I’ve been doing some archeology through our archives lately. I noticed a few patterns, including discovering a series about what it’s like to spend your first few weeks here at Basecamp. Looking back over the years, it’s neat to see people’s experiences evolve over time as our company as grown.
I thoroughly enjoyed taking a dive through time in these posts and seeing echoes of their experiences from my own trial month. I definitely felt vulnerable and not the most confident in myself when I started 4 years ago. I couldn’t name it at the time, but I was dealing with impostor syndrome as I dropped into a new team that I couldn’t even physically see most days.
Faking it until I made it helped, but that festering feeling of fear persisted. I think my eventual cure was, and still is, a relentless drive to leave the campsite cleaner (and better) than when I found it. Even if it’s a single line of code, a comment, or a little ping saying thanks — it matters.
This insight from my trial month continues to ring true:
One thing I learned really quickly was that our users are creative: If you give them the ability to do anything, they will do everything!
I’m surprised and delighted on a daily basis with how people use Basecamp. Our Everyone on Support days remind me of this on a regular basis! Since that first experience learning about how our users extend our products and their functionality, I’ve been hooked on helping them get even more out of our apps.
My coworkers have also reflected on starting at Basecamp and how it’s impacted their life, craft, and outlook. Here’s a few other highlights from other “first month” posts:
The 37signals community is huge! Every change is noticed — sometimes within minutes of being launched. Receiving instant feedback to your work is great (at least so far 🙂
I’ve been thoroughly impressed by how much everyone genuinely cares about the user experience with the applications they maintain. Everything from page response times increasing by a few milliseconds to minimizing interruptions during deployments or even the impact of the number of http redirects on load times — it’s all constantly being discussed and debated.
I enjoy finding the common threads that weave across everyone’s experiences with their first few weeks. We’re constantly learning how to make this onboarding experience better for our new employees, and we’re not perfect at it still. Out of everyone’s first month posts so far, there’s a few lessons to be learned:
It takes some time to get used to the REMOTE culture, but it’s worth it!
Finding your balance and making your schedule your own is paramount.
Breaking things (sometimes immediately) is OK and expected.
We’re all in this together, despite being so physically apart!
I’m hoping we will have more to share about our first experiences in 2016. If you have something (or someone) that made starting at your job special, I’d love to hear about it.
You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch what you’re doing, and you try to get the most for your money.
You can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I’m not so careful about the content of the present, but I’m very careful about the cost.
I can spend somebody else’s money on myself. And if I spend somebody else’s money on myself, then I’m sure going to have a good lunch!
I can spend somebody else’s money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get.
“How do you juggle it all?” is a question I’m asked regularly. Usually with an undertone that I must have some secret. A trick. Is it sleeping just 5 hours per night? Is it working 12 hour days for months on end? What is it!?!
The common lore of Highly Productive People is that they just work harder. Often superhumanly so. They have a singular focus that turns their drive to 11. The media loves to recount these feats of marvelous stamina and determination.
I don’t fit that mold. I usually sleep a good 8.5 to 9 hours every night. I take pride in making work fit the traditional 40 hour/week constraint. I have no drive for more, more, more.
If I have a trick, it’s a focus on the quality of each individual hour. That doesn’t mean Time Management, in the 1990s sense of the term, slicing each hour to the last minute, and squeezing it for every last second of peak productivity. But it does cover a realization that all hours are not created or spent equal.
An hour haunted by stress, interruption, sleep deprivation, or frazzle is not worth the sixty minutes its allotted. It’s a low quality hour. You’d be foolish to expect that you can turn such dirty input into clear accomplishments. Garbage in, garbage out.
40 hours of work every week is a king’s keep. I contend that almost anything can be accomplished with such a glorious budget. But not if you squander it on meetings, multitasking, or poorly defined problems. There’s no limit to the amount of time that can be wasted like that.
Well, there’s a physical limit. And I suppose that’s where many people find refuge. I gave it everything! You can’t blame me, and I can’t blame myself, for failing to accomplish when every second was spent. I left nothing for myself, so have mercy, they rationalize.
Covering your ass to yourself or others might give you some temporary comfort, but it won’t cover the deficit of ambition in the long run. Resignation is a coping mechanism for the beaten.
What you need is a set of refinement techniques. You need to actively work on increasing the purity and quality of your hours. Here are a few that I use:
Do I really need to be involved in this?
Gluttonous curiosity is the siren song that seeks to loop you into all manners of discussions, decisions, and events that you’re likely not a necessary or even important component.
It’s hard to accept that while your insight or experience might be useful to other people, it equally might not be nearly useful enough to offset the cost of yet another head at the table.
The value of just skimming that email, turning down that meeting invitation, not depositing your two cents in that chat seems abstract in the moment. But diligently refraining from chiming in and collaborating is what gives room for making more important progress on fewer things.
Could this wait?
Some problems need to be dealt with today, lest they compound tomorrow. Best deal with those right away. But they’re in the minority. Most problems and opportunities are just as valuably addressed a day or a week or a month from now.
Putting something on the back burner means it might well have dissipated by the time you give it a second look. Wonderful! That was work that then didn’t need to get done. Or just appeared more important than it really was when you first thought about it.
The longer you delay solving a problem, the more you’ll know about it. Lots of pains just go away by adding idle time.
Can I bail on this?
The road to a day wasted is paved with heroic attempts of throwing good hours after bad. Mistaking the depth of a problem is a reliable error of working life.
The crime comes when you continue digging after realizing the hole needed is thrice as deep as you anticipated, without confirming that the solution is also worth thrice the effort originally budgeted.
Learning to give up is a critical skill for making your remaining hours count. Sunk cost is a sucker’s bet.
Am I ready for this?
Sometimes it’s the problem that needs more time to ripen, and sometimes it’s you. We are not equally capable or fit to tackle all problems at all times.
If my head is in tune for writing this week, it’s a good time to complete the copy for the new website, but it’s probably a bad time to organize the work for the next quarter. If my fingers are itching to code, then let’s solve that bug that’s irked me for a month, not try to redirect the passion to doing 1–1 interviews that week.
Our motivations ebb and flow. Swimming with the tide instead of against it is just so much easier. And as detailed above, most things can wait until the water that needs to carry them comes back up.
Even with a strong repertoire of techniques for making each hour count for more, you will still fail regularly. Maybe all the work that needs doing this week just doesn’t include anything you can muster the motivation for. So it slides and you feel shit.
But there’s great comfort in knowing that this happens to everyone. With far more often than most are willing to admit. Despite a finely-honed perception for high quality hours, I still churn through junk frequently. Leaving me with much less than what I had hoped. So it goes!
What matters is increasing the aggregate quality of your hours over the long term. Not to stress when you fail to turn out a perfect batch.
Once you’ve built an awareness and appreciation of quality time, I doubt you’ll feel the same pull to keep chasing more, more, more. The difference between an uninterrupted string of four quality hours versus a few days of crap hours is a revelation.
Even if you squeeze and squeeze to get more hours, maybe you’ll get another 20–50%? Refine the ones you already have and you might get 200–500% more value. That’s the true 10x.
The trick to juggling it all is to stop juggling.
I spend most of my quality work hours building Basecamp. We just released a brand-new version 3, which has a special Work Can Wait feature designed specifically to increase the quality of your working hours by avoiding interruptions. Give it a try!
Working with people is messy — the more people, the messier it gets. There’s no way around that. And while you may know your own mess, finding something in someone else’s is quite a challenge.
So we wanted to make sure Basecamp 3 made it easy to find what you’re looking for, no matter what fragments of information you may have handy. We’ve got every angle covered — sometimes from multiple angles!
Let me play out a few real-world scenarios below and show you how Basecamp 3 makes it easy to find what you’re looking for — especially when you don’t know exactly what it is.
“I know Jamie said something about that yesterday, but I don’t remember exactly how he said it or exactly where he said it.”
Ever happen to you? You know someone said something somewhere, but you can’t remember exactly what it was or where they said it? Unless you can rifle through your memory for a keyword, A standard keyword search isn’t very helpful here.
In Basecamp 3, just head into the “Find…” section, leave the keyword field blank, and just select “Comments” and then “Jamie Dihiansan” and hit “Go”. You’ll then get results showing everything Jamie commented on across every Basecamp you both have access to.
Leave the keyword field blank, and just select “Comments” by “Jamie”. You could also have selected “Everything” rather than “Comments”, but that would show original source content, not responses to something someone else said.
“Someone told me Ann’s been doing some amazing QA work lately. I’d love to see what she’s been up to.”
I this case I’m not specifically looking for any one piece of content, or even anything specific — I’m just looking to find out where Ann’s been pitching in. It’s more about discovery than it is a traditional search.
So I’d jump into the Reports menu and select “What has someone been up to…”
Then type Ann…
And then I get the “Here’s what Ann Goliak has been up to” report that shows everything she’s done on Basecamp in reverse chronological order. Comments she’s made, to-dos she’s added or completed, files/images she’s shared, deadlines she’s posted, etc. If she’s done it, it’s on this report. And now I know what Ann’s been up to!
As you scroll down, you’d see any comments, messages, to-dos, files, schedule items, attachments, answers to automatic check-ins, and anything else Ann did.
“Where are those sketches Ryan posted?”
You know Ryan Singer’s been working on some concept lately, and he mentioned he shared some sketches in Basecamp. You don’t remember where or when exactly, only that they were sketches. Easy!
Head into the “I’m looking for an image or file…” search on the Find screen.
Image and file search has a special grid-UI dedicated to visual searching.
Then just type in Ryan Singer. Now, I could have also selected “PDFs”, or “Video” or “All files” from the “Images” menu, but since I knew they were sketches, and I wanted to filter everything else out, I just selected Images.
And now I see all the images Ryan has shared — no matter where they were shared (in a Campfire chat, in a message, in a document, attached to a to-do, attached to an event, it doesn’t matter). And there they are!
Images -> Ryan Singer -> All Basecamp… And there they are!
“I have no idea who shared it, or where they shared it, or what they called it, but I know someone put that PDF I need up on Basecamp.”
This one happens all the time. You know it’s in Basecamp, you know it’s a PDF, you don’t know what it’s called, you aren’t even sure of what words to look for, you only know it was a PDF and you need it now! Easy!
From the same “I’m looking for an image or file…” search in the previous example, just select “PDF” and leave everything else as it is. Then hit Go.
You’ll get back a list of every PDF uploaded to Basecamp, most recent first. If you knew more info like who shared it, or which Basecamp it was in, or even a keyword, you could have entered that too to get more specific. But in a lot of cases you don’t know the specifics, you just know the generalities. Basecamp 3 has your covered.
I don’t know what I’m looking for, I’m just looking.
This one sounds kinda silly, but it’s very real and very common. You want to jump into a Basecamp and just have a look around. You’re in a discovery mindset. What’s happened today? What happened yesterday? Who said what? What topics did the conversations revolve around? Was there new work added to do? Was anything completed? Anyone share any visual concept or ideas I might want to check out? Who knows! You only know that you want to know.
Basecamp 3 makes this super easy. For example, let’s say I wanted to see what’s been going on in Team OMG. “Team OMG” is our customer service’s Basecamp. I just visit their Basecamp and scroll down.
An entire history of everything that ever happened in a Basecamp is always one screen scroll away on desktop or mobile. The latest stuff is on top. Just scroll down to go back in time and bump into what you’re looking for.
At the bottom of every Basecamp is a full history log of everything that ever happened in that Basecamp — all the way back to day one. It’s basically everything flatted by time — new/completed to-dos, discussions, files that were shared, new documents, schedule items, comments, answers to automatic check-in questions — they are all here organized by time.
Now, on top of all this you can of course search by keyword. That’s the easy one. You can also filter your searches just to a specific Basecamp, a specific person, a specific kind of content (“just search the schedule”), etc. But I hope the examples above give you a sense of some of the other ways you can find what you need in Basecamp 3!
The Richardson family arrived in Spring Grove, Illinois in 1840, when brothers Robert and Frank each claimed 80 acres of farmland that had become available for homesteading. Successive generations of Richardsons tried their hand at cash crops, dairy cows and pig production. But it was the agritourism business that proved the most sustainable for the 175-year-old family farm, which today is operated by the fifth and sixth generations of Richardsons. The family sells cut-your-own Christmas trees during the holidays and operates the world’s largest corn maze in the fall. They’ve become experts in seasonal entertainment, offering a nostalgic rural escape from suburban sprawl.
If you liked our story about Richardson Farm, you might also enjoy our September episode about Silo City, a traditional family farm in Iowa covering several thousand acres. And you can subscribe to The Distance so you never miss an episode!
Also, starting with today’s episode, I’ll be posting transcripts for each show.
Transcript
WAILIN: The Richardson family has a holiday tradition. Every year on Thanksgiving, after they’ve eaten, they pick out their Christmas tree. Here’s George Richardson.
GEORGE: Take the afternoon off after our bellies have sat for a little bit from Thanksgiving dinner and go out and get our tree.
WAILIN: Lots of families put up their Christmas trees right after Thanksgiving. But there’s something unique about the Richardsons. When they pick out their tree, they just head to their backyard, where they grow Christmas trees on 130 acres of northern Illinois farmland that’s been in the family since 1840. The Richardsons are in the cut-your-own Christmas tree business, and they sell just over six thousand trees every season between the day after Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve. Here’s George’s son, Ryan, who’s the sixth generation of Richardsons to work on the farm.
RYAN: So we have Scotch pine and white pine, both wonderful trees. Scotch pine’s kind of the old stature of the Midwest Christmas tree and it’s kind of phased itself out culturally a little bit. Firs have overtaken the market, and so firs are in general shorter-needled tree and the most popular’s going to be a Fraser fir and it’s difficult to grow in this particular region of the country, in the Midwest. So a close cousin of them is a hybrid tree, it’s a cross between a balsam and a fraser, and it’s called a Canaan. That’s a beautiful tree. So Frasers, Canaans, blue spruce, Norway spruce, concolor firs are beautiful…
WAILIN: And that’s just Christmas tree season. In the fall, the family operates the Richardson Adventure Farm, which includes a pumpkin patch, a zip line, a carousel and the world’s largest corn maze. Over the last 175 years, the Richardsons have grown cash crops and raised dairy cows and pigs. But what has proved the most sustainable — and enjoyable — is the entertainment business. Learn how the Richardsons found their true calling on this episode of The Distance, a podcast about long-running businesses. I’m Wailin Wong. 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 basecamp.com/thedistance.
(CLIP OF ACTIVITY IN THE RICHARDSON BARN)
It’s the first Saturday of December and the Richardsons’ main barn is packed. The farm is in Spring Grove, Illinois, just a few miles from the Wisconsin border, and you can tell you’re close when you turn onto Richardson Road and see cars with trees on the roofs passing you in the other direction. Inside the barn, people are buying wreaths, homemade donuts, fudge, and holiday crafts, and drinking complimentary hot chocolate under a portrait of Robert Richardson, the first member of the family to settle here. He and his brother, Frank, were bricklayers who emigrated from England to Wisconsin in 1837. Robert was George’s great great grandfather. Here’s George again.
GEORGE: This is the original homestead from 1840, the ground that we’re standing on now. Milwaukee was the bustling port city in 1837, where Chicago was still kind of just getting organized, a little bit of a swampy mess, to tell you the truth, so Milwaukee was really the boom town at that time. When this county opened up in 1840 for homesteading, they moved down here and they each homesteaded 80 acres and then Robert subsequently bought out Frank some years later.
WAILN: While working in Wisconsin as a mason, Robert Richardson fell in love with Milwaukee cream brick — a light-colored brick made from local clay. In 1861, he built a house on his land with that cream brick, taking an oxcart up to Milwaukee to get the bricks and hauling them back to Illinois. George’s older brother, also named Robert, lives in that house today with his wife Carol. George and his wife, Wendy, live on a nearby farmstead. It’s these two families, plus George and Wendy’s son Ryan, who own and operate Richardson Farm. The business has two main parts: the Christmas trees and the fall adventure farm with the corn maze. But none of this existed until the early 1980s. That’s when George and Robert’s parents, who were pig farmers, started looking for a new business and landed on cut your own Christmas trees. Here’s Carol Richardson, Robert’s wife.
CAROL: We planted 300 trees that first year and we thought that’s all we had to do was just plant them, and we got them in the ground and then we let them go and the weeds grew up around them and the grass and we thought well, this isn’t as easy as we thought it was.
WAILIN: The Richardsons joined the Illinois Christmas Tree Association and picked up some tips on weed control, among other things. They found that they liked growing trees and interacting with customers.
GEORGE: Then in 1986, we sold like 180 trees or something like that, just put a sign out on the road and people came in and oh, they had a wonderful time going out in the field and choosing their tree and coming back in. We gave them hot chocolate and we had a wonderful time because we were making more money than with pigs and so after a few years of that, we kind of figured out that the Richardsons, we kind of liked talking to people a lot more than we liked talking with pigs.
WAILIN: Here’s the thing about Christmas trees, though. If you want to grow them, you have to think about the long term. The Richardsons buy four-year-old seedlings that are around 14 to 20 inches, and plant them in one-acre blocks of a thousand trees each. Then it’s a multi-year process of nurturing the seedlings until they get to six to eight feet in height. Here’s Ryan Richardson, George’s son.
RYAN: You have to put your money and love into them for seven or eight years before they’re even going to think about repaying you back, so you need to budget out. We’re planting around eight or nine thousand of new seedlings every single year and we take very good care of them because in the end, they’ll take care of us.
(CLIP OF WAGON RIDE)
WAILIN: Outside the barn, customers pick up their hand saws and climb onboard tractor-pulled wagons to ride out to the field. Families walk between the rows of pines and firs, looking for their perfect triangular, fragrant tree. Here’s Natalie, who’s with her husband, their three children and their dog. Until this year, they’ve always had artificial trees.
NATALIE: The last one died because (laughs) the lights that came along with it—the middle part didn’t light up, so we’d have the top part of the tree lit up and the bottom part lit up, and my husband had to get a set of lights to just cover the middle part. And we’re like, you know, I think it’s time to get a real one this year. So yeah, it’s been 20 years of us being married and we’re out here picking a nice-smelling tree.
(CLIP OF TREE BEING SAWED)
WAILIN: It takes just around a minute and a half to cut down the tree. The trunks are still pretty tender at this age, and the saws are sharp. When the tree’s down, it’s loaded on the wagon for the short ride back to the barn, where it’s put through a baling machine that secures the tree with cord.
(CLIP OF BALER)
GEORGE: Our customers, God bless ’em, they seem to be happy with what we have. They’re really loyal to us. If it’s 50 degrees and sunny the Saturday after Thanksgiving, they can spend hours with the kids and the dogs and Grandma and Grandpa choosing their perfect Christmas tree and it’s just so happy. But they will also come out if it’s 10 degrees with a 30-mile-an-hour wind and it’s just, they choose their tree a little more quickly (laughs), but they still are in a really good mood when they come back into the barn to get their hot chocolate and buy their donuts.
WAILIN: After Christmas tree selling season ends, the Richardsons spend the winter on bookkeeping and making plans for the next season. New trees get planted when the ground starts to thaw, followed by corn and soybeans, which the family still grows as cash crops. Then comes the corn for the corn maze and the pumpkins. On Labor Day, the Richardson Adventure Farm opens to the public. The farm’s signature attraction is the corn maze, which spans 10 miles of trails over 28 acres.
GEORGE: We started the corn maze out of necessity because my brother and I were raising pigs and they weren’t doing so well at that particular time, 1998. The market crashed and we lost a lot of money. We used all our Christmas tree income to pay for pig feed and we’re like, this is not what we planned on. This is not going to be very, not very much fun. So we needed something else and we kind of figured out that we liked dealing with the public, so we weren’t afraid of something like that that dealt with agritourism.
WAILIN: At that time, the late 90s, the idea of agritourism — turning agricultural activity into a consumer-facing entertainment business — was still fairly novel. But the Richardsons felt they had a knack for it, based on their success with the Christmas trees. They decided to expand their tourism business on the 540 acres they owned. They hired a corn maze designer from Idaho to help them get started.
GEORGE: He had manufactured up this huge aluminum backpack thing that must have weighed 50 pounds, with a GPS on it and a battery to operate the whole thing, and he would walk, so the GPS locator dot followed the lines of the trail on his computer screen. He would walk the pattern into the cornfield and we would take spray cans of paint and paint behind his left heel a dashed line (laughs) where he was walking. Oh man, that was fun to see the design to take shape; that was really something. Now, of course, he’s much more sophisticated. Same guy that we used our very first year, we still design the maze with him and he comes out and cuts the design into the cornfield. We plant the corn north-south and east-west, so we don’t have rows of corn, we have a nice dense stand, so it looks very good in the aerial photograph, and he still comes out when the corn is about 12 inches high, has GPS mounted on his tractor, hooked in with his computer that’s got the design.
WAILIN: The Richardsons pride themselves on their intricate maze. This year’s design was Chicago Blackhawks-themed in honor of the team winning the Stanley Cup. It’s not a true maze because there are multiple exit points, a nod to people who are short on patience or might just need to get out in a hurry to use the restroom. Others spend hours exploring it. More than half of the farm’s fall visitors come after 6 pm so they can walk the maze on a starry night, using the light from their cell phones for extra illumination. During full moon weekends, the farm stays open until midnight. And the Richardsons didn’t stop at the corn maze. You can reserve a campfire and have a picnic, feed goats and try something called zorbing, which involves getting strapped into a clear plastic ball and rolling down a hill.
GEORGE: I think we added a 50-foot long slide at first, and then we had some pedal carts. Then we added some kiddie tricycles and the 50-foot tall observation tower at the base of the world’s largest corn maze because you can get up and look at part of the design, it’s really fun. And then we’ve continued to add jumping pillows and a carousel and now we have a train ride and a 700-foot zip line, zorbing, lots of activities. We have to keep up, keep adding value to it so we fight for that consumer dollar and make it worth their while.
WAILIN: Eventually, the Christmas trees and the fall activities did well enough that Robert and George Richardson were able to get out of pig farming entirely. The only pigs you’ll find today are the ones competing in the pig races during the fall. Here’s Wendy Richardson, George’s wife.
WENDY: We do call the pig races and afterwards, people are amazed that really there are Richardsons, that the name didn’t come from the road or whatever, and they like to talk to us. They like to talk to Carol, she’s up front, one of the first people that they see. Robert’s always right around the front and they love to see there are actually Richardsons to talk to. And they like the history.
WAILIN: The ability to talk to a real-life Richardson is part of the farm’s overall appeal, which is about selling a certain kind of rural nostalgia or an idealized version of farm life, an escape from suburban sprawl. It’s romantic in all the ways that pig farming most definitely was not.
GEORGE: Sometimes my brother and I, we’ll just chuckle with each other, remembering some horrendous zero-degree day when we were trying to keep all the pigs warm or the water thawed and how different our life is now. There is nothing I miss about pigs. That was a fine business, raised my family, put the kids through college, it was just fine. But I really love entertaining people, having folks come to the farm and have a wonderful time, and it makes me feel very good.
WAILIN: Ryan, George’s son, joined the business in 2007. He had been living in Florida when the family asked him to help build the 50-foot observation tower overlooking the corn maze. At the same time, his grandfather was sick, and he had recently been a groomsman in a wedding where he hit it off with one of the bridesmaids, who lived in Illinois.
RYAN: I’m just happily living in Florida doing my thing, and then I had a tower to build, a grandpa to take care of and this girl Kristin I couldn’t get out of my mind. So that happened in like three days of each other, so I was like well okay, so I called my best buddy Marlon and said, “You better get a plane ticket, man. We’re gonna need a U-Haul. We’re gonna need to load all this stuff back up and go back to Illinois.”
WAILIN: Ryan’s the only one of his siblings who’s involved with the business, and it’s a natural fit for him.
RYAN: I’ve always been a little farm boy, always. Whenever Mom couldn’t find me in the house, you’d go look in the barn because I was totting my way out there after Dad, and that’s just kind of how I was.
WAILIN: Ryan is now married to Kristin now, and they have two children, but he’s still happily following a path that George, Robert and previous generations of Richardsons helped prepare.
GEORGE: We like to talk about our history because it is very unusual in the business world, to have a business go for this many generations. That does require sacrifices by the elder generations to make sure it gets into the hands of the younger ones and generally, the older generation has to forgo being a multimillionaire to make sure it continues. But we love seeing the business go forward, very happy to hand it over to Ryan lock, stock and barrel someday. And maybe when I’m 99, I’ll actually retire and enjoy life. (Laughs) No, I’m enjoying life now so that’s the wrong thing to say.
WAILIN: The Distance is produced by Shaun Hildner and me, Wailin Wong. Our illustrations are done by Nate Otto. This is our last episode of the year and we’re already hard at work on stories for 2016. If you know of a super interesting business that’s at least 25 years old, email us at [email protected], or tweet at us. We’re @distancemag, that’s at distance M A G. 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 basecamp.com/thedistance.
I analyze data for a living. I occasionally do some other things for Basecamp — help with marketing, pitch in on support, do some “business” things — but at the end of the day, I analyze data. Some of the data is about feature usage, some about application performance or speed, some about our great support team, some about financial matters, and some of it defies categorization; regardless of the type of data, my job is to identify business problems, use data to understand them, and make actionable recommendations.
If you ask almost any data analyst, they’ll tell you that the biggest chunk of their time is spent cleaning and preparing data — getting it into a form that’s usable for reporting or analysis. Ironically, I don’t have any actual data about how much time that process consumes, either personally or for the profession as a whole, but I’d guess that the time spent on acquisition and transformation of data outweighs actual math, statistics, or coming up with recommendations by a factor of five to one or more.
Over time, both personally and as an organization, you get better at capturing and preparing data, and it eats up less and less of your time. I’d characterize the time I’ve spent at Basecamp as being four fairly distinct phases of increasingly greater sophistication in terms of how I prepare data for analysis:
The CSV phase: In my early days at Basecamp, I was just happy to have data at all, and everything was basically a comma separated value (CSV) file. I used `SELECT … INTO OUTFILE` to get data from MySQL databases, `awk` to get things from log files, and the ‘export’ button from third party services to get data that I could then analyze.
The R script phase: After a month or two, I graduated to a set of R scripts to get data directly into my analysis environment of choice. A wrapper function got data from our MySQL databases and I wrote API wrappers to get data from externalservices. Our first substantial automated reports showed up in this phase, and they were literally R scripts piped to `sendmail` on my laptop.
The embryonic data warehouse: Eventually, a fledgling “data warehouse” started to take form — a MySQL instance held some data explicitly for analysis, a Hadoop cluster came into the picture to process and store logs, and we added a dashboard application that standardized reporting.
The 90% data warehouse (today): today a centralized data warehouse holds almost of all our data, every type of data belongs to a documented schema, and Tableau has dramatically changed the way we do reporting. It’s not perfect — there are some pieces of data that remain scattered and analyzed only after cleaning and manual processing, but that’s the exception rather than the rule.
Over the course of this transformation, the time that I spend preparing data for analysis has fallen dramatically — it used to be that I started any “substantial” analysis with two or three days of getting and cleaning data followed by a day of actually analyzing it; now, I might spend twenty minutes getting vastly greater quantities of already clean data and then a couple of days analyzing it far more deeply.
That evolution didn’t come for free — it took substantial investments of both time and money into our data infrastructure. We’ve built out two physical Hadoop clusters, bought software licenses, and poured hundreds of hours over the last five years into developing the systems that enable reporting and analysis.
I used to struggle with feeling guilty every time I spent time on our data infrastructure. After all, wasn’t my job to analyze data and help the business, not build data infrastructure?
Over time, I’ve come to realize that there’s nothing to feel guilty about. The investment in our infrastructure have paid dividends many times over: in direct time savings (mine and others), in greater insights for the company, and in empowering others to work with data. In the example analysis case I described above, the transformation infrastructure saved a day or two of my time and delivered a better result to the business; I do perhaps thirty or forty such analyses per year. That makes a few weeks or even months of total time spent on those investments look like a bargain.
I often hear people argue that “investing in infrastructure” is just code for giving in to “Not Invented Here” syndrome. The single biggest impact infrastructure investment we’ve made was actually abandoning a custom developed reporting solution for a piece of commercially developed software. Just like any sort of investment, you can of course spend your resources poorly, but done properly, investing in infrastructure can be one of the highest returns you can possibly achieve.
Here’s something that’s unavoidably true: Investing in infrastructure always pays off. Always. Not just most of the time, but every single time. Sometimes the payoff takes longer than we’d like, sometimes there may be more efficient ways to get the same result, but every time we spend time and money on the four things, we’re surprised at how much of a difference it makes.
I recently wrapped up a fairly large infrastructure project at Basecamp, and my focus is naturally swinging back towards focusing more exclusively on the core of what I do: analyzing data. For the first time, however, I’m moving on from an infrastructure project without much guilt about whether it was an investment worth making. Instead, I’m looking forward to reaping the dividends from these investments for years to come.
I’m often asked for advice. I’ve decided it’s time I give less of it. There are things I used to know that I just don’t know anymore. I should stop talking about those things — it’s unfair to anyone who’s listening.
If you want advice on product design, copywriting, reducing complexity, business strategy for a well-established small business, or building a team — happy to help. I know I can be valuable there because those are things I’m thinking about and working on every day. I’m current.
But if you want advice on how to start a new business, how to get your first customer, how to hire your first employee, or anything related to starting something brand new, I’m not your man. It’s been 16 years since I started my company. I just don’t remember what it’s like anymore. I’m out of touch.
Advice, like fruit, is best when it’s fresh. But advice quickly decays, and 16 year-old advice is bound to be radioactive. Sharing a life experience is one thing (grandparents are great at this — listen to them!), but advice is another thing. Don’t give advice about things you used to know. Just because you did something a long time ago doesn’t mean you’re qualified to talk about it today.
Think you’ll get a good answer from a 30 year old telling you what it’s like to be 15? Or a 20 year old remembering what it’s like to be 5? Shit, I’m 41 now, and all I remember about being 25 is that I wasn’t 26. How clearly do you really remember anything from 16 years ago? And how many of those memories are actually marred by time and current experiences? How many of those things really happened the way you recall them today?
If you want to know what it’s like to start a business, talk to someone who just successfully started one. If you want to know what it’s like to hire your first employee, talk to someone who just successfully hired theirs. If you want to know what it’s like to make an investment, talk to someone who just made a successful one.
While distance from the event itself can provide broader perspective, the closer you get to the event, the fresher the experience. If I want to know what something’s really like, I’d take a fresh recollection over a fuzzy memory. I think the same is true for advice.
I spent half of last week in New York, and the other half in Baltimore. But I only packed enough contact lenses for New York.
I wear daily wear lenses, so I have to replace my lenses every day. I usually over-pack lenses so I have at least twice as many as I’ll need, but this time, in a blurry rush to get out of the house on time, I forgot.
I realized this as I was nearing my last day’s supply. Shit!
So I called my optometrist back in Chicago to ask them if they could send my prescription to a local Lenscrafters in Baltimore so I could pick up a box when I arrived in town.
They looked up my prescription and discovered it had expired earlier this year. My prescription hadn’t changed in 5 years, but it had still technically expired so they couldn’t approve it, or send it. The answer was no. Definitively no. No sir. And that was the end of that. Policy ahead of flexibility for a customer in need. I get it, but I didn’t like it.
So what to do. Ultimately we decided to run over to a local Target. They have an eye clinic with walk-ins available. I could quickly get a new exam and then buy a box of lenses there. That would tide me over. Perfect!
So we hopped in the car, sped over to Target, and walked into the clinic.
It was empty, other than a fellow named Ron. He ran the clinic there that day. Ron had a very Wilford Brimley look about him. Friendly. Good sign! I could walk right in, put my face against the crazy contraption, read some letters, and get on with it.
I explained the situation to Ron, and he stopped me. He said “That’s ridiculous. There’s no reason to put you through the time and expense of a whole new exam just for a couple days worth of lenses. You’re stuck, let’s get you unstuck. Call your optometrist at home and put me on the phone with them.”
So I did.
Ron didn’t ask them to transfer the prescription. He just asked them to read it out loud. “What was Jason’s last prescription?” They told him. He said, “Got it, thanks!”.
Then he went into the back, pulled a few spare trial lenses, and handed them over with a smile. I asked if I owed him anything, he said no — but there’s a jar over here where you can pop a few bucks in for kids who can’t afford glasses. And that’s exactly what I did.
Ron is a very reasonable man. He considered the situation, considered the risk, and did the reasonable thing. He helped someone out who was stuck in a bind. He imagined what it would be like if he was in my shoes, and I was behind the desk instead. He’d want from me what I asked of him. That’s the best service you can ever give.
It made me think about our business. We should be Ron. We all should be more like Ron. Snap out of corporate policy mode, and act under the good neighbor code.
Business lessons are everywhere (I’ve written about that before). You don’t have to seek out famous mentors, attend expensive conferences, or worship the best minds in the industry. Just pay attention and observe everyday dealings between everyday people in everyday situations. School’s in session at every moment. The best lessons are experienced first hand.
A couple years ago I purchased a new car. A few days later I got an email from Audi asking me to rate my experience. I clicked the link to the survey and ended up seeing this:
Ok, this should be easy.
“Ease of looking at dealer’s inventory” — great, no problems there. A 10, right? Well… was it OUTSTANDING? How about TRULY EXCEPTIONAL? No, it wasn’t those… I can’t say someone’s inventory was truly exceptional. I can’t put my name on that sort of endorsement. So…?
Comfort in the office where we cut the deal? It was fine — I couldn’t imagine it to be better, but was it TRULY EXCEPTIONAL? No. That doesn’t fit. So does that make it a 6 or 7? No, it was better than that… But… So…?
I see this sort of thing in surveys all the time. A simple 1–10 scale (or 1–5, it doesn’t matter), but the labeling of the numbers is so sensationalized that it turns me off. As far as the number goes, I’m happy to give something the highest rating, but the language overshoots the number and then I don’t know how to respond.
I find these sorts of things great reminders of how important it is to choose the right words. Don’t overshoot, don’t sensationalize. Be modest with language. Find the right fit and leave it alone.
Hey Guys, We run a monthly subscription that provides a certain service for other businesses. At the moment we have a few clients but are currently really struggling to get some more. We have only really been in business for a couple of weeks but was hoping for some more clients. At the moment we have a tried a fair bit, mainly trying to build a twitter following and keeping our blog up to date at the moment (daily high quality posts) in order to build some authority. We have also sent out a heap of emails (tried a few different subjects + content) but still not really getting any more customers. So my question to /r/Entrepreneur is, what are some tips you have for getting clients in a service based industry?
Years ago a guy decided he had some talent making cakes and wanted to start a business. But he had no clue how to start. So he went to his dad who is already a successful entrepreneur and PhD in Economics and asked him how to get started. His Dad’s reply? “If you want to have a cake business, you need to sell cake.”
So this wannabe business owner took his father’s advice to heart. He went out and hustled cake. He built the best fake cake he could. Then he figured he needed to be where people naturally were going to become cake customers. Not in the yellow pages. Not on the internet. Not making cold calls. He went and physically hung out where his customers were going to be: wedding venues! Brides-to-be are constantly at wedding venues. Checking them out. Getting ideas. Making reservations. So he went over to the wedding venue by his house and dressed in his Chef whites with this fake cake of his. And he just walked. Slowly. Up and down the sidewalk. He’d lap around and around for 5 hours. Eventually a bride-to-be would stop by the wedding venue to make a reservation for their own ceremony, and they’d see this baker and his beautiful fake cake, and they’d ask for a card. In a couple months of this, he was making cakes for every wedding at that venue.
Today? You might know him as Duff Goldman, or as Ace of Cakes, a very popular show on the Food Network that followed some of Duff’s successful career. There’s a lot to take from Duff’s story.
1. Have a product worth showing off
You have to make good things. You can’t skip this step. You need to look at your product and see if it’s actually any good. Lots of people put out things they aren’t even proud of. Duff knew his stuff was good. People would see this fake cake and want it. You have to get honest with yourself. Would you buy the service you’re selling? A lot of folks are too scared to face this reality. Their product stinks. But then they don’t put in the practice to get any better.
2. Take your time
You’ve been in business for a couple weeks? “Tried to build some authority” with a blog in that time? Duff on the time it took to get his business in gear:
Within two months, I was making the cakes for every wedding at the place (Two and a half years later, I had my own shop. We did things a little differently, because if I were just to make the same cupcakes everybody else does, nobody would care. So we made huge cakes and cakes in strange shapes. Then came my own TV show, and business exploded.
Two and a half years to get his own bakery! For most people their own shop is something they expect to have… today. But the reality is: to be successful with your own shop you could use a big audience behind you. So he scoped down his dreams and worked out of his apartment until he had enough business.
You’ve been at it a couple weeks. That’s nothing. It took me years of writing to build any semblance of an audience who would consistently read my stuff on Twitter (@natekontny) or Medium. You’ve got to put in some serious time and work to make a blog pay off. It’s totally worth it. But it’s an investment. You can’t get discouraged after a couple weeks.
Success takes time. Give yourselves some goals, but get realistic about how long it’s going to take to become great. Basecamp the company (37signals at the time) was around for 4 years before they even had 4000 blog subscribers to Signal v. Noise. With that, they launched Basecamp the product, and it still took another year to support 4 meager salaries with their software products.
3. Go to where your customers are — physically if you have to
Duff didn’t just spray and pray on the emails. There’s lots of bakers. Lots of websites and yellow page ads. Brides planning weddings are inundated with noise. So he went out and actually pounded pavement where no one else was.
Inkling, was my first business of any success that I started with Y Combinator in 2005. Our first customers were the result of some emails we sent, but we were able to stand out. There wasn’t any other Prediction Markets tools out that were doing software as a service. We could email someone and had very unique things to say about who we were. Is your service unique enough you can email someone about? If they aren’t, you’ll need to figure out how to stand out.
Go pound some actual pavement. Go get some meetings with people close to you. Don’t sell them anything, but set up some time with them to get some feedback on what you’re selling. A common email I would send out starting Inkling and later another business I did (Cityposh with Y Combinator in 2011), was just “Can I buy you coffee?” as the subject line. And I would just layer on the compliments about how much I liked their business and see if they had a moment to give me feedback on my latest project.
If the meeting had to be virtual I’d send “Can I buy you a virtual cup of coffee” and would send them a gift card to Starbucks if they accepted. This worked really well.
I remember sitting across from the owner of a bar in my neighborhood. He didn’t have a need for the product I was selling, but in that conversation he outlined exactly what he had a need for that he would buy from me. That conversation was great feedback to help me mold who I was trying to help, and if I had given up on that idea, this guy had just given me the next thing to work on and he would have been my first customer.
Go get those feedback meetings. Often they turn into their own deals. If someone you talk to thinks you’ve got something great on your hands, just end the feedback meeting with “So is this something we can explore using at your company?”
4. Make a fake cake!
One of our first clients at Inkling was O’Reilly Media. We did for free. Why? Because their logo and name was enough to get us a lot of free attention amongst even more potential clients. We did another deal with ABC San Francisco. They paid us a fraction of what we normally charged. Now they were getting our name on radio and television. One of our biggest deals was with Cisco and that’s because the guy who brought us in there had seen someone on ABC San Francisco talking about us.
These deals were like the fake cake. They weren’t the real high paying deals we wanted, but go find one or two high profile customers that you can leverage for more attention. And figure out how you can help them for nothing. If you have a useful product, you should be able to get at least one person with some clout that would love to have your service for nothing. I wouldn’t do this more than once or twice, but if you find the right one, that freebie is worth a ton.
5. What other fake cakes can you make?
What else can you do to show off your value. Open source everything. Put out lesson after lesson you’ve learned in your life. Share all the ways you’ve gotten these first customers. Share the things that are working and the things that aren’t. Go answer questions on forums where your “brides and grooms” are asking questions. Just like a couple going to a wedding venue, your customers are going somewhere to ask questions and get help. Go answer them. Reddit? Forums? They’re searching for answers to something. Be there to help. The more you do this, the more chances you have to drop links back to your own blog, Twitter account, business, etc.
6. Make crazy cakes
We did things a little differently, because if I were just to make the same cupcakes everybody else does, nobody would care. So we made huge cakes and cakes in strange shapes.
We can’t just keep doing what everyone else is doing. Today I’m the CEO of Highrise, web-based CRM software. When Highrise first came out in 2006, it was unlike a lot of things. It was simple unlike Salesforce. And it was software as a service unlike all the local databases and address books people were using to manage their contacts.
But today, Highrise was recently spun-off from Basecamp to get the love it deserves, and the market is really different. There’s a ton of CRM competitors. Good ones too. We can’t just do whatever everyone else is doing. So I do everything in my power to be different. I send feature announcement newsletters to our customers with pictures of my family to stand out from the soulless news everyone else is sending. I write and teach what you can learn from the inventor of Instant Ramen noodles vs. the content marketing garbage everywhere. We built a way to send simple text based bulk email vs. the trendy, graphic laden, slick email campaigns other vendors are trying to steer everyone to make. And on and on, we realize no one would care unless we offered something others weren’t.
Is your service different enough from everyone else? If it isn’t then I’d spend a ton of time figuring out how you can get it there. Two really important books that have helped me make products that are different and innovative enough to stand out from the competition are Blue Ocean Strategy and Something Really New. Spend a ton of time thinking about how you’re going to be different.
I hope this helps some of the folks looking for ways to reach their first or even their thousandth customer. If I can be of any help to anyone please let me know on Twitter or shoot me a brief email (nate.kontny on Gmail).
And to see how we’re living our own advice, you should follow what we’re doing at Highrise.
