Wanderer above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich
I’ve been running businesses for over 10 years. I helped start Inkling at the end of 2005 with Y Combinator.
One of my biggest frustrations was simply how little the company spread through blogs and news sites. I echoed the wants of every other entrepreneur. How can I get more press? How can I meet more bloggers who want to write about us? Do I need to hire a PR person?
We had a blips of press when we first started. But for 9 years it was in business (was acquired last year), it’s a minuscule list.
Inkling had been able to stand despite the difficulty spreading the word the way I wanted, but I hated that feeling of being beholden to other people to spread what I was working on.
As I found myself dreaming of what I’d work on next, I was haunted with the struggle of finding people to spread my work.
In the late 1980s there was a teenage actor who was doing well finding movie roles. But as quick as his career started, it stuttered.
So he fell back to Plan B, and went to college. But he couldn’t let the acting bug go away. He kept looking for and landing parts. Then in his final year of college, he landed the best role of his life — a starring role in a movie filled with A-list actors and a great director. This was an Oscar-worthy movie.
So he quit school and moved to LA to pursue a professional acting career full-time.
Except, the movie bombed.
Critically, it did well. But it was a box office dud. And his hope that this was his stepping stone to stardom was squashed.
He was back to being a largely unknown actor, sleeping on friends floors in LA, with endless competition. He’d get an occasional minor role, but was making less than when he was a teenager.
He needed a breakout role. But no one was giving it to him.
So, he decided to do it himself.
He dusted off a script he had started in college, and with a friend put serious time into turning the half-written document into an actual screenplay. When they thought they finally had something, they started shopping it around. And, it wasn’t half bad. They got some interest from a big name studio, and made a deal.
Just one problem. The studio decided they didn’t want either of these guys to act in it. They wanted A-list celebs to star in the movie.
The whole point of writing the screenplay was to give them big parts to help launch their careers, and now the plan was falling apart.
But another friend of theirs with some clout at a movie studio, was able to step in and find a new buyer for the script. The new buyer green-lit the movie, and put the friends back in charge. They gave themselves the parts they wanted, and the rest of the story is very well known.
In 1997, on Christmas day, the movie premiered. It made over $225 million in theaters, was nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and won two of those awards, Best Supporting Actor, and most importantly…
The script Matt Damon had started while attending Harvard became Good Will Hunting and won Best Original Screenplay for Matt and his good friend, Ben Affleck.
Matt and Ben’s careers soared, catapulted by the success of that movie and their roles in it. All because they worked hard to become what it is they tried so hard to find — someone to put them in starring roles in a great movie.
Become that which you seek
Everyday I bump into someone struggling to find someone else to help them with their project or career. They are business people looking for technical co-founders or people like me at Inkling looking for someone else to write about me.
Now, from all these years in business, I realize that Matt Damon had it right. Instead of looking for some executive producer to give him a starring role, he was just going to become the executive producer.
If you’re a “business guy” stuck because he can’t find a technical co-founder: go become the technical co-founder. Go to some classes, conferences, meetups. Read and use the same blogs and forums. Do what you think a technical co-founder would do. You’ll be surprised that the action of trying to accomplish this actually puts you in the company of a great deal of people who would make… really great technical co-founders.
You know who Matt Damon met on the set of his movie? Steven Spielberg. Who then cast him for a role in Saving Private Ryan.
I was so sick of no one writing about me and the companies I work on, I decided I needed to become that writer. I put in years of practice and patience of publishing blog post after blog post and having three people read them (my wife, my mom and me). But, eventually, my blogging gained some traction and followers.
One of those followers turned out to be Chris Dannen, a senior editor at Fast Company, who asked me to write for them. About what? About me. And now, that’s turned into invites to write about my projects for other magazines and newspapers.
I had spent all this time looking for someone else to write about me. But, when I spent that time instead becoming the writer, better opportunities presented themselves.
Of course, this took a while. Everything worth it does.
But a funny thing happens when you do the work to become the thing you seek so much from others. You find it.
Basecamp is looking for talented interns to join our team this summer. We’re excited to work with you, and the things you work on will impact millions of users at the world’s leading online project management tool.
About the Basecamp summer internship program
Interns at Basecamp work on real projects and are mentored one-on-one by a member of our team who will guide you throughout your time at Basecamp. The projects you’ll work on as an intern at Basecamp are all derived from real problems we face as a business, and we expect you’ll have a meaningful impact during your time here. You’ll leave Basecamp with new technical, creative, and business skills and having accomplished something significant.
Internships at Basecamp are remote — you can work from anywhere you want, provided there’s some overlap in time zones with your assigned mentor. We’ll fly you to Chicago once or twice during the summer to get together with your mentor and the rest of the intern class, and you’ll talk regularly with your mentor via phone, Skype, or Google Hangouts. You’ll also participate in some of our dozens of Campfire chat rooms every day.
All internships are paid and require a commitment of 8–12 weeks of full time work between May and August 2016 (we’re flexible on start/end dates, planned vacations, etc.).
About you
We’re hiring interns interested in working on programming, product design, operations, marketing, and data.
Regardless of role, there are a few key things we’re looking for in interns:
You are independent and self-driven. Basecamp is built on the concept of being a team of managers of one, and that applies to interns as well. You’ll get plenty of support and guidance from your mentor and the rest of the team, but no one will be telling you how to spend each minute of your day, so it’ll be up to you to make sure you’re making forward progress.
You are an excellent communicator. We write a lot at Basecamp — we write for our products, we write for our marketing sites and initiatives, and most importantly, we write as our primary way of communicating internally. Clear and effective communication is essential to being successful at Basecamp.
You have fresh ideas and you’re willing to share them. We don’t know it all, and we actively want to hear fresh ideas and perspectives that we haven’t considered.
You’re eager to learn. You’ll dive right in to new technologies, new approaches, and new concepts and apply them to your work.
How to apply
To apply, send an email to [email protected] explaining why you want to be an intern at Basecamp, what projects you’re interested in working on (see below), what work you’ve done in the past, and why we should hire you. Feel free to include your resume, but we’re big fans of great cover letters over resumes. Be sure to tell us what dates you’re available this summer and where you’ll be located.
We’ll be accepting applications through Wednesday, February 24th. We’ll be in touch to confirm receipt of your application and let you know about next steps shortly after we receive your email.
The projects
As an intern at Basecamp, you’ll work on one of the following projects directly with a mentor.
Programming: Research and implement new features for Trix, our open-source rich text editor (JavaScript / CoffeeScript) and integrate those features in Basecamp 3.
Programming: Make our Android app more Androidy. Taking into consideration the foundation of our hybrid (web + native) app development philosophy, our Android team will help you explore ways to make uniquely powerful Android features — ones that make our customers reach for their Android device instead of the desktop app.
Programming: Change the way people find information internally at Basecamp by unifying various internal search tools into a single source of all the information people need to respond to customer problems. You’ll talk to internal clients, survey the state of the world, and then build out a solution.
Design: Understand how people work with clients in Basecamp through a mix of quantitative analysis and customer research (surveys, structured interviews). You’ll work to structure the problem, identify the data that you need, write survey questions and interview guides, conduct interviews, and synthesize findings and implications for client features within Basecamp.
Marketing: Help us target a specific industry (or “vertical”) by picking an industry, identifying the various stakeholders who are involved, interviewing them, and building out a sample Basecamp to demonstrate how Basecamp can help them accomplish their work. You’ll launch your work and then measure the impact of that work on the targeted vertical.
Marketing: Identify what people are saying about us on social media by using your analytical and digital marketing skills to help determine both quantitative and qualitative ways for us to know what people are saying about Basecamp. Are they generally happy? Satisfied? What are they talking about? How can we measure our impact?
Operations: Bring us into the IPv6 age by coming up with a plan for us to add IPv6 support to our public sites, testing support, deploying the new configuration, and providing documentation and training for our operations and support teams.
Operations: Establish a way of offering custom domains for Basecamp 3 customers. You’ll figure out how to automate provisioning, handle terminating thousands of SSL certificates, monitor for problems, and make it a great customer experience.
Operations: Upgrade our hardware provisioning process so we have a fully automated process to take a server from the point of arriving at our datacenter to being production ready.
Operations: Make it easy for new people to come on board or set up a new computer by figuring out how to run everything you need for development in a virtual machine or container.
Data: Help us find problems before we feel the pain of them by improving our ability to identify unusual values in the over 30,000 services we monitor to tell us about the health of our applications and businesses. You’ll identify the right algorithms to use to detect aberrations, the parameters needed to ensure that we balance false positive and false negative alert rates, and put the system into production.
I’m currently trying to teach myself coding and feeling a bit discouraged at the moment. Trying to hear of other’s success stories to see if it’s worth it to see it through to the end. (zeexik asks on Reddit)
Who hasn’t felt like this about something? We’re out of school, but there’s things we want to still learn to get where we want to go. But it’s daunting. We get discouraged.
17 years ago I spent my summer in Paducah, KY. It was friggin hot. It was even worse because on a lot of days I was wearing an acid proof suit — those things are made of an unbreathable plastic something that doesn’t react with acid; see Breaking Bad and why you don’t use acid in your bathtub 🙂
Why was I in this suit? Because I was doing experiments at a uranium processing plant where we used a lot of hydrofluoric acid. If that sounds dangerous, it was. We’d have to carry gas masks around all day; go through radiation detectors; some guy had recently burned a hole through his shoulder from some tiny, accidental leak somewhere.
It was my first real gig doing chemical engineering, and I hated it. I mean, aspects of using my education were incredibly enlightening, but I didn’t want to work in plants like this after college.
Fortunately for me that summer, I broke my ankle.
They wouldn’t let me in the plant anymore for fear my cast would get contaminated with uranium. You know, typical summer intern problems. 🙂
It was fortunate because they stuffed me in a trailer outside the plant where I couldn’t get into too much trouble. And the only thing I could then do all day was use a computer. They’d give me Excel spreadsheets and ask if I could help them with some macros to speed up their calculations. It opened my eyes to what I really wanted to be doing.
I loved that work. Programming macros turned into me creating visual basic UI’s to make all these things that made the lives better of people around me at that plant. The feedback was instantaneous. Unlike the experiments I was doing that were dealing with all these messy chemical and physical problems people still couldn’t understand from decades of academic research, the computer obeyed my will, and allowed me to make so many people happy when it made their lives easier. I was hooked. I just dove in. Found everything I could about programming. Started making websites.
But then college was almost over, and I was still a chemical engineer, and instead, I wanted a job programming computers. So I took the closest thing I could get near the software business which was as a consultant for Accenture. And that sucked.
I was stuck gathering requirements all day. Typing up meeting notes. I didn’t have the skills for them to let me do any software engineering tasks. So I just kept at it. I’d bug all the engineers around me on what they were doing and learning. I’d go home and make more software. More websites. Try more things. Eventually I bugged enough people at work about the stuff I was making, they saw I had a hunger and new set of skills and they started letting me do some tasks on the side. I still had my requirements gathering and grunt work to do, but I’d stay after work for hours programming things for them, and learning some new reporting tools they had that they didn’t have time to learn yet, which included the ability to program UI’s to pull up the reports.
Eventually, I moved on from that role and they started putting me in software engineering roles. I still wasn’t any good. But I just sponged all the knowledge I could from the senior people around me. I did my work off hours too to see if I could make it better than they expected of me.
Eventually, I moved on from that company and was a pretty damn good engineer finally, and got a job at a software company.
Eventually, I moved on from that job and started creating my own software companies. First Inkling, where I was the CTO, then I was an engineer for the Obama campaign, then I made Draft (http://draftin.com) and then all of this led to Jason Fried and Basecamp picking me to take Highrise (http://highrisehq.com) and turn it into a separate company where I still get to write software every day.
So heck yeah, I’ve taught myself software development and make money at this. It wasn’t fast. It took at least a year of really hard work on the side to get people to give me some tasks that were programming related at work. And years after that before I’d say I was any good.
But it’s like anything. It takes practice. We suck at so much stuff when we start out.
I have a 19 month old daughter. She’s awful at everything.
Right? 🙂 Crashes into walls. Falls down constantly. Can’t figure this out or that. But we know she’s going to be awesome at this stuff she struggles with today. Look at how far she’s already come! It’s ridiculous how much she learns and learns and learns. And that doesn’t have to stop.
Don’t pick up software development if you’re just doing it for a paycheck or what you think the paycheck is going to be in the future. Pick it up because you like figuring out things like that. And I guarantee you, with enough practice and work, you’ll get better. And then better. And then better after that.
And as for the coding schools, I haven’t done any myself, but sometimes those are the best ways to learn for some folks. Some people get by with a book and a keyboard. Some really need the mentors and fellow students around them to bounce things off of. I would definitely experiment and check them out. I know people who’ve taken those courses and gone on to make their own things or gotten really great jobs. Claire Lew is a great example. She took a course at Starter League, and now Basecamp put her in charge of Know Your Company. That’s not everyone’s story of course. But let me share one more anecdote:
An acting teacher told his class of total beginners (which included me): “New York and LA are inundated with actors. It’s tough to make a career there. But… you can absolutely achieve it in Chicago. You won’t get everything you want all the time, but if you do the work you can get enough acting jobs, including commercials or industrial films, to make the money work. If you want to have a career as an actor, it’s yours.”
He absolutely believed that it wasn’t about what we looked like or innate talent we had at acting. If we wanted a career in acting, we just had to do the work.
And as I started watching the people around me succeed at acting, that’s exactly what they were doing. They were making a living at it. It wasn’t A-list Hollywood stuff all the time. Sometimes it was appearing in training videos about workplace sexual harassment, or chemical safety, or whatever. But those paid the bills so they could get up on stage every weekend to perform a play for a hundred people. The people with the rigid goal of Hollywood now or nothing? Those folks were bitter and gave up.
If you want a career in software, it’s yours. There is nothing stopping you from learning this. Just put in the work to learn it like anything else. It might take a bunch of only fair jobs before you’re good enough, but take what you can get and learn.
I’m often asked about the benefits we offer at Basecamp. Potential employees are obviously curious, but most of the questions I get are from fellow business owners and entrepreneurs. Everyone’s looking to know what everyone else is doing — as are we — so I figured I might as well post our current benefit list publicly.
Note: Since the majority of our staff works remotely, and some outside the US, some of these benefits are provided in different ways. For example, the 401k is only available in the US. We’re currently working on making sure everyone, no matter where they work, have commensurate benefits (or at least as similar as possible). We’re still working on this, so hopefully I can write more about how we’ve addressed this down the road.
Overall, our uptime this year was the best it’s ever been in our modern recorded history. All of our customer facing apps recorded 4 9’s of uptime or better (meaning 99.99x% uptime), and each individual app had less downtime than last year.
Our Applications 2012–2015
What About Basecamp 3?
Basecamp 3 isn’t on the list, because it’s had perfect uptime since launch!
Our team will continue working hard to deliver the most stable and performant Basecamp you’ve ever used. We’re looking forward to a great 2016!
Just a few of the things you can love, like, not care, or hate to do. Illustration by Nate Otto.
Attend enough startup conferences or listen to enough motivational speakers and you’ll hear one piece of advice repeated over and over again: You’ve got to love what you do! If you don’t love what you do, you might as well stay home. No less a giant than Steve Jobs famously told Stanford’s 2005 graduating class, “The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle.”
I don’t buy it.
There’s nothing wrong with loving what you do, of course — I just don’t think it’s a prerequisite for starting a business or building a fulfilling career, let alone doing great work. In fact, I think it’s disingenuous for really successful people to put so much of the focus on love, just as it’s disingenuous for really rich people to say money doesn’t matter. People tend to romanticize their own motivations and histories. They value what matters to them now, and forget what really mattered to them when they started. It’s human nature, so it’s an easy thing to do.
The way I see it, many great businesses and important innovations are actually born out of frustration or even hate. Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp, the co-founders of Uber, didn’t start their ride-sharing service because they loved transportation or logistics. They started it because they were pissed off that they couldn’t get a cab. Kalanick may love running Uber today, but he really hated not having a way to get home. A random brainstorming session one night in Paris turned that frustration into the seed of a multibillion-dollar company.
I talk to other entrepreneurs all the time, and many of their companies sprang into existence for similar reasons — because the founder wanted something that didn’t exist or scoped out an opportunity to do something better than it had been done before. Love for their subject matter may or may not play a role in their stories, but hate for the existing options, along with strong opinions about how things could work, does and is a much better predictor of success.
My own career is no exception. Back in the mid-’90s, I was looking for a simple tool to keep track of my music collection, and all of the available programs seemed bloated and unnecessarily complex. Those are two things I hate, so I set out to make my own tool and eventually released it under the name Audiofile. I didn’t love music collecting. I didn’t even love software development. (I was just learning it at the time.) And I didn’t have any aspirations to run a software business — I just saw a need, and I filled it. Nothing wrong with that. A similar situation led me to start my current company, Basecamp.
Truth be told, even today I don’t always love what I do. The paperwork, the reporting, the day-to-day minutiae that come along with responsibility for a large and growing company — none of those things make me swoon. Yet I’d still rather be running Basecamp than doing anything else. I think I’m good at it, every day I get to do challenging, creative work, and I continue to find making better project-management tools a worthy and rewarding cause. It’s also a real pleasure to work with such amazing people as I do every day of the week.
If I were giving a motivational speech, I’d say that, if you want to be successful and make a real contribution to the world, you have to be intrinsically motivated by the work you do, and you have to feel good about spending your days on it. Love might grow — and it’s a wonderful thing if it does — but you don’t need it up front. You can succeed just by wanting something to exist that doesn’t already.
When I was 15 I had a friend named Patrick. We met in driver’s ed.
If you looked at him, you’d probably expect to find him in a mosh pit, or playing insanely loud punk music. You’d be right. But the guy had the voice of an angel and sang in his high school choir.
One night, Collin and I pick Patrick up from choir practice. Collin was our 16 year old friend who we often made drive us around. Poor Collin 🙂
As we were driving to who knows where (some cafe to play chess and drink coffee or to Taco Bell) a song came on the radio that I liked. And I sang it a little.
That weird looking, punk rock, 15 year old kid gave me some advice that has helped shape every single thing I’ve accomplished since.
He warned me that, as I sang, I was trying to imitate the musician on the radio, and I wasn’t doing a very good job of it. My voice just couldn’t do what we were listening to.
Instead, I should try to cover the same song but do it in a way that suited my voice. My voice isn’t very strong at those high notes. If I was going to imitate anyone, try to imitate someone’s voice that works at this low pitch.
I tried Patrick’s advice, and I sang the song at a considerably lower pitch that was comfortable to me. I remember it sounded now more like Johnny Cash. The result was surprising. It wasn’t half bad, and it was much better than me trying to sing like that guy on the radio.
I’ve never felt like a “web designer”. I’ve been building websites for 15 years, and I’ve done what I’ve needed to do, but I could never get my stuff to look even close to those beautiful creations I admire.
To get past that, I’d end up buying a template someone else made. Or finding really good business partners who could design all the things I couldn’t.
A handful of years ago, however, running my third software company, I found myself alone trying to create a new project.
I didn’t have a partner, or a designer or anyone else to help me. And I didn’t have any money to spend getting the help. A template wasn’t going to cut it this time. I was in a bind.
I don’t have a Dribbble account full of my work. I don’t have a portfolio. I don’t know what awards designers win. I hear there are awards.
But I had to figure out what I can design. I had to figure out a way to design that suits me.
Since I can’t do a lot with color, or illustrations, or shadows, or logos, I’d have to go with very little of those things. It would have to be the basics.
I still looked at people doing amazing work online for inspiration. But instead of trying to step into the shoes of my preconceived notion of a designer, I started noticing elements of projects that I could actually do myself.
I can’t create an identity or logo like Aaron Draplin, but I sure could use Futura Bold and add a little space between the letters like he seems to be doing.
I ended up with what you see at Draft, software I’ve made to help me write better.
It has no logo. It has zero images. There’s one color on the homepage. Blue.
Thank god or luck or hard work or whatever, I have stumbled on a large number of people that appreciate and love the user experience and user interface I’ve created. I’ve worked my ass off to accomplish this project. But I didn’t expect this.
Of course there’s plenty of blemishes that you might see (and even more that I do). Mountains of things I need to improve and polish. And I’ll never think it’s as good as anything from my heros who I immediately think of when someone says: designer.
But somehow, along the way of getting here, I have figured out a way to design. I found some way to sing this song but with a voice that suits me.
You might not be able to sing like your preconceived model of how a singer sings, but I’ll never understand when someone tells me, “I can’t sing.”
I love print. I love the feeling of physically holding a book and turning its pages, or leafing through a magazine. As a former newspaper reporter, I never stopped marveling at how I could file an A1 story at 5 pm and by early the next morning, there it would be—my words and my byline, above the fold—on hundreds of thousands of papers landing on people’s doorsteps, a weighty tactile thing that had been physically printed and distributed at great expense.
But as a former newspaper reporter, I also have no delusions about the sorry state of print media. I lived through multiple rounds of layoffs and buyouts at my old job, and the real reason I still get the Chicago Tribune and New York Times in print form is because their Sunday editions are basically free with a digital subscription. I read most of my news online. Even in the digital-only world, high-quality sites have had their share of troubles, indicating that the challenges facing independent media are not just about format, but about finding that elusive mix of good content plus the right audience plus sustainable funding.
That’s why I was delighted to report a story for The Distance on Bowlers Journal International, the longest-running sports monthly in the United States. It is thriving in print—advertising is up! The magazine, founded in 1913 by a Chicago shoe salesman, has a remarkably loyal base of subscribers and advertisers. Of all the stories Bowlers Journal has told, the most enduring one is that of its own longevity and close relationship with its readers. Take a listen:
Transcript
WAILIN: Print media is dead. Right? We’ve witnessed the long, painful decline of newspapers and magazines and decried their inability to adapt to the digital age. Well, in certain corners of the publishing industry, print is very much alive.
KEITH: For print advertising, we’re already projecting to be up 10 percent. So you know what? The magazine world, it’s about the industries you serve. Now, if you’re broad-based consumer, that’s one thing. But you can’t assume—you can’t associate broad-based consumer publishing with what we do, which is niche-targeted publications. It’s a different world.
WAILIN: That’s Keith Hamilton, and his world is bowling. He’s the president of Luby Publishing, a company whose flagship title is Bowlers Journal International, the longest running sports monthly in the United States. It was founded in 1913, and it’s read by elite bowlers, pro shop operators and bowling center owners around the world. The circulation of Bowlers Journal has been steady at about 20,000 subscribers for the 34 years that Keith Hamilton has worked there.
KEITH: We know who our reader is. We meet our reader at the tournaments. We meet our readers at trade shows. We’re very intimate, probably one of the most intimate magazines with its readership that you can imagine.
WAILIN: The Bowlers Journal audience includes Hall of Fame players like Mike Aulby, who started reading the magazine as a teenager in the late seventies, started on the pro bowlers tour when he was just 18 and made the cover in 1985.
MIKE: You know, it’s kind of the go-to place for anything, especially the higher level of the sport, for us. We kind of kept tabs on it through there and you know, there’s one thing on the pro bowlers tour is you wanted to have a feature article in there because that was the spot where everybody in the industry would see it.
WAILIN: Welcome to The Distance, a podcast about long-running businesses. I’m Wailin Wong. On today’s show: the story of a print magazine and a beloved American pastime, both of which have survived Prohibition, the Great Depression, two world wars and more, all while retaining an incredibly loyal fan base. The Distance is a production of Basecamp. Introducing the new Basecamp Three. Basecamp is everything any team needs to stay on the same page about whatever they’re working on. Tasks, spur-of-the-moment conversations with coworkers, status updates, reports, documents and files all share one home. And now your first basecamp is completely free forever. Sign up at https://basecamp.com/thedistance.
KEITH: We publish Bowlers Journal, Bowling Center Management, Pro Shop Operator, Entertainment Center News, Billiards Digest. We can have 42 issues a year come through here.
WAILIN: That’s a lot.
KEITH: It is, because we’re very lean, as you probably noticed. We’ve got six people in the office.
WAILIN: Bowlers Journal has modest origins. It began as a weekly publication, founded by a 56-year-old shoe salesman and avid bowler in Chicago named Dave Luby. The first issue was eight pages long and the back cover had an ad from Brunswick, the bowling equipment manufacturer. The company has advertised on every back cover of Bowlers Journal since that very first issue in 1913.
KEITH: Yeah, Brunswick’s an amazing supporter of this company. Loyal, loyal as the day is long. It’s one of the longest relationships in any industry, I mean, 102 years with one advertiser is pretty good.
WAILIN: When Dave Luby died in 1925, the magazine passed to his son Mort. He was a World War I veteran who loved to bowl, drink and gamble, and he married a Hollywood-raised socialite who once played bridge with legendary actress Mary Pickford. Under Mort Luby’s watch, Bowlers Journal expanded to cover billiards but also lost its beer and whisky advertisers to Prohibition, and the magazine downsized from a weekly to a monthly. To keep money coming in, Mort Luby started a wire service that covered bowling tournaments for newspapers across the country. He also started a tournament, the Bowlers Journal Championships, which are still held today.
In 1967, Mort Luby died in his sleep on a Pullman car traveling home from a bowling industry event in Houston. His son, Mort Junior, took over Bowlers Journal at the age of 25. He still visits the office once a month.
KEITH: Great man. He set out a goal of life and man, he hit it. He hit every aspect of his life. So I got a lot of admiration for Mort. He basically set my life, my career path.
WAILIN: That career path started when Keith was just a college kid looking for a summer job. His sister knew someone who knew Mort Luby Junior and heard he needed help cleaning a Chicago townhouse he owned.
KEITH: Yeah, I remember like it was yesterday. Pulling up to that townhouse and seeing Mort Luby come out. He was driving a white Buick Park Avenue back then, and you knew right away this guy was something special just by his presence. It wasn’t that I had a desire to get into publishing—or bowling. It was just a job, then.
WAILIN: That cleaning job turned into a stint working in the Luby Publishing office during Keith’s breaks from college. He had been a high school athlete, playing football, basketball and baseball. He was not a bowler. His interest in the sport — and in the publishing business — would accumulate over time. Luby Publishing helped pay for his MBA program at Notre Dame, and Mort put Keith in charge of advertising when he graduated. As he started working full-time, he set his sights on a bigger opportunity.
KEITH: I saw a path to owning the company. Even when I was green with inexperience, I saw that you know what? Mort’s going to retire soon and there’s not really anybody here with the business acumen to step in and purchase the company.
WAILIN: Keith teamed up with Mike Panozzo, a colleague who worked on another Luby Publishing title, Billiards Digest, and had more editorial and journalism expertise. In the summer of 1992, they took Mort Luby Junior to Lawry’s, a Chicago restaurant famous for its prime rib. They wouldn’t officially take over Bowlers Journal until 1994, but it all started with that dinner.
KEITH: Mort was dropping some hints, you know, when I get outta here, when I get outta here, and Mike and I took him to dinner that night, told him we were interested in the company, and away it went. Now it was a long process because you know, we weren’t wealthy guys. Mort didn’t pay great (laughs). So it took probably two years. It was that type of process to get to a proper price and I tell you what. Sometimes, you just have to go through the process. If we went to Mort day one and said, Mort here’s the deal? He would have said no way. You have to go through the rigors of the back and the forth and the understanding of what this means. What this means from a tax perspective. My MBA? I learned that buying Luby Publishing. It wasn’t so much at Notre Dame. Sorry, Notre Dame. Great school. But it was definitely that process there, taught me more than I ever could have imagined.
WAILIN: Bowlers Journal has always been for the high-end bowler, the person who travels to tournaments and spends money on products. The magazine covers professional bowling competitions and provides detailed ball reviews, working with a testing center in Florida that can control variables like humidity and the amount of oil on a lane.
KEITH: Our readers, I’m not kidding, they can own up to six bowling balls because each ball performs differently on a certain lane pattern. They can have the same ball but drill it differently, you know where you put your thumbs? They can drill in another part of the ball. It has to do with the pin and the center of gravity and all that, stuff that I don’t know but I like to think I do.
WAILIN: Keith is being modest. His specialty may be on the business side of the magazine, but he’s picked up a lot of bowling expertise. It wasn’t until about 12 years ago, though, that he really started bowling. He got into it by joining a super tough league in the outskirts of Milwaukee and a more relaxed league in Chicago.
KEITH: At the good league, the challenging league, they talked about their bowling shoes. They talked about the pins. They talked about leagues. Everybody complained about the lane oil. The casual league, nobody talked about that stuff. They played their card games based on strikes and spares and they were eating pizza.
WAILIN: At the first game he bowled with the serious league in Milwaukee, he shot an 88.
KEITH: Some of the people knew me because of the magazine, so they expect me to be a good bowler. So I’m like apologizing for my bowling because I don’t want them to think the magazine is some hack, okay, because I don’t write instruction. I write about the business side of it or I don’t tell people how to bowl. So don’t judge the magazine because I stink. So I remember getting one of those few times in my life, we’ve all been there, you get that red-faced feeling permanating throughout your entire body from head to toe. That was me. It was awful.
WAILIN: But Keith improved, and for the last eight years, he’s averaged 170. Perhaps more importantly, joining that challenging league helped him better understand his audience. And knowing the Bowlers Journal readers is what’s helped Keith and Mike run the company. They know what their subscribers want to read and how to deliver that information better than anyone else.
KEITH: For example, we cover a bowling tournament. You gotta talk about what happened behind the scenes. Here’s what led to the shot that led to the shot that made him win the tournament. Or here’s what happened in the background. Here’s the friction that was going on in the crowd that you couldn’t see on TV. As long as you deliver original information, original content, you can be in print. Make no mistake about it. And I know our industry right now—it’s still print. We had a great online magazine, great digital magazine for two and a half years, but it just didn’t have the interest, so we had to can it.
WAILIN: This doesn’t mean that Bowlers Journal isn’t looking for ways to evolve. It publishes plenty of online content and has added a podcast featuring interviews with important figures in the sport. Keith thinks the magazine will look much different in ten years. He sees the way his 22-year-old son reads everything on his phone. And the bowling industry is undergoing significant change too.
KEITH: It’s going from a league-organized play base and it’s evolving into more of a nice Saturday night out entertainment. Now instead of bowling centers, they build what we call family entertainment centers, where bowling is an important, significant part of it, but it’s about the martini bar, it’s about the fancy lounge, it’s about the games, it’s about laser tag. It’s so much more than bowling.
WAILIN: These changes put Bowlers Journal at a bit of a crossroads. The growth of these family entertainment centers exposes more people to bowling who might not have otherwise visited a traditional bowling center. But casual bowlers don’t spend hundreds of dollars on balls and shoes, and those are the kinds of people that Bowlers Journal advertisers want to reach. I asked Mike Aulby, the Hall of Fame bowler you heard at the beginning of the episode, if he’d ever bought something after seeing it in Bowlers Journal. He remembered an ad for Ebonite, a bowling equipment company, that featured Earl Anthony, one of the sport’s all-time greats.
MIKE: And there was one where he would wear a trench coat with a Magnum Force bowling ball, and I have an orange bowling ball just because Earl threw it, so through those ads, so you bet.
WAILIN: The challenge for Keith and his staff is to cover the evolution of bowling as an industry and find ways to bring more casual bowlers into the fold, while still providing the kind of deep tournament coverage and ball reviews that will keep their core readers and advertisers coming back for the next hundred and two years.
KEITH: Obviously, we have a proven product, so there’s a lot of value for the 102. But you gotta earn it. You gotta improve. You gotta evolve. You gotta change. You gotta be hungry. You can’t expect business to keep going because you’ve been around for a hundred years.
WAILIN: Readers like Mike Aulby have seen their relationship with the magazine change over the decades. Mike no longer bowls competitively, but he owns a bowling center in Lafayette, Indiana, so he’s interested in reading about business trends. And there are subscribers like Fran Deken, who went from competing on the professional circuit to being a bowling writer, tournament director and high school coach. She started bowling at age 10 and reading Bowlers Journal shortly after that.
FRAN: I was 12 years old. My dad got us a subscription, my brother and myself, and we would argue over who got to read it first.
WAILIN: When Fran was growing up in the Chicago suburbs, she and her brother would drive to the city to attend tapings of a bowling television show, where they would look for the players they saw in the pages of Bowlers Journal. Fran ended up in the magazine herself. The first time was when she won a national intercollegiate tournament as a 20-year-old student at the University of Iowa.
FRAN: I love the Bowlers Journal all these years. Some decades have been better than others, but I save lots and lots of copies of it, although I’ve moved many times so I’ve had to unload some of them. But both of us, my husband and I, we always look forward to seeing what’s in the next month’s Bowlers Journal.
WAILIN: The magazine’s subscribers are remarkably loyal. Mike Aulby buys back issues on eBay and knows people who clip the vintage ads to frame as wall art. Keith Hamilton doesn’t take those readers — or his advertisers — for granted, even though he encourages his editorial staff not to back down from covering issues that might be controversial. He just asks his writers to be fair.
KEITH: Every day when that magazine goes out, three days later, I’m sitting there like waiting, I swear to God. After all these years I’ve been in the industry, you’re always waiting. Was there something in this magazine that ticked somebody off? But you know what? What they need to understand is, first of all, we have to do that. Because if we wrote a hundred percent of the time everything is great, it loses credibility. And the things that we’re writing about won’t have any, won’t matter.
WAILIN: Bowling doesn’t have the visibility of other sports. There are no household names like Tiger Woods. There are no glamorous pop culture references, like what The Color of Money did for billiards back in the 80s, although movies like Kingpin and The Big Lebowski are cult hits. And bowling isn’t an Olympic sport, despite intense lobbying efforts from the industry, including an unsuccessful bid to get it into the 2020 Summer Games in Tokyo. What bowling does have going for it is widespread consumer appeal, and that’s helped keep the sport alive.
KEITH: What’s great about bowling is that you can be male, you can be female, you can be child, you could be senior citizen. There are no barriers for you to bowl. Now, I can’t go out and play basketball anymore. I pull a hamstring just looking at the court. But I can bowl! Okay? I can bowl. My grandmother bowled up until 90. That’s the beauty of the sport, so that’s the reason that it appeals to everyone. And everybody has a good time bowling. Nobody comes back from bowling and says they had a bad time.
WAILIN: The Distance is produced by Shaun Hildner and me, Wailin Wong. Our illustrations are done by Nate Otto. I send out a newsletter every two weeks where I round up other interesting stories about long-running businesses. To sign up for that, visit https://thedistance.com and scroll down to the bottom to enter your email. The Distance is a production of Basecamp, the leading app for keeping teams on the same page about whatever they’re working on. Your first Basecamp is completely free forever. Try the brand new Basecamp Three for yourself at https://basecamp.com/thedistance.com.
Happy 2016! We hope you had a great New Year’s Eve with family and friends. While it’s officially time to leave 2015 behind us, here’s a batch of Basecamp 3 updates from December:
Adminland, the most boringly powerful section of Basecamp, gets an update! Top two requests fulfilled: Now you add new people to the account straight from here (without having to add them to a specific Basecamp first) and bulk change which Basecamp’s someone can see.
We’ve added annual billing options to every Basecamp paid package. Prior to this annual was only available for the Basecamp Big (enterprise) package. Annual billing is great for those who have to expense Basecamp — a single bill once a year is so much simpler than a bill every month!
Improved sorting of the My Assignments menu to group to-do lists by Basecamp. This is more predictable than the old random-order version, and eliminates a situation where the same Basecamp could be listed multiple times in different spots.
Lists are now grouped by Basecamp.
You can now turn off the Clientside in a given Basecamp, without having to archive or delete the Basecamp. This way if you were just kicking the tires of the Clientside feature in a given Basecamp, you can keep using Basecamp with your team without having to involve a client.
The Android app now features multi-account support. As more and more people set up additional Basecamp 3 accounts, it’s now a whole lot easier to quickly flip between accounts without ever having to sign out.
Quick account switcher on Android.
Major improvements to sign-up and sign-in flows. We’re continuing to refine and improve these. There’s no reason they should ever be the slightest bit confusing. Sorry about that!
Account owners can now add themselves to any Basecamp in their account. Before people could create Basecamps without the account owner knowing.
Better handling of time zones on signup.
Improved compatibility with keyboard control (tabbing through fields) and screen readers. We still have more improvements to make here, but this is a great batch of initial improvements.
We now include the title of the first to-do list on the To-dos card. Previously, we suppressed the list title until a second list was added to the set. This was confusing because customers were adding lists but not seeing the titles, leading them to think the title had been removed for some reason.
The schedule for sending the “David H. started chatting in All Basecamp” notifications has been changed. Before, we’d send one notification every 12 hours. This meant that busy Campfire chat rooms that never stopped being active just ran on this funny schedule of saying “David H. started chatting” every 12 hours, even though that room might have been active for a long time. Now we’ll only send the notification if a Campfire chat room has been quiet for at least 6 hours. If a chat room is busy 24/7, we won’t send any special notifications. The purpose is to draw attention to a fresh round of discussion after an extended silence.
Live filtering of the Campfire menu so you can jump to any Campfire quickly.
Quick filtering on the Campfire menu.
Fixed a bug where users who were removed from a Basecamp still received to-do completion notifications if they were the creator, assigned, or subscribed. Now if you’re not part of the Basecamp you won’t get any notifications from Basecamp.
…and a variety of other fixes, tweaks, and improvements!
We’ve got some great Basecamp 3 stuff cooking for 2016. Just yesterday we started working on a variety of new projects — many of which we hope to have ready for you within the next 6 weeks or so!
Thanks again for using Basecamp 3! Loving everyone’s feedback so far! Keep it coming!
And if you haven’t tried Basecamp 3 yet, January is the perfect time. In fact, January happens to be our busiest month for signups. The start new year is the right time to get your work organized, get your team on the same page, and make some wonderful progress together!
Then I think about it some more and it takes a direction.
As I work through the direction, I’ll see another direction. Usually relatively similar, but different enough that it demands its own exploration.
As I dig in into the problem, more layers and possibilities reveal themselves. Sometimes they point in entirely different directions. Some seem like big possibilities, others seem smaller.
As I keep exploring, some more options emerge. Some independent of the ones I’ve already explored, but others branch off from an existing exploration.
As I keep sketching and thinking and mocking and working through variations and conditions in my head, on paper, or in code, a few strong possibilities take the lead. I begin to follow those.
One primary direction becomes the most obvious, but there are still variations on that idea.
As I dig into the variations, I realize they aren’t direct descendants of that primary direction. Instead they’re closely related offshoots, but smaller. They usually fade away.
And finally the solution becomes clear.
Then I check my thinking by going through the process again.
Where it goes from here depends on what it is, but hopefully at the end I’ve enjoyed figuring something out.
