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Join Jason and David as they recap what’s been happening at 37signals. They will take questions from viewers and answer them live.
Thursday, December 4
11 am Central (17:00 GMT)
@ live.37signals.com
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New Delhi, 21:30
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When you’re hiring, seek out people who are managers of one.
What’s that mean? A manager of one is someone who comes up with their own goals and executes them. They don’t need heavy direction. They don’t need daily check-ins. They do what a manager would do — set the tone, assign items, determine what needs to get done, etc. — but they do it by themselves and for themselves.
These people free you from oversight. They set their own direction. When you leave them alone, they surprise you with how much they’ve gotten done. They don’t need a lot of handholding or supervision.
How can you spot these people? Look at their history. Have they been self-sufficient at previous jobs? Have they defined their own role before? Have they started their own site/company before? Or done their own thing in some other way? Find someone with initiative and a budding entrepreneurial spirit. And then nurture it.
You want someone who’s capable of building something from scratch and seeing it through. When you find these people, it frees up the rest of your team to work more and manage less.
Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:
Backpack
New in Backpack: Email replies to Newsroom Messages
We introduced email-reply to messages and comments in Basecamp a few months ago. It’s been a huge hit. Today we’re excited to be able to print this new feature to Backpack.
Highrise
[Case study] How a home design and plan provider uses Highrise
“Highrise proves its self everyday when I receive an email or phone call with someone that I had been in correspondence with but had forgotten about. I quickly open Highrise and search their name in the nice fast search utility. This way it reminds me of their information and allows for a personalized phone call as well as eliminating the need of asking them to remind me who they are. Another way this helps me out is if my boss loses a phone message that I had provided him I still have a backup of the numbers, addresses, and any other information provided to me during the conversation.”
Basecamp
[Case Study] Broadband Genie: “You name it, we manage it through Basecamp!”
“The biggest thing straight away was quite simply the ability to upload graphic designs, specifications and so on and have everybody comment on it in one place, then iterate and so on. Attempting this sort of thing with a large group via email is pretty much a non-starter and can end badly. What Basecamp gave us was a single place where everybody could see everything that was going on, and (just as importantly) a record of what had gone on previously.”
Timepost, project timer that integrates with Basecamp, now available for both Windows and Mac
Timepost is a project timer that automatically downloads projects and to-dos from Basecamp. Previously available only for Mac OS X, it is now available for Windows too.
Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:
Basecamp
Large monitors on production floor show company’s Basecamp milestones
“I love my new production schedule monitor. Great job and the best part is that I can see the red dates from my office. Everyone here likes it so far or until their project goes red for everyone to see.”
A monitor displays milestones at A. D. Williams Engineering.
VisioPlanning for Basecamp: Keep track of projects and employees in real time
“When an employee is working on a certain project, he must keep his interface up to date by activating the flashing light corresponding to the task(s) he is working on. This update is then automatically carried on to the supervisor interface. This way, the supervisor always knows what the employees are working on in real time.”
Basecamp FAQ: How can I upload or change the photo that appears next to my name?
Tired of seeing that generic person icon inside Basecamp? Then you and your team should upload photos. It’s a simple step, but it really humanizes things when can you see a person’s face next to their words.
Highrise
Highrise Deals API
Attention developers: The Highrise API now works with the new Deals feature.
Multiple products
Discussing when to use Highrise tasks vs. Basecamp to-dos
“There is almost NO time that seeing everything we have to do in one place actually helps us, other than by making us anxious. Theoretically, it sounds nice, but I don’t think there’s a practical application. Instead, I think keeping tasks somewhat separate allow you to focus on what is important right now.”
Rollover menus can be finnicky but the ones at Threadless are very comfortable to use. Overall, Threadless is very disciplined about keeping the front page clean. You can actually read the whole thing. There aren’t any blocks full of links that you have to skip over and copy is kept to a minimum.
Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:
Basecamp
Versatility Skateboards: “Basecamp is the body of our business’s communications and Campfire is our brain”
“Basecamp is the body of our business’s communications. Every project, from designing a new skateboard to planning a contest sponsorship, is tracked in Basecamp. Campfire is our brain. All three of us leave it up and running all day, which allows us the ability to brainstorm at the drop of a hat. The best feature of Campfire is that it’s logged and we can revisit the ideas we discussed 10 minutes, 10 days or 10 weeks later. Without Campfire, a lot of ideas would be lost!”
Campfire
How Beanstalk uses Campfire when things go wrong
“We just had a short outage on Beanstalk, which required a quick reboot on our slices at Engine Yard. While this situation really sucks, it happens. The best thing you can do is let people know you’re working on it and update them on the progress. By using Campfire, we’re able to give people an extra sense of comfort that real people are hard at work on the problem. In the end, a negative thing becomes a positive experience.”
Backpack
Plotters use Backpack to create “the greatest birthday scavenger hunt of all time!”
Tim Sullivan plotted out an elaborate alternate reality birthday game for his girlfriend using Backpack. He writes, “I don’t think we’d have been able to even conceive of organizing this without Backpack. It’s keeping us completely organized and allowing us to pull off what could be the greatest birthday scavenger hunt of all time!”
Multiple products
Video: Setting up 37signals Open Bar
If you use more than one 37signals product (or have multiple accounts within a product), you can make your life a lot easier with 37signals Open Bar. In this video, Jason and Jamie show how easy it is to set up Open Bar so you can switch quickly between your accounts.
37signals products are “essential web tools for virtual students”
Three 37signals tools made the list at “Ditch the backpack: 100 essential web tools for virtual students.”
37signals tools make list of 45 top cellphone resources
Mobile Maven, a site dedicated to cellphone tips, recently published “45 Mobile Resources Every Road Warrior Must Have.” Three 37signals tools made the list.
In “A Radical Business Plan for Facebook: Charge people” [Slate], Farhad Manjoo proposes “something crazy”: Tech companies should start charging people to use their services.
David is interviewed in the piece and explains why “having a price is really cool for making profits.”
“[Hansson:] “You have customers, they pay you money for the product or service, and you get profits! It’s almost too simple to work.” Of course, 37signals didn’t come up with this idea on its own, either: “I’ve heard that over time—hundreds of years actually—this has been how most businesses have made their money. But somehow that notion got lost in the Web world.”...
“People tend not to look closely at the odds,” Hansson told me. “There will always be people winning the lottery, but that doesn’t mean a good financial strategy is to go out and buy lots of lottery tickets.”
Instead of taking a heap of venture capital money—lottery tickets—in the hope of one day getting a huge payout, Hansson says that Web entrepreneurs would be better off starting their businesses in the way most offline entrepreneurs do: Use a small amount of seed capital to make a good product that appeals to a client base that is willing to pay you for it. Then, over time, use the money you make from your customers to improve the product or to create more products—allowing you to attract more paying customers, which then lets you invest more into the business, and so on. It’s a cycle that has proved quite successful over the millenniums that humans have engaged in economic activity.
Read the full article for more.
Also recently published: Die Kraft des Mittelfingers [brand eins] is a recent article (in German) on 37signals. Even if you don’t speak German, you may be able to get the gist:
David Heinemeier Hansson ist vulgär, und das ganz bewusst. Seine “Fuck you! ”- und “That’s bullshit”-Sprüche setzt er dosiert ein, wenn er Gesprächspartnern seine Sicht der Dinge nahebringt.
Related: The Secret to Making Money Online [SvN]
Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:
Backpack
Basetwo Media: “Backpack’s ease of use encourages collaboration from all of our employees.”
“After having tried a variety of other online tools, shared calendars and a Wiki, we’ve that found Backpack’s ease of use encourages collaboration from all of our employees. Best of all, it’s fun to use.”
Backpack Tip: Jump to a specific date/month
Video shows you how to jump to a specific date/month in the Backpack calendar.
Basecamp
Owner of Adam&Co. (a design firm): “Basecamp CHANGED my life for the better”
“It really has made my life sooooooo much more manageable and I have to say – I didnt thnk about how I could leverage it to deal with non-work things until this situation arised. We have a growing list of contacts on there so everyone has the most recent numbers, a constant to-do list that we each can knock stuff off of as we accomplish it rather than each of us doing the same things twice – as well as a journal of events so we all have the same story. It’s truly been incredible.”
Nokia is looking for an Interaction and Visual UI Designer in Burlington, MA.
Rainforest Action Network is looking for a Web Designer/Developer in San Francisco, CA.
The University of Iowa is looking for a Web Applications Designer in Iowa City, IA.
A stealth-mode startup is looking for an Lead Interaction Designer in London, England.
FIRST ROI is looking for an Flash / Interactive Designer in Austin, TX.
Boston Apparel Group is looking for a Web Designer – Chadwick’s in West Bridgewater, MA.
ShermansTravel Media, LLC is looking for a Exciting Interactive Web Designer in New York, NY.
Clorox Creative is looking for an Experienced PHP Developer in Oakland, CA.
CashNetUSA is looking for a User Interface Engineer in Chicago, IL.
Check out all the Design Jobs currently available on the Job Board.
Hewlett Packard is looking for a Web Front End Engineer in Marlborough, MA.
Janus Health, Inc. is looking for a Web Developer Maverick in San Diego, CA.
Meetup.com is looking for a UI/Front End Engineer-Javascript/CSS in SOHO-NY.
Joost is looking for a Flash ActionScript Programmer located in New York, NY.
The MITRE Corporation is looking for an Experienced Ruby on Rails Lead Engineer in Bedford, MA.
Tribune Interactive is looking for a Developer (Java/Rails) in Chicago, IL.
Patch is looking for a Quality Assurance Engineer in Soho, New York.
Starbucks Coffee Company is looking for a Front End Web Developer in Seattle, WA.
Sitezoogle is looking for a Senior Programmer anywhere (telecommute).
Check out all the Programming Jobs currently available on the Job Board.
The Job Board is flush with great programmer and designer jobs all over the country (and the world). The Gig Board is the place to find contract jobs.
Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:
Basecamp
A file organizing strategy using Basecamp comments
Jamie and Sam are working on creating HTML emails for all the 37signals products. They setup a project for this in Basecamp, and they’re using the newly available comments on to-do lists in a cool way. There’s a to-do for every email template that needs to be updated and, once completed, the template itself is attached by Jamie as a comment for easy retrieval.
Highrise
Access Highrise on your BlackBerry using Bridge
Bridge is a subscription based BlackBerry application that “enables synchronization and convenient online and offline access to Highrise.”
