at some of the miscellaneous ways we use Campfire to share information, communicate, and get things done.

Give a product review for a new piece of hardware
Mark links up his new printer/scanner and talks about its pros and cons.

Work the late shift
Jeremy, a night owl, commits a change at 2:30 am. Everyone else will see it when they login in the morning.

Show progress on a to-do list
Jamis shows his progress by uploading a screenshot of his “Things on my plate” list.

Continued…