Here he talks about how all the marketing in the world can’t replace a product that sells itself:
As Ahmet Ertegun once said, a hit is a record that gets a listener to jump out of bed, put on his clothes and go to the all night record store to buy it after hearing it on the radio. I listen to the radio in my car all day long. But it’s rare that I have to write down the title of a song and rush to my computer to download the track. Happened with Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy”. And, in the CD era, with Alanis Morissette’s “Hand In Pocket”, I had to go home and rifle through hundreds of CDs to find “Jagged Little Pill”. And then there’s Walt Wilkins/Pat Green’s “Wrapped”… Point is, hit records sell themselves, like drugs. If your record is not selling itself, you’re never going to make it. In other words, if you’re working me, you’re in trouble. Your track should be so great I hear about it from someone else!
And then he explains why he loves picking fights:
I was listening to Richard Roeper on Howard Stern, he lamented the guest hosts from Hollywood who co-starred with him on “At The Movies” would say nothing negative, for fear of alienating some potential business contact. But it’s when you say something negative that you endear yourself to a group! And if you’re offering a better product…
Are you willing to state your truth and own it? Elton John talks shit about other people. But most acts demur. I’d like Jon Bon Jovi if he just said SOMETHING or SOMEONE sucked. But he’s so busy sucking the public’s dick I miss no chance to beat him up, point out his band’s foibles, because he’s not real…and I know many people agree with me. Then again, most people are indifferent! And only by taking a side can you get them to care!
Over the last few months I’ve noticed a ton of inspiring websites. Camerion.io, Art Lebedev, n+1, Show of Force, and on and on. And everytime I look at one of these sites, I think to myself “Oh I’m so inspired. Look at how they did this. Look at that paragraph style. Look at that header. I feel so full of ideas.”
Then it’s time to work on a new project, and did all the inspiration make a difference? Actually, no. Most of the work I do is looking like all the other work I’ve done for months and months and years. Apparently looking at cool stuff isn’t enough to increase your skill. It’s easy to look at some stuff and say “oh that’s inspiring, that gives me ideas” without moving an inch.
So I got thinking. How did I develop the basic skills I have right now? Mostly by copying heroes. When you’re fresh starting out, you have no fear of diving in and copying something directly. It’s like playing guitar. When you start playing guitar all you want to do is play the first verse of your favorite song. Big success! You don’t need to write the next great guitar symphony or a hit single. It’s totally satisfying to learn to play something somebody else can already play. And you get better by doing it.
And it was the same way with design. I was totally psyched to copy a Müller-Brockmann poster, a Designgraphik composition, or an Apple UI. Merely executing the copy was a thrill. But now every design is supposed to be the next great thing. And as days and weeks and months go by, the design level stays the same while the aspiration goes higher and higher.
So maybe it’s time to take one of these Fridays off and just copy something.
Replicating this success is not, of course, something that any new site could rationally aspire to do. Perhaps the central reason for craigslist’s great success is that they took a function that was being done offline (classified ads) but could be better done online, and translated it quite simply to to online world. Their goals were modest, and they weren’t trying to build a huge franchise—they were simply trying to solve a problem. Ironically, this led to a huge and powerful franchise.
Florida took advantage of the system over the past decade. The Marlins found a way to spend as little as possible and win just enough—well, maybe. They did win one world championship in the decade but gave their fans only one other pennant race. Here’s a good question for fans: would you take one world championship every decade if it meant punting eight of the other nine years?
Another baseball piece: In “MLB Payroll Efficiency,” Purple Row attempts to correlate number of wins with year-end payroll over a three-year period.
Here’s the browser breakdown of visitors to the 37signals Launchpad, our global sign-in screen for our web apps. This also includes product-specific sign-in screens like this Basecamp sign-in screen or this Highrise sign-in screen. These stats were pulled from Google Analytics and they represent the past 30 days.
This is part of our “Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud” series which profiles companies that have $1MM+ in revenues, didn’t take VC, and are profitable.
In April of 2009, Adii Pienaar (from Cape Town, SA), Mark Forrester (London, UK) and Magnus Jepson (Stavanger, Norway) met up in London at the FOWD conference. It was the first time they were all together in the same room. Rather surprising when you consider they’d already been running a successful company called WooThemes for over a year together.
The backstory: Pienaar had started a business called Premium News Themes which released the very first premium WordPress theme in November 2007. Soon after, he got an e-mail from Jepson about collaborating. A month later, they released their first collaborated theme.
Then Forrester entered the picture. He was visiting Cape Town in January 2008 and Pienaar met up with him to discuss working together. They released their first theme together a month later and continued working on more. All the while the trio continued to do freelance work on the side.
By July, sales were far exceeding the earnings from freelance work. So they gave up the freelance work, formalized the relationship, and began focusing exclusively on the company they dubbed WooThemes. Now it’s a full fledged business that designs and develops templates for WordPress as well as Tumblr, ExpressionEngine & Drupal.
I have to think (and experiment) every single time I want to decipher one of these keyboard “shortcuts”. Why is it that only the command key (⌘) actually has the symbol printed on the key itself? And what’s up with the symbol for the option key (⌥)?
When we set out to build finger-friendly controls for iOS devices in Basecamp, two major constraints informed our design.
In Basecamp on a PC, when you hover over a to-do, milestone, or file, you’ll see edit and delete controls. But as has been covered here and elsewhere on the web, there’s no way to hover on a touch device. So our solution to this first constraint is to show the controls when you tap instead of when you hover.
The second constraint is that the controls must be finger-friendly. That is, they should be sized such that they’re always big enough to operate with a thumb, but never too big to fit on the screen.
Our first attempt at these controls turned out to be too small when zoomed out…
In Basecamp on a PC, when you hover over a to-do, milestone, or file, you’ll see edit and delete controls. But as has been covered 
