Time: 37:24 | 5/16/2011 | Download MP3

Summary
Jason and David answer questions posted by readers at Signal vs. Noise. How did David became a partner at 37signals? What happened with the affiliate program? What is David’s take on methodologies like Agile or Waterfall? How do you move beyond a lack of motivation? Will David ever “retire” from Rails development? How did Jason advise Groupon? How do they prepare for public speaking? Do they play the stock market? How do they deliver criticism/praise? What advice do they have for a young programmer? When was the first time they realized they wanted to do their own thing?

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We’re looking for another person to join our operations team. We would prefer someone in the United States who is interested in both application development and systems engineering.

You will automate Sysadmin tasks with Chef, troubleshoot application performance issues with New Relic, and create new tools to make things run more smoothly and efficiently. You’ll also be expected to participate in an on-call rotation after you’re fully up to speed (traditionally 1 to 2 months).

Want more information? Check out this post on the Job Board.

In October of 2007, social news site Newsvine was acquired by msnbc.com. It was msnbc.com’s first acquisition in its history.

Newsvine announced the acquisition and answered this question: “Why would a young, efficient independent news startup become part of a large organization?”

It’s all about growing the community and spreading the idea of participatory news as far and wide as possible. Although going from zero to over a million users a month in less than two years is heartening, msnbc.com operates on another scale entirely. While Newsvine may be well known in early adopter circles, we want every college student, every farmer, every weekend journalist, and every household to have their own branch on the ‘Vine. In order to spread this idea further, we could have gone out and raised a lot of money, quadrupled our staff, and gone it alone, but when one of the finest news organizations in the world is headquartered right across Lake Washington, the potential of partnering with such a great team is dramatic.

Meanwhile, Charlie Tillinghast, president of MSNBC Interactive News, offered this take on the deal:

Tillinghast said msnbc.com was racing to foster a community among its readers and to exploit the power of unmoderated user commentary and ranking of the news. Ideally, he said in an interview, the site would design and build its own tools, but Newsvine, a small, lean company headquartered in downtown Seattle a few minutes from msnbc.com’s newsroom, “is just a great fit.”

“Newsvine is local, small, nimble — they don’t come with a lot of things you don’t want,” he said, such as complicated partnerships and contracts. “There isn’t a lot to rearrange.”

So what’s happened since then? Newsvine CEO Mike Davidson (shown below) is still with msnbc.com today. Here’s what he had to say about what’s happened post-acquisition:

Do you still work with the product?
Most of the Newsvine team (including myself) is still here. In addition to maintaining Newsvine.com, our team’s technology runs all MSNBC, TodayShow, and other brand family blogs (about 25 of them and counting) as well as many of the interactive features within the company’s core sites (global registration, live votes, inline comment threads, Facebook/Twitter integration, etc.).

Because our team does not have end-to-end creative control over these other projects, they are generally less satisfying than working on our own product. But at the same time, they are more satisfying from a financial standpoint. A 10% increase in Newsvine’s traffic doesn’t move the needle much for the company’s bottom line, but a 5% increase in overall msnbc.com traffic means millions of dollars, and since we’re a private company with profit sharing, that’s real money for all ~275 employees every year.

What impact did the sale have on customers?
When we were acquired, the growth wave that ensued — about 450% over the next few years — brought criticisms. Not only had the user base become much bigger, we were now associated with a mainstream media company; a development that some users appreciated and others felt uncomfortable with.

On the bright side, we’ve been able to get some of our best users on TV and send them to political events like the RNC and DNC, but on the down side, some users wrote on Newsvine specifically because they didn’t see eye-to-eye with mainstream media.

How is Newsvine doing now?
Traffic-wise, the product is about 400% more popular than it was, but feature-wise, it unfortunately hasn’t changed much in the last few years. A lot of this is due to the fact that our team has remained small (8 people now) and we’ve been working on many other projects within msnbc.com alongside our Newsvine duties. Currently, over 25 million uniques a month are hosted on Newsvine technology via the various projects we power around the company, and we’d like to think we’re a contributor to the extremely profitable business our parent operates.

As for things we wish went differently, it’s tough to say because we were acquired literally the week the market peaked in 2007, and things went downhill for the economy directly after that. Because of the downturn, many media companies (including msnbc.com) cut back their budgets and dug in a bit for a long winter. We stayed at 6 people for a very long time, and as our responsibilities expanded outside of the Newsvine brand, our attention to Newsvine.com itself diminished. Thankfully the nature of the site has always been for users to essentially run it, so this worked out ok, but it’s definitely the reason you don’t read as much about Newsvine in the tech press as you did a few years ago. When you don’t reinvent yourself every year or two, there just isn’t much of a tech story to tell.

Andrew Wicklander interviewed me for his Project Idealism podcast and our 45-minute chat is now online. Andrew’s background in software project management led to a lot of questions about how we work at 37signals. I was glad to dig into a number of topics including:

• How we emulate our “cowboy days” with teams of three
• How a growing company is like a cocktail party
• Picking and choosing from XP and Agile, and why basic values are more important than methodologies
• Why methodologies lose their meaning over time
• Why features become bloated when they are made for cases you don’t understand
• The overlap between UI design and product design
• How programmers and designers should negotiate on cost
• Who should manage projects: a designer or a programmer?
• How to not get lost in a project and the central challenge of doing just one thing at a time
• The costs of unfinished work
• The power of working in small steps and being in a “known state” between steps
• How doing less is still the hardest standard to keep
• and Why 37signals won’t be competing with Cisco anytime soon

Thanks a lot to Andrew for interviewing me and asking such thoughtful questions. The podcast is on his website and also available as episode #11 on iTunes.

We use Campfire a lot – it’s our main way of communicating as a team that’s more than half remote. We’ve shared what happens inside our Campfire rooms before, and today I’ll share a peek at how we use our statistics robot, “Tally”, in Campfire.

Tally sits in a few of our Campfire rooms all day and answers questions people have, whether it’s about how signups for a product us doing, how a feature is being used, what the latest results for an A/B test are, or what the weather in Chicago is. Tally also sends SMS messages, searches the internet and more:

Tally grew from a couple of desires:

1. I wanted an easier way to answer easy questions that come up frequently – how is this A/B test going? How many people have used custom fields since we launched them? None of these are hard questions to answer, but Tally makes these simple questions completely self-serve.
2. I wanted to explore our API more. In the course of doing analyses at 37signals I end up interacting with a lot of different APIs, and have seen some great ones and some terrible ones. I wanted to see how ours stacked up, and also have a chance to write and test some new wrappers for other APIs as well.
3. I wanted to add some fun features to our Campfire room. Tally knows how to tell a joke and has some funny images at the ready. These don’t add any practical value, but are occasionally good for a laugh.

One of the most common uses of Tally has been to check A/B test results. We use and are big fans of Optimizely to run A/B tests, but also use Clicky to measure the results. Tally makes finding the overall results a one-line affair:

Tally was inspired in part by Github’s Hubot. For the technically curious, Tally is implemented in R using the Campfire streaming API.

Have an idea for something we should teach Tally to do? Are you doing something interesting with the Campfire API? Tell us about it in the comments!

The problem with the “follow your passion” chorus: We can’t all love the products we work with. Someone has to do the jobs and sell the things that don’t seem sexy but make the world go round.

It’s something we’ve seen in our Bootstrapped, Profitable, and Proud series. Braintree processes credit cards. You won’t meet too many people who claim to “love” credit card processing. Even Braintree’s Bryan Johnson admits, “I’m not particularly passionate about payments, but I am passionate about trying to build a good company.” Johnson gets satisfaction from making customers happy, creating a workplace that employees enjoy, and improving “an unscrupulous and broken industry.”
InsuranceAgents.com sells insurance. Again, it’s tough to find anyone with a “passion” for insurance. Seth Kravitz of InsuranceAgents.com says, “Insurance is not an exciting industry, but that doesn’t mean the work can’t be meaningful. We had to find ways to make the work more fun, make the environment more family like, and show people the positive impact of what they do.”
Both these companies have succeeded by dropping the “follow your passion” idea and focusing instead on process.

The problems with passion

Part of this is recognizing that, despite its wonders, there are also problems with passion. For one thing, most people’s passions aren’t that unique. That’s why it’s so hard to succeed in the restaurant business or as a professional dancer; You’re competing against everyone else with that same dream.

Also, turning a passion into a business is a good way to kill the passion. You might love music. But become a music critic and you’re going to have to listen to hundreds of albums every month. Including a lot of stuff you hate. By the end of it, you might just discover that you can’t stand the thing you used to love. Kravitz says, “I love reading books, but I would hate to be a book reviewer. What you love to do in your personal life, many times doesn’t translate well into a business.”

How not what

So does this mean we’re all doomed to a life of ditch digging drudgery? No. It’s about redefining passion. Instead of working with a thing you love, think about how to work in a way you love.

It’s something Amy Hoy talks about in Don’t Follow Your Passion. Here’s her take on The Cute Little Café Syndrome:

If you want to run a successful café — and enjoy it — you need to love a lot more than coffee. You’ve also gotta get some kind of pleasure, even grim satisfaction, out of the daily grind. (Ha ha.) Which means, of course, interacting with customers, hiring & managing wait staff, handling the day-to-day necessities like ordering supplies, cleaning, paying rent, marketing your butt off, and dealing with customers who want to squat on your valuable tables all day for just $2 of brew.

Take your cues from this “daily grind” example and how companies like Braintree and InsuranceAgents.com succeed. Find meaning in what you’re doing. Work to improve your industry. Get joy from making a customer’s day. Surround yourself with the kinds of people and environment that keep you engaged. Figure out the details and day-to-day process that keep you stimulated. Focus on how you execute and making continual improvements. Get off on how you sell, not what you sell.
It might not be the romantic ideal of “passion.” But if it provides you with sustainable joy and profit that you can count on, you’ll still be way ahead of the curve (and have extra resources and free time to spend doing whatever you want).