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A few months ago I made a custom emoji for use in two of our products: Basecamp, the best project management app; and Campfire, IMHO the best real-time team chat.

Why Neckbeard? At first it was a joke—picking up on that Internet meme. But now he’s quickly become one of our most beloved emojis in Campfire. He’s also the unofficial mascot for our neckbeardiest co-worker’s pet projects. Neckbeard also made his way into GitHub and Turntable.fm (thanks guys—shout out to Emoji Cheat Sheet too).

I like Neckbeard so much, and I don’t want him to be limited. I want you and your friends to use Neckbeard in ways that we can’t. I want you to modify him and improve him as you see fit.

Here’s the downloadable vector illustration. The Creative Commons license is below. Thanks for downloading Neckbeard. I hope you have fun with him as much as we do!

neckbeard.eps.zip (636 KB)

License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported. You are free to Share—to copy, distribute and transmit the work, to Remix—to adapt the work, and to make commercial use of the work. Please attribute this Neckbeard depiction to 37signals.

Lately I’ve been spending some time with local entrepreneurs who are looking for business advice. Inevitably, the topic of pricing comes up. “How do I know how much to charge?”

There are lots of answers.

You can make up a number and see if it works. You can test a few different prices at the same time. You can do traditional market research and see what you find. You can read pricing books and academic papers on pricing approaches, techniques, and behavioral psychology. You can see what others are charging.

The good news about pricing is that you can guess, be wrong, but still be right enough to build a great sustainable business. Maybe you’re leaving some money on the table, but, like my dad always says, no one ever went broke making a profit.

However, you are not allowed to ask people:

• “What would you pay for this?”
• “Would you buy this for $20?”
• “How much do you think this is worth?”
• “What’s the most you’d pay?”

And these are the questions I hear people asking over and over. You can’t ask people who haven’t paid how much they’re willing to pay. Their answers don’t matter because there’s no cost to saying “yes” ”$20” “no” ”$100”. They all cost the same – nothing.

The only answers that matter are dollars spent. People answer when they pay for something. That’s the only answer that really matters.

So put a price on it and put it up for sale. If people buy that’s a yes. Change the price. If people buy, that’s a yes. If people stop buying, that’s a no. Crude? Maybe. But it’s real.

You can dig into the why’s more deeply over time, but you have to start somewhere. And the best place to start is with real answers. This is why we picked $10 for a Basecamp Breeze email address.

Just doing work without an eye on the big picture rarely satisfies anyone. We want to know what we’re doing matters and that means knowing why we’re doing it. This is true in all walks of life and certainly so in software development.

If you simply ask a programmer to implement a feature, but fail to share the purpose or the justification for said feature, all you get is a code monkey. Code monkeys merely translate requirements into code verbatim. There’s no room to trade concessions with the designers if I don’t know what you’re trying to do.

So not only is it demotivating not to know why, it’s also bad for productivity. Figuring out what the problem really is is how good programmers judo the problem: “Yes, what you’re proposing is one way to solve it, and that’ll take 50 hours. But we can solve the same underlying problem by doing this instead and that’ll only take 8 hours. How about it?”

Sharing the context shares ownership. Now we’re all working on solving the problem the best way we can. Not just laying the bricks in the order the big man tells us to.

Today we officially launch Basecamp Breeze, the simplest way for small groups to stay in touch via email. Check it out.

Breeze gives your group a permanent, easy to remember email address (like [email protected]) so anyone in the group can reach the entire group without having to remember a bunch of individual email addresses.

The Breeze backstory

Most people are part of a small group.

Maybe it’s a book club or a church group or a trivia team. Or maybe you’re on a softball team. Or maybe your kid plays little league.

Or maybe you have a team of mentors you often ask for advice. Or if you live in a condo, you’re part of a condo association.

Maybe your company has a board of directors. That board is a small group. Maybe you run a small company – your staff is a small group. Or if you’re a teacher, your classroom is a group.

And everyone has a family. Some larger than others, but all are small groups.

Small groups love email

Small groups usually use email to keep in touch. Email is the universal constant of communication. Everyone you communicate with has an email address. There’s no adoption curve, nothing complex. Even your grandmother has email.

But email has two flaws when it comes to groups

If you use email to communicate with your group, you’re probably intimately familiar with these two flaws:

1. You have to remember each person’s email address every time you want to make an announcement or start a group discussion. This means people get left out by accident.
2. If someone doesn’t “reply-all” when responding to a group email with multiple email addresses, then it all falls apart. People miss messages.

Something better, please

There’s got to be a better way. But it can’t be complicated. It can’t be “software”. It can’t be something people in your group have to sign up for or log in to. It can’t be hard to set up. And it can’t be hard to maintain.

Tools like Google Groups and Yahoo Groups are great on paper, but they’re often a hassle to set up and even messier to maintain. These tools are getting more complicated over time, not simpler. Check out this comparison.

This is why we built Basecamp Breeze

Breeze eliminates the two key flaws of group email. With Breeze, no one in the group has to remember everyone’s personal email address. And no one has to worry about someone forgetting to “reply-all” because any reply to the group email address automatically goes to everyone in the group. Simple. It always works. Nothing new to learn.

If you can use email, you can use Breeze. And that goes for everyone in your group.

A Breeze email address for your group only cost $10, one time. Pay once, and use it with your group of up to 50 people without ever having to pay again.

We think you’ll find Breeze incredibly useful. Let us know how you end up using it. Thanks!

Last week I wrote about Audi’s customer satisfaction survey. The numbers and words just didn’t mesh. And there were dozens of questions – many of which were difficult to rate according to their given scale. I didn’t end up filling it out and deleted it from my inbox.

This week I got another survey from another company. This one was from Zingerman’s – the famous Ann Arbor-based deli. I’d recently purchased some olive oil, vinegar, and mustard from their site.

Here’s the email they sent:

That’s a fantastic email. Short, friendly, clearly written by someone who understands tone, brand, and how to get feedback that’s useful. No tricks. Yes, it’s automated, and signed by a team, but that’s fine. It was originally written by someone who cares. It’s consistent with Zingerman’s casual catalog voice, too.

They have a 0-10 scale just like Audi. Except they only have one question. “How likely are you to recommend Zingermans?” That question sums up just about everything. They consider 0 “not a chance” and 10 “in a heartbeat”. The rest is up to you.

And they don’t ask you to click over to a web-based survey somewhere. They just say, hey, reply to this email with a number and, if you have time, let us know why you gave us this rating. Your reply is your answer, that’s it. There’s nothing else to do and nowhere else to go. Easy.

Then they say: “We are a small crew in the service center, we read every word and we try to do better all the time.” That alone makes me want to give them feedback. I know I’ll be heard. I believe I’ll be heard. The Audi survey? It feels like it’s going straight into a database. I’m an aggregate stat, not a person, not a customer.

It would be easy to say that Audi’s survey will give Audi more detailed feedback. More data points attached to specific experiences. And it would be easy to say that Zingerman’s question is too broad, too difficult to act on a “7” with no other information.

But I’d wager that Zingerman’s gets more useful feedback than Audi gets. That one question – answered simply with a reply to an email – probably leads to more valuable, subtle feedback than the dozen-question, extremely detailed , slippery Audi survey.

The Zingerman’s survey feels like it’s written by someone who’s curious about the answer. The Audi survey feels like it’s written by someone who’s collecting statistics. Which company do you think really cares more?

I’d be happy if 37signals is the last place I work. In an industry so focused on the booms and busts, I find myself a kindred spirit with the firms of old. Places where people happily reported to work for 40 years, picking up a snazzy gold watch at the end as a token of life-long loyalty.

Committing myself to this long-term focus has led to a peaceful work atmosphere and an incredible clarity of purpose. If this is the last job I’ll ever have, I damn well better make sure that I like it. I won’t just tough things out. If shit is broken, we’ll fix it now, lest we be stuck with it for decades.

Two key ideas help inform this dedication. The first is Alistair Cockburn’s metaphor of software development as a co-operative game. Focusing on the residue of knowledge and practices carried over from game to game is far more important than worrying about the output of any one game.

Working people to death to ship any one feature or product is a poor strategy, as it reduces the capacity to ship the next feature or product (burn out, build-up of bad rush practices). It’s far more important to have a system for shipping that improves over the long term than one that heroically manages one monster push.

Second is Jeff Bezos’ idea: “What’s not going to change over the next 10 years?” If you’re going to stick around for decades, you’re better off making investments in things that’ll pay off for a very long time. It applies both to software and peopleware.

Of course, not everyone is at a stage in their life where they’re willing to settle down with a job for decades. But I find I enjoy working most with the people who are.

If you’re not committed to your life’s work in a company and with people you could endure for decades, are you making progress on it?