Handmade 2.0 is a long article that talks about artist-entrepreneurs who open up virtual shops on Etsy and eslewhere. The author explores what makes Etsy seem different from so many current efforts to “build community” online. There are some lessons here for anyone trying to build an ecosystem around a product, store, or whatever:

The company does not, for instance, demand exclusivity. Indeed it seems to want its sellers to market themselves aggressively on their own sites, in stores, at fairs…Etsy constantly holds entrepreneurial workshops (how to build your “global microbrand”), pointing to “best practices” among Etsy sellers, offering shop critiques, advising how to “write a killer press release.” Its magazine-videocast, The Storque, often feels like a D.I.Y. business school. In addition, [Etsy’s Robert] Kalin has hired about a half-dozen of the best Etsy sellers to work directly for the company, in jobs meant to spread their skills to as many sellers as possible. Some help run Etsy Labs, a community-centric program held at the company’s headquarters, teaching craft skills.

On some level the Etsy idea is not really techno-progressive at all. It’s nostalgic. The company is host to a book club, which Kalin participates in, and when I visited, the most recent reading assignment was “The Wal-Mart Effect,” a book that assesses the societywide impact of that mass retailer’s success. Kalin seems flabbergasted that anyone would shop at Wal-Mart to save 12 cents on a peach instead of supporting a local farmer. Buying something from the person who made it is “the opposite of what Wal-Mart is right now: just this massively impersonal experience,” he told me earlier. “When you get an item from Etsy, there’s this whole history behind it. There’s a person behind it.”

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

New Basecamp Feature: Image-grid view
Today we announce a new Basecamp feature called the image-grid view. The image-grid view allows you to browse images (GIF, JPG, or PNG) uploaded to a project in a visual grid (3 across). The images are thumbnailed to 200×200 so they are big enough to browse but not too big that you can’t see many of them at once.

Using Backpack for recruiting project management
“When it comes to keeping all information together for a job search, Backpack is the best thing I’ve found…I generally set up one Backpack page per client I work with and include notes about that client’s process, interviewing preferences, and stuff that I need to do next in my own recruiting processes. If my client has provided me with a written description as a Microsoft Word document, I upload it here. If I have pictures of the work site, I upload them. In short, that page becomes a clearing house of information relevant to my search and helps me to be efficient in tracking my communications and efforts.”

List of great tools for web application development includes Basecamp
20 tools for web application development is a helpful reference list for anyone developing a web app. The list includes Basecamp: “We use Basecamp to communicate and collaborate on all of our projects. It allows us to set up a schedule with milestones and keep our messages and to-dos all in one spot.”

How Backpack is helping one design/writing freelancer
“Using the List feature I was able to get a simple to-do going. I thought that was all I’d ever use it for. As things went on and I needed to be more organized, I was able to add another page with Monthly goals separated by weeks and by those that will take place over the entire month. Then I decided to make a calorie counter page. I don’t know what I’ll make next. The examples page has so many diverse pages, people planning a wedding, organizing guitar tab, selling stuff, choosing fonts. There are plenty of ways to use it, that’s what makes it so intimidating to start and so addictive once you do.”

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Some of the recent activity at our internal 37signals Campfire chat room:

New Xerox logo

Ryan S.
Ryan S.	cries
Jason F.	RS: Ugh.
Jason F.	I don’t mind the new type
Jason F.	But the ball. omg.
Ryan S.	the new type looks like it could be anything. a video game company, a brand of sneaker, a prescription med
Ryan S.	the old one was authoritative and distinctive
Ryan S.	also had a nice “precise” quality to it that fits with their line of products
Jason F.	RS: Yeah. I don’t like the lowercase trend..
Matt L.	yeah, looks like totally generic software logo thing at the end too.
Ryan S.
Sam S.	i like the 1907 kodak logo
Sam S.
Ryan S.	that logo is wild.
Jeremy K.	Sam – that’s awesome
Sam S.	reminds me of
Sam S.
Jeremy K.	like wax seals with the family initials
Sam S.	yeah totally

Neverending receipts

Sarah H.
Sarah H.	This is the receipt for the GIFT CARD i bought my dad.
Sarah H.	17 inches FOLDED IN HALF
Jeremy K.	Sarah – wow
Jeremy K.	I got a two-footer from Staples earlier this week and was blown away
Jeremy K.	But half of it was to print the terms of some impossible-to-redeem rebate
Sarah H.	yeah it’s totally ridiculous
Sarah H.	half of it is a survey I’m never going to take.
Jeremy K.	haha

Chicago-area based TicketsNow was just picked up by Ticketmaster for $265 million.

I’ve been fortunate to meet Mike a few times and have always been impressed by his humble, genuine nature.

He started TicketsNow out of his one-bedroom apartment with no VC in 1999. Last year they sold about $200 million worth of tickets. TicketsNow is an inspirational success story built on a solid vision, hard work, real value, and good decisions.

Congrats to Mike and his entire team.

Mike asks:

I’m at a crossroads with a new project where I have a concept that can be executed in two ways. One execution is significantly more complex to build (and would take much longer) than the other, but could be the deciding factor of how successful the application is. The other execution gets the concept out there faster, but I fear it may lack the profoundness of the full execution and may fall short of its potential.

Assuming you have a vision for what a product should be before you begin development, where do you draw the line between your full realized vision and a core release that gets the concept out there. How do you make the choices about which features define the “soul” of the product versus the features that are not critical for a first release but which you plan to implement later?

My advice is always to err on the side of simple. The more complex something is the greater the chances that something will go wrong. And things will go wrong. You’re better off with less things going wrong early on. Wrong can be overwhelming.

Further, your initial assumptions about how critical a specific feature is often wrong. You don’t want to spend all the extra time up front on something that may or may not be the deciding factor. You’re better off executing the basics at a very high level and then adding on from there. What you thought was essential may surprise you.

Lastly, the longer a product takes to develop, the less likely it will launch. Long projects zap morale. Things get in the way. Life changes. Your time demands shift. Opportunity costs mount. We believe you’re better off launching something small quickly and then building from there. You’ll know more about what the product should really do once it’s actually alive.

As far as knowing exactly where the cutoff point is, that’s more art and gut than science and stats. The way we usually do it is to ask ourselves: “Does what we have now solve most of our problems now?” There’s always more to add and plenty of things to refine, but does what we have now get the job done reasonably well most of the time? If you’re using your product as you build it, and as long as you’re careful not to confuse your needs with “wouldn’t it be cool if…” then you’ll naturally get to the “yup, it’s good to go” point soon enough. That’s when you launch.

Whatever you choose to do, good luck. We hope you succeed.

Got a question for us?

Got a question about design, business, marketing, etc? We’re happy to try to provide some insight into how we’d tackle the problem. Just email svn [at] 37signals dot com with the subject “Ask 37signals”. Thanks.

My iTunes library got so big recently that I didn’t trust Shuffle mode anymore. Scrolling through my library was a memory exercise instead of a quick path to an ear massage. Plus I missed that feeling I had when I was 14, with a shelf full of maybe 50 CDs, each of them dear to my heart. While I felt the frustration growing, it seemed like too daunting a task to actually filter through 60 gigs of music. But an unexpected event suddenly gave me an opportunity.

A couple weeks ago, my hard drive went belly-up and I had to restore everything from backups (thank you SuperDuper). Restoring from a crash is like moving to a new apartment. You can cargo cult and just move everything from point A to point B, or you can take the opportunity to reevaluate what you should keep and what you should toss.

This reminded me of a tip Jason told me for unpacking from a move. The idea is you dump all the packed boxes into the middle of the living room. Then you take things out one-by-one only as you feel the need for them. After a couple weeks of unpacking only what you need, you discover the rest of the pile is prime material for donations or the dumpster.

I loved the idea. And my hard drive crash was the perfect chance to test it on my overgrown music collection.

So here’s what I did.

1. I made my living room pile. I found the iTunes Music Library folder on my backup and copied it to my Desktop as a folder named “Music”.

2. I opened iTunes and kept it completely blank. I set it to Album View to replicate my CD shelf of yore. Then I waited for an itch.

3. When a craving hit, I opened my Music folder on the Desktop, found the Album I wanted, and dropped it into iTunes.

Two weeks later, I have a beautiful hand-picked selection of Albums in iTunes. And since that “Music” folder only takes up 48×48 pixels on my Desktop, I’ll leave it there as long as I want as an Archive in case a rare itch hits.

You don’t need a hard drive disaster to replicate this tip. Just copy ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/ to your Desktop and rename it “Music”. Then inside iTunes, delete everything. Wait for the itch, and start cherry-picking your own small music collection. Enjoy!

You’re probably wondering why I’m here. And so am I. The best I can hope to do is at least explain how I got here.

Some time back I was invited to play Werewolf at the 37signals/Coudal compound. Since everyone seemed intent on killing me off as soon as possible (despite the fact that I was never the werewolf) I actually spent most of the time sketching. Jason liked what I had in my book and asked if I’d be interested in posting from time to time here on SvN.

What was I supposed to say, no?

So here, a mere four months or so later, is my first post of the very squid sketch that started this whole thing. I expect I’ll be posting at odd intervals with whatever I’ve been working on, and possibly a bit of commentary on process. I hope it’s of interest.

Below the fold, the further adventures of the squid…

We’ve invited Phineas X. Jones to be a guest artist here at Signal vs. Noise. You can get some background on Phineas and his “for-real work portfolio” at phineasxjones.com. Phineas also has more images and words at nocommercialpotential.net and at anexquisitecorpse.net (“a collaboration between a small number of artists, each with little to no idea as to what has gone before, creating a (hopefully) single, unified and otherwise unique work that could not be created any other way”). His initial post will explain more how this all came to be…

The photos in Mark Richards’ Core Memory Project reveal technology’s evolution through the computer collection at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley. Some examples from the CMP site:

Several months ago I wrote a brief review of the Sony Reader (PRS-500). The upshot was that I was extremely happy with mine, with just a couple of small caveats. Fast forward to today and I now have something else to compare it with, the Amazon Kindle.

There are plenty of comprehensive reviews of the Kindle floating around so I don’t think we need another one. Instead, I’ll focus on comparing it with the Sony Reader.