Last December, Sam posted the following in our “37signals Newsroom” Basecamp project:

I’ve been trying out an experiment over the past few workdays: when someone asks me for help with something, I show them how it’s done.

In an on-call case, it means copying and pasting the console transcript, cleaning it up a bit, and adding some descriptive comments. ... Other situations call for a different approach. Jamie came to me with a JavaScript problem this afternoon, so we took an hour and paired together on a solution via screen sharing.

Now, the other party might not fully understand the explanation, but I think it’s a positive change to assume that everyone is curious to learn how things work rather than too busy to care. Repeated exposure to these explanations might spark an interest that would otherwise go unexplored.

And obviously there is a practical limit to the amount of time and effort we can put into such explanations. In theory, though, spreading the knowledge means the people who ask you for help are more likely to be able to solve those problems themselves.

So I invite you to try the experiment with me. The next time someone asks you to do something, walk them through your process, or write it up for them to read.

Jason chimed in:

Yes please. This is a great initiative. Whenever someone does something for someone else, let’s make sure it’s taught, too. It’ll be slower in the short term, but faster and better in the long term. 

Since then, we’ve all gotten a little more conscious about teaching one another to fish. Recently, I was frustrated I lacked the skills to update basecamp.com. Mig jumped in and offered to show me some HTML and CSS basics. It’s “one of the most empowering things anyone here at the company could learn,” he told me. “I’d be more than happy to show you the ways.” Rad. Thanks, Mig.

Everyone in the company works at least one day a month answering support tickets, and the support team buddies up with non-support folks to share solutions for the more complex cases. Programmers often share the code they used to solve a problem with support, which encourages support to try to solve similar issues themselves next time. Designers and programmers swap intel all the time. Here’s what Jonas has to say about working with Trevor:

He’s continually helping me get better at programming, and has been super patient and encouraging. He frequently suggests that I tackle certain problems, takes time to help me out when I have questions, and reviews my code when I’m done.

I’ve tried to return the favor a bit by helping him work through some design problems and CSS.

I think this mutual learning approach and easy back-and-forth has had real benefits to the app, too. Even though it seems like it would be counterproductive to take the extra time, I think we’re ultimately more productive because we can work on different projects simultaneously, then chat a few times a day to figure out the remaining tricky stuff.

We weren’t not working this way before, but it wasn’t an institutionalized value or anything. Making a conscious, enthusiastic effort to work with, not for, each other, has expanded our horizons, empowered us with new skills, and made us a more well-rounded company.

It wasn’t as though John Horton, President of LegitScript, never sought outside funding for his company. He just didn’t have any luck.

“They all told us we were dumb for the business idea,” he says, “that it would never work.”

To be fair, the idea was a tough sell.

After years as a prosecutor working on drug cases and a stint as Assistant Deputy Director at the White House Drug Policy Office, Horton was getting ticked at the vast, complex “rogue Internet pharmacy” problem and the lack of any way to combat it. At any time, an estimated 35,000-40,000 sites are offering prescription drugs online. Of those, a mind-boggling 97% are illegitimate — meaning they violate laws or regulations, fail to adhere to medical and safety standards, or engage in fraudulent or deceptive business practices.

Ginormous companies like Visa, Microsoft, and Twitter had no way to ensure they weren’t doing business with cybercriminals. Some were getting slapped with significant fines; others needed a way to stymie the crummy user experience of clicking on ads for bogus sites. That’s where Horton wanted to step in, by monitoring the web for counterfeit drug sales, shutting down illegal operations and providing trustworthy information to consumers.

It was May 2007. Cocky first-time founder that he was, Horton figured he could get things up and running in about six months. Two and a half years later, he had run his personal finances into the ground. Still no one was buying it.

It was the classic scenario where VC firms scratched their heads, and said, ‘So, wait: you want companies to pay you to help them lose customers … and want to give the rest of the information away to the public for free?’ They all told me it would never work and my business plan sucked. So, I decimated my life savings, maxed out my credit cards, sold my car, refinanced my condo, borrowed as much money as I could, and got down to having $350 in the bank and was probably a few weeks away from bankruptcy.

It was at that moment — when dogged perseverance finally met with good timing — that Google saved LegitScript by becoming its first customer. “The reputation is true,” Horton says. “They’re a pretty open, receptive company. It was one of those things where they weren’t quite ready at first, but persistence pays off.”

Persistence continued to pay off and other companies — Microsoft, GoDaddy, Twitter, Visa, various registrars and ISPs, government agencies — began hiring LegitScript to keep their platforms clean, via its combo of automated algorithms and old-fashioned detective work. “We’re basically cybercrime investigators who help major platforms make sure that they aren’t inadvertently profiting from shady or illegal stuff,” Horton says.

LegitScript now has the world’s largest database of Internet pharmacies in over a dozen languages, and its team, currently about 30 strong, continues to grow. Employees speak English, Spanish, French, German, Dutch, Portuguese, Indonesian, Thai, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Hebrew, Russian, Turkish, and Dog.

That last language would be the native tongue of Parker, LegitScript’s office dog. The chocolate Lab greets visitors, has her own internal email address (you can discuss the finer points of Milk Bones vs. Yummy Chummies with her here), and is a trusted panelist at all job interviews. “There’s only been one time where she just did not like the person,” Horton recalls. “He seemed like a really good developer, and a couple weeks later, the guy ended up getting arrested.”

Parker’s not the only staff member “doing battle with the bad guys,” as Horton puts it. Due to the nature of the work, which can include tangling with organized crime, LegitScript doesn’t disclose its precise location (the office is somewhere in downtown Portland, Ore.) or reveal other employees’ names. Horton has endured death threats, attacks from rival companies, even a Russian criminal network registering bestiality websites to his home IP.

“The rogue internet pharmacies consider us to be their worst nightmare,” he claims. “We are responsible for making sure they can’t do certain things like advertise with search engines or use major credit cards to accept payment, and we have shut a bunch of them down. These people have invested a lot of time and resources in attacking us and getting us to not do what we do.”

I don’t favor counterfeit versions of anything, but if you have a counterfeit Gucci bag, you don’t eat it.

But Horton has no intention to stop doing what he does. “This is something that can have real consequences for real people,” he says. People overdose; people are hospitalized; people die because some phony pharmacy sold them a sugar pill.

“I don’t favor counterfeit versions of anything, but if you have a counterfeit Gucci bag, you don’t eat it. It shouldn’t happen, but it’s a lot qualitatively different. If it’s Viagra and it just doesn’t work, eh. If it’s an anti-cancer medication and it doesn’t work? You might be dead.”

Fascinating work that makes a positive impact is a pretty good recipe for job satisfaction. “I feel very very lucky,” Horton says. “We get to do something that is not only very interesting, but something that is doing well by doing good.”

Visit LegitScript.
“Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud” is a Signal vs. Noise series highlighting profitable companies with $1 million+ in revenues that didn’t take VC.

In addition to general health coverage and a CSA subscription, 37signals employees get a monthly fitness allowance to put toward whatever helps us stay in shape.

What makes this benefit awesome (and effective) is that we get to choose how to make the most of it for ourselves — it’s inspired by the same ethos behind our practice of hiring Managers of One, then leaving people alone and counting on them to do good work. Unlike company wellness programs that include discounted memberships at a particular gym or other specific incentives, the laissez-faire approach trusts employees to decide what works best for them.

While a few of us rarely spend the money or use just part of it, many of us leverage it toward activities that might otherwise by cost-prohibitive: primarily gym memberships, classes and personal trainers. Michael goes to Fulton Fit House in Chicago; Joan belongs to a capoeira group in Portland; and Eron and I are both CrossFit cult members, in Durham, NC, and Austin, TX, respectively. He recently did his first muscle-up!

Andrea uses her stipend toward horseback riding, and Scott puts his toward entry fees for cycling races—when he’s not racing, he uses it to replace stuff that wears out or breaks (tires, tubes, chains, etc.) in the course of training. Other employees use the money for gear as well: Will just bought some weights; Kristin purchased a yoga mat; and Merissa just started tracking her sleep, activity, and diet with Jawbone’s UP band.

Andrea on horseback, Michael at Fulton Fit House, and Kristin in an extended side angle pose.
Speaking of Merissa, she wins for most inspiring success story: She used the benefit to hire a personal trainer, works out five times per week at a small club near her place, and is now using UP for motivation to be even more active:

Even doing jumping jacks for one minute every hour or so (during my workday) is making a difference. I’ve lost around 70 pounds in the last year. It’s not even about that number, though — it’s about how healthy I am feeling. It’s incredible to work for a company that supports me just as much outside of work as they do at work.

How does your workplace encourage wellness?

Once upon a time, Jordan Lowe, President and Chief Executive Officer of ServerCentral, found himself hacking the telephone pole outside his student apartment.

The University of Illinois dorms only supported one landline per unit, which presented a happy problem: His little business had grown to a point where that would no longer suffice.

“We had to add additional capacity ourselves through the building, through doors and windows and stuff,” Lowe says.

The little business, at first, was nothing more than a little unused space on a small, private virtual server Lowe and his partner, Daniel Brosk, had purchased for $1,000 or so to support their own websites. They didn’t know what to do with the extra space, so they posted an ad on daily deal site for a free domain name in exchange for an annual hosting contract. They also started offering domain names for $10 — when everyone else was charging around $30 — making just a couple bucks in profit at a time. (Hence the phone ringing off the hook; hence the phone pole hack.)

2000: ServerCentral launches in University of Illinois student housing
2000: Server space opens in Bloomington, Ill., changes from virtual private servers to dedicated servers
2001: Server operations move from Bloomington, Ill. to Chicago facility
2002: HQ moves from U of I to Chicago
2003: Server operations expand into Ashburn, Va. and San Jose, Calif.
2004: Server operations expand into Tokyo
2005: Server operations expand into Amsterdam
2009: Server operations expand into Elk Grove Village, Ill.
2010-2011: Server operations expand within Elk Grove Village, Ill.

The original server soon ran out of room too. “All of the sudden, we had to buy another one and another one,” he says. “We were kind of unprepared to start a real business.”

But as their customers’ needs grew, the business did too. Their web hosting customer base started requiring more and more space, needing racks and additional bandwidth. ServerCentral moved out of the dorms and bought what Lowe calls “kind of a compound” — a three-flat Chicago apartment building with a house behind it. The company’s first employees lived there or in the building next door, and would barbecue together in the evenings.

Even at ~80 employees now, the team clearly still manages to have fun.

“When customers are buying racks and servers, that launches a company. We just kept growing with the customers, and they helped launch this business. We always would do what they said they needed.”

Cabinets and servers eventually eclipsed the web hosting side of things, so ServerCentral unloaded that part of the business in 2008. When they needed better bandwidth, they bought a bandwidth provider — nLayer Communications, which was doing about $1.5 million in revenue at the time of purchase in 2007, and about $20 million by the time they sold it in 2012. This year ServerCentral is on track for close to $30 million in revenue, with facilities in Elk Grove, Illinois; Chicago; Ashburn, Va.; San Jose, Calif.; Amsterdam; and Tokyo.

Although ServerCentral made Inc. Magazine’s 2010 fastest growing private companies in America, Lowe insists the company’s success is due to its slow and steady approach to growth. “Going slowly but surely has helped us through the tech bubble exploding,” he says. Managing growth has been the company’s greatest challenge, since the absence of public funding often means saying no to huge potential customers: They can’t afford the risk of overbuying equipment, only to get dumped later on. “We can’t take a lot of risks, since we’re privately funded. ... We take a safe stance on that kind of thing. We’re competitive, but we’re not cheap.”

High-end facilities and top-to-bottom service cost money, but it’s money ServerCentral’s customers (37signals is one) are willing to pay.

“What we offer is very different from our competitors,” Lowe says. “They don’t have the same level of on-hand staff we do. If you call us, you’re not going to get a call center and open a ticket. With us, you call us, you talk to the person who’s gonna walk out there and do it and fix the problem.”

Every new employee spends their first couple weeks at the data center, working with equipment and interacting with customers. The environment is relaxed and low-stress, Lowe says, because they try hard to hire people who like what they’re doing.

“Did I expect to be doing this 14 years later?” Lowe asks. “No. It’s gone very well. It’s pretty exciting. I still like doing what I do. ... That surprises me, because a lot of people hate their jobs. That’s why we haven’t taken any money.”

Not that there haven’t been offers. “I probably get five emails a week, people trying to give us money,” he says. “It’s ridiculous. Especially this last year; the market’s doing really well. If we wanted to take money, this would be a good time, but we just don’t need it. We want to keep growing in other markets, with this level of service.”

Visit Server Central.

“Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud” is a Signal vs. Noise series highlighting profitable companies with $1 million+ in revenues that didn’t take VC.

In summer 2011, Mitch Van Dusen and Lech Szporer happened upon an impromptu jam session in their Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, NY neighborhood.

Van Dusen and Szporer — musicians and creative collaborators with a studio space nearby — dug what they heard, so they brought down some instruments and joined in.

“We ended up playing over an hour,” Van Dusen recalls, “just banging on stuff with kids.”

The two packed up and turned to go, but the kids weren’t having it.

“They ran upstairs past us, and started playing instruments.” Out of the six or seven children who stormed the studio that day, only one had any musical training. What happened next was really something: In less than an hour, “Kickstand and the Butterflies” had written their first song.

“Watching these kids with no training just so effortlessly start creating sound … it was frankly brilliant.”

Over the next several months, the same group of children, ages 5-14, came by every day to hang out and play instruments. Van Dusen and Szporer recorded several tracks with them — never intervening much, just letting the youngsters do their thing and watching what happened.

“We just grew this amazing bond with them,” Van Dusen continues. “I learned more from them about music than in many other formal lessons.”

“That Christmas, Lech and I were sitting in a coffee shop and saying, ‘wouldn’t it be nice if we could get these kids some instruments for Christmas?’ A woman sitting nearby overheard their conversation, and offered a guitar and amplifier she had sitting around. That moment was their epiphany: Give kids your instruments, because they will play them.

The organization’s primary focus at the beginning was an instrument drive — getting folks to send in their unused instruments, that were just sitting around in closets collecting dust.

They soon realized it’s not enough to hand a kid a trumpet and tell ‘em to have at it. Just as important, they saw, was ensuring children had a creative environment to explore and have fun. “More than just teaching the kids music, we’re giving them and environment where they can explore,” he says. “We’re not teaching formal music at all.”

Give Kids Your Instruments is in talks with a small private school, where there’s a decent chance they’ll be able to open a community music and creative arts room. Another project in the works is the construction of large-scale “sound playgrounds” — essentially, Van Dusen describes, “sound sculptures, a big living instrument these kids can play with the abandon they would on the playground.”

“With the kids, it’s such an organic process. ... One of the things that has become so clear is that kids have a certain reckless abandon that they have easier access to than us adults. As kids grow older, they lose that — it’s not accepted. But when kids are kids, whatever they have inside them is so much more likely to just pour out.

“When people listen to the record on the website, and they keep in mind that this was done with very little practice, that this was natural, kids being kids creating songs on the fly — as adults, this is such a profound lesson … all those things we enjoyed as kids without thinking about them. If more of us were taking a peek to peer into the minds and the souls of these kids, we have so much to learn from them. All it takes is a little consideration. You see it real quick if you look.”

Visit Give Kids Your Instruments.

Mike Chang and Eric Grismer, besties since high school, had always kinda sorta kicked around the idea of starting a business.

After college, Chang left Southern California to work in Taiwan for a few years. The two friends toyed with the idea of sourcing something cheaply from Asia they could turn around and sell in the U.S., but they never landed on anything they felt passionately about.

Chang took off to earn an MBA from Oxford, and moved back in with his folks in Los Angeles after graduation. It was late 2008, and the job market was in the sewer. He didn’t have a job … and he wasn’t super convinced he wanted one, either.

“I definitely was interviewing and trying to get a ‘real’ job,” Chang says, “but I was kind of turned off by the whole thing.” He’d put on a tie, show up at networking events, shake hands, make contacts. “I felt like it was always the same boring conversations, the same small talk.” The whole situation was depressing.

Grismer, living in Berkeley at the time, called up Chang to mention that people were starting to use LEDs to light aquariums — and was that something he could find cheaply in Asia? Grismer had been interested in fish tanks since they were kids, but Chang never got into it — it’s an expensive hobby. Still, his program at Oxford had stressed green companies, and he knew LED was the lighting technology of the future.

What the heck, they decided. Why not? The idea is kind of funny, almost. Lighting for fish tanks? Hard to get more niche than that.

“I thought it was a pretty low-risk proposition and that I was going to get a real job eventually anyway, so it didn’t hurt to start a small side business in the meantime,” Chang says. They did a little research, spoke to few contacts, found out they’d have no problem sourcing the products they needed. Chang moved to Berkeley to be closer to Grismer.

“We asked each other how much money we had,” Chang recalls. “I remember I had about $2,000 left, and Eric said he could come up with about $2,500.” That was it. They didn’t approach anyone for funding. It hardly even occurred to them.

“Honestly, I thought it was such a small niche industry that no one would be interested,” Chang says. “We didn’t think it was ever going to become anything big. We never took ourselves seriously back then, and we still don’t.”

Mike Chang and Eric Grismer in China, July 2009. “Obviously we weren’t taking ourselves too seriously at the time if we planned to leave the country only a couple of weeks after launching the site.”

Having less than five grand to start out with turned out to be less of a snag than the learning curve Chang and Grismer found themselves faced with: Neither was an engineer. “We had to learn it on the fly,” says Chang. “People spend years and get PhDs on light.” They tinkered with parts for months, trying to develop a ready-to-use product, but couldn’t get it right. Finally, they stumbled upon a long thread in a fish forum about assembling aquarium lighting with parts available online. That was their eureka moment.

“As soon as we saw that, we realized we had been trying to reinvent the wheel, and that all we had to do was simply sell people the individual parts and they would put it together themselves,” Chang says. Turns out fish tanks are a relatively DIY enterprise anyway — if you have one in your house, chances are you’ve already figured out how to run your own plumbing and manage other projects more complex than assembling your own light fixture. DIY kits were the way to go, they reasoned.

With that, they spent the entirety of their modest investment on their first purchase order in summer 2009 — “and to be honest,” Chang says, “if that didn’t work out we would have quit then and there.”

Quitting might have looked tempting. No one was earning a salary in those days, and Chang was sleeping on the floor in his friends’ studio apartment. “Since they were students and broke just like I was, I never felt out of place or that I really needed the money,” says Chang. It was cramped, but rent was free, and they all had fun together. He promised his roomies he’d name a product after them in return for their kindness.

“I really wouldn’t trade that for anything,” he says. “It was a good year.”

Chang took a temporary job with the U.S. Census Bureau, sold his possessions on eBay, and did whatever else he could to bridge the gap until Rapid LED started making enough money to pay him a small salary. Since the business had practically zero overhead (their storage space was a closet in the same cramped studio), they were able to pump their initial earnings right back into the business.

That worked, as did their extremely customer-focused business model. All Chang wanted to do in the early days, he says, was sit there and wait for emails to come in so he could answer each customer and take care of their needs individually. “People were just amazed at how fast we responded, and at the time we were willing to spend with them to help them pick out their product.”

“I was pleasantly surprised by how much your customers will advertise for you,” Chang says. “If you deliver them a good product with good service, it’s amazing how much people will appreciate it.” Without any money for advertising, word of mouth was all Rapid LED had to go on.

They were the first company to offer DIY lighting kits, but competitors — some of them Rapid LED’s first customers — soon followed suit. Their first-mover advantage helped them stay ahead of the pack, as did (perhaps counterintuitively) their lack of technical expertise. Since Grisman and Chang didn’t have the knowhow or equipment to test which cheaper LEDs might work, they just bought and sold the best name-brand bulbs they could.

“The quality of the light going into the fish tank really matters. People think 100 watts of light is 100 watts of light,” Chang says, but “color spectrum really matters, light intensity really matters, longevity really matters. Lighting is one of the cheaper components of a fish tank. People will have thousands of dollars of fish and coral. It’s important to get really good lighting in there because you’re keeping something much more expensive alive.”

Customers rewarded Rapid LED for its hands-on support and high-quality products by telling their friends, and the business grew organically from there. They eventually brought on a few part-time employees and one full-time customer service rep, another buddy from college. Their revenues grew from $380,000 in 2010 to $1.2 million in 2011 and $1.6 million in 2012. Projected revenue for this year is between $1.75-2 million.

Most recently, the company purchased a commercial condo in Burlingame, Calif., which they’ll move into soon. (They named the company under which their new workspace is held “SooKoo LLC,” after the friends Chang crashed with that first year: Soohyun Cho and Peter Koo. Cho and Koo ended up marrying, and celebrated the birth of their daughter Evelyn in Dec. 2012.)

“Not bad for a $4,500 start,” says Chang, “but obviously we’re still looking ahead for more growth and opportunities.” Indoor and commercial lighting are more competitive markets, so the plan at Rapid LED is to look into various niche industries to see what else they can do. “Indoor growing is a much larger market than aquariums,” he says, “herbs, or whatever else you want to grow.”

Cough, cough.

“But we’re having fun and doing well now, so we don’t feel pressure to sell,” Chang says. “We’ve all been friends for so long and we started with nothing.”

“I think it’s OK to start small,” he muses. “Everyone wants to build a billion-dollar company, and they think they need to go out and find angel funding. Not everyone starts with that ability. ... Do what you can within your means, and just work hard. If I could go back and do it again, I totally would. It’s cliche, but money’s overrated.”

That attitude keeps Chang out of wearing a suit and glad-handing at networking events. “We’re in an industry where it’s pretty relaxed; it’s not fast-moving. It’s more genuine. I don’t feel like I ever come to work and have awkward conversations. Not that I’m not used to that, but it’s good not having to do it,” he says. “I’m working with my best friends every day.”

Visit Rapid LED.

“Bootstrapped, Profitable & Proud” is a Signal Vs. Noise series highlighting profitable companies with $1 million+ in revenues that didn’t take VC.

No one was talking to the dudes in the middle.

At least, that’s how Andy Forch and Richard Greiner felt about the online retail offerings geared toward men: You could find plenty of high-end designer products hardly anyone can afford, and plenty of hardcore performance gear that’ll help you summit Everest. But the options in between — the options for regular, active guys like them, who bike to work in the city and hit the trails on the weekend — were hardly anywhere to be found.

Richard Greiner and Andy Forch

“We don’t need Mount Everest tents,” Greiner explains. “We need a tent where we can go on a little backpacking or car camping trip, something functional and well-designed. ... There’s no resource out there for ‘guys’ guys.’ Nobody’s talking to us in a way that is more conversational or more relaxed.”

“It was sort of the perfect storm of scratching our own itch and knowing there was a void to be filled because we were the target market,” says Forch. “We both knew we wanted to get our hands dirty with starting a business.”

The two were working in investment banking in San Francisco when they hatched the idea for Huckberry — a members-only, bi-weekly web magazine featuring curated apparel and gear, along with the stories behind the products.

The guys quit their jobs and used the coffee shop between their apartments as their office. Forch learned Photoshop and designed the website; Greiner called up brands and set up suppliers. Inventory started arriving at their home addresses.

“My girlfriend at the time wouldn’t come over to my house, because there were just boxes everywhere,” recalls Greiner.

‘A big dirty warehouse’

Huckberry launched in summer 2011, about five months after its cofounders quit their jobs. They invested $20,000 each at the beginning, from their personal savings. Taking VC was never much of a consideration.

“We took a few calls,” says Greiner, but “coming from the investment banking world, the thought of taking money was unattractive. ... I wanted to see if we could bootstrap it and see where we could get to. The one thing we sought more than money was advice, and we didn’t find anyone who we thought offered a lot of insight.”

Their expenses were minimal at the outset, since they weren’t paying themselves and didn’t have an office. They started turning a profit within three months.

Huckberry’s business model helped leverage the company in the beginning as well — as opposed to traditional retail, where the retailer pays the vendor and the vendor sells to the customer, Huckberry’s customers pay them first and then Huckberry pays their vendors. “Our business model is fixed cost-light and variable cost-heavy,” Greiner says. “Once you get going, you have tons of costs! But a lot of those are the result of doing business.”

They began hiring, slowly at first. “It was a big day when we got our first office,” Greiner recalls. “It’s a big moment when you realize, ‘we have a little business here!’” The reality of a dedicated space — though only 350 square feet — inspired a growth spurt, and Huckberry brought on more people. “Next thing you know, the office space is more like a closet. By the time there were five of us in this teeny office — we do all the fulfillment ourselves — this place was a zoo. It was insane with all the inventory.”

They moved to what Greiner calls “a big dirty warehouse,” which they’re also in the process of outgrowing—it’ll be time for Huckberry to move again soon. But at least the current space is big enough for a rock wall.

‘We are what we’re selling’

“Everyone here is active,” Greiner says. “We are what we’re selling. We’re weekend warriors. Everyone just kind of fits our vibe.”

“The funny thing is,” says Forch, “Rich and I came from very formal worlds, where it’s all about pedigree — ‘where’d you go to school?’ Now I’m never asked where I went to school. Here it’s like, ‘hey, you pass the airplane beer test.’ Would I wanna get stuck with you in a snowstorm? Are you gonna tell a good story?”

“We make decisions all the time that if you were an e-commerce guru, you’d hate Huckberry,” laughs Greiner. Huckberry’s twice-weekly email edition, for example, features four to six brands and their respective stories, blog posts, and a section called “Diversions” — links to interesting stories elsewhere on the web. Traditional e-commerce “rules” stress always sending readers to your site. But, says Forch, customers open Huckberry’s emails at 5-10 times the rate they do competitors’ emails.

The idea is that even if customers aren’t interested in anything Huckberry is selling, they’ll still find value in the email, and the company. “All these little tricks that e-commerce guys do, we pretty much say no to all of them,” Greiner says. “We’re trying to get people’s mind share instead of wallet share. You’re building a relationship with these people. ... Our mentality, that we are what we’re selling — people can really feel that and identify with that.”

“We try to have fun,” Forch adds. “We’re trying to build a lifestyle brand, and authenticity is a big part of that. How do you try out a new product? You take the team camping in the Sierras. We hire people to work with us, not for us — people who are doers, who go out there and get after it. It’s a fun environment.”

‘Fighting with our hands tied behind our backs’

Doers don’t come cheap, though — especially in the Bay Area.

“Bootstrapping a company is hard,” Forch says. “Bootstrapping a company in San Francisco is really hard.” Silicon Valley money raises salaries for everyone in the region, making it a tough place to compete for quality employees who’ll stick around. “Getting that talent and culture to your company is a big challenge for us.”

Being the little guy is always an obstacle as well. As a young bootstrapped company, Greiner says, “sometimes it feels like we’re fighting with our hands tied behind our backs.” Many of Huckberry’s competitors — men’s magazines, other “flash sale” sites like Fab.com — are better funded, and Huckberry doesn’t have millions to put toward advertising.

Instead, they’re focused on growing in a “natural and organic” way, says Greiner: “finding and establishing partnerships with like-minded people who have the same values. We don’t take the buckshot approach. We go out and find people that we really believe in, that we really trust, and we partner with them on an intimate basis.”

The next eight innings

At this point, the cofounders have no plans to sell — they make all decisions as though they’ll be running Huckberry indefinitely. The company employs 12 people and enjoys a run rate of mid- to high-seven figures in revenue, just a couple years after launching. Forch and Greiner are pleased with that kind of progress, but they operate as though they’re in the first inning of a nine-inning ball game.

Next steps include expanding the content side of the business, and exploring other initiatives like a brick-and-mortar presence, a private label, and event hosting — whiskey tastings, a concert series, fly fishing demos — “all these touch points that people can really identify with,” Forch says. “We’d like to go into something knowing we could be one of the best at it.”

‘You always throw out your first pancake’

“The great thing about being small and nimble,” says Forch, is “if you try something and it doesn’t work — OK!” Huckberry’s size allows for experimentation and gives the company a certain level of agility. A few months after launching, for example, they tried out a different sales model — and caught hell from their customers. They went back to their original plan right away. “You sort of know that when you find something that works, do more of it, and when you find something that doesn’t work, don’t do more of that.

“You always throw out your first pancake,” Greiner says, echoing advice he received earlier in his career. “Point is, just go out and do it. Start it. Don’t worry about problems that you don’t have. Don’t overthink and overplan. Your first business plan, your first design, is gonna be thrown out. You learn so much by doing, so get out there and do it.”

Visit Huckberry.

“Bootstrapped, Profitable & Proud” is a Signal Vs. Noise series highlighting profitable companies with $1 million+ in revenues that didn’t take VC.

In customer support, empathy is everything—we need to be able to put ourselves in our customers’ shoes, feel their pain, give them the kind of help we’d want to receive whenever we have a problem. Potential hires are even tested for empathy before joining the team. (In case you missed it, Jim wrote a lovely post about empathy yesterday.)

Empathy is a skill—like any other, a skill that can be fostered and developed and built into a culture. (Dev Patnaik’s “Wired to Care: How Companies Prosper When They Create Widespread Empathy” explores the role empathy plays in successful organizations.)

Every once in a while, admittedly, my empathetic skills can be … challenged. And sometimes I make mistakes.

It happens. When a person we are genuinely trying to help is being unnecessarily rude or refusing to listen, it can be frustrating. In those situations, our capacity for empathy is compromised. The temptation can be to “stoop to their level” because “they’re just not listening” or “I can’t get my point across any other way.”

I recently worked with a customer who wasn’t able to sign into her website. Not our product, Basecamp—her own website. I did my best to politely explain they were different tools, and that she’d want to contact the admin for her website. She “frowned” me, and left angry feedback because she still wasn’t able to sign into her website.

I checked this customer’s history—she had written in about the same issue before, and another teammate had already politely explained she was barking up the wrong tree. I tried another reply, explained a different way. She left more angry feedback, because she still couldn’t sign into this other tool.

At that point, frustration got the better of me. “I’m really sorry for the misunderstanding,” I wrote. “I can only help you with Basecamp, though. I’m unable to help you get into your website. That is not our tool, or our company. Does that makes sense? It is as though you have contacted support for your vacuum cleaner, when your dishwasher is what is broken.”

I went to her website and found the company who supports it, and gave her the link to their customer support site. Turns out, her website was for her petsitting business. I read her “About Me” page. She has two boxers.

I have two boxers.

Her humanity slapped me right across the face.

What was I doing, scolding this fellow animal lover (this fellow human!) about vacuum cleaners versus dishwashers? Why didn’t I try harder to explain things clearly and patiently, like I would with my mom and dad? (Come to think of it, why aren’t I more patient with my mom and dad when they have tech questions?) I felt about two inches tall.

She didn’t write back. I hope she got the help she needed.

From now on, in my mind: Every time there’s a challenging case, the customer owns at least two boxers.

Our customers can be unexpectedly, hilariously great sometimes. It’s not at all uncommon for one of us on the support team to post something a customer said in Campfire, because “this lady just made my day!” or “this guy was so funny and nice!”

Now, we’re empowered to do right by our customers, so that’s part of it—we can all take care of billing issues or ID merges or whatever our users need without going to a manager. (Psst: there is no manager.) When we’re able to fix a problem within a few minutes or we prove to be real people rather than robots, that tends to pleasantly surprise people, and they react accordingly. Awesomeness begets awesomeness.

Super speedy, plain and clear communication – didn’t feel like a call-centre experience – was quite obvious that Jim knew what he was talking about rather than just reading from a script. Got the exact answers and actions that I needed. Not used to this level of service – feel a bit dazed ;-)

But we don’t deserve all the credit. Our customers just tend to be savvy, and kind, and they consistently disprove the popular consensus that people on the Internet suck.

No problem. Machines don’t mess up near as often as often as people. So odds are I just didn’t save it correctly. Thank you again for your time and trying to help.

Chase answered my question quickly and completely. He also threw in “have an awesome Tuesday” which is a mildly absurd thing thing to wish someone as it is usually weekends which are “awesome”. I’m gonna run with it though and try to make this day “awesome”. I already high-fived my dog. He seemed confused.

A surprising number of folks write back just to say thank you. They don’t have to—it’s our job to help. But it’s still nice to hear and gives us warm fuzzies.

You know what Kristin, you just made my day … and restored my faith (a bit) in our species.

Sometimes they go beyond that, even. Out of gratitude or wackiness or whatever, they send us photos and videos of their pets, or links to memes.

Thank you. I attached a flying unicorn to show my appreciation.

Some of our San Francisco customers know Merissa is a huge Giants fan, and a few submitted support tickets to tell her they were excited for her during the 2012 World Series. People will sometimes write in just to say they love Basecamp, or to wish us happy holidays.

Just want to say Merry Christmas guys … we’ve been using Basecamp for many years and continue to love the service. Keep up the good work and hope to be on your service for years to come. Here’s a big thank you. Thanks to the web-based nature of work I can stay in touch while getting some awesome snow on holiday in Niseko, Hokkaido, Japan!

Those of us in support are here because we genuinely enjoy helping—but you folks make it easy. Thanks!

I left my newspaper job in 2007, in part because I wanted to go on a three-week trip.

There was no way to accommodate my being out of the office that long — working remotely was so completely out of the question that the possibility was never even mentioned — so I gave my notice, and the paper lost a valued (I think!) employee.

This year, when I told my boss I was thinking about going to Europe for the summer, his response was something to the effect of “oh, cool. Have fun.”

When you’re already an offsite employee (my house is about 1,000 miles from the Chicago office), for a company that extols the benefits of a remote team, it doesn’t much matter where you’re working from. I took advantage of that flexibility and spent my summer working from Scotland, England, France, and Ireland.

For 37signals, the main advantage of a remote workforce is the ability to attract and hire the best people, no matter where they live. But for me, remote work is a major employment benefit. More than a 401k, more than a health care plan — the fact I no longer have to save up vacation time to take one or two short trips a year is huge. I don’t have to wait until someone gets married or dies before I can go see my family — I can just go see them, and work while I’m there. If my girlfriends are going to Mexico for a week but we’re slammed in customer support, I don’t have to choose between letting down my pals or letting down my team. Gone are the days of spending precious PTO on obligatory holiday travel, resenting how I’ve still never seen Vietnam.

I mostly stayed with AirBnB hosts, anywhere from a few days to a few weeks at a time. Since all I need for my work is my computer and a reliable Internet connection, I just made sure before I booked each place that I’d be able to get online.

Sure, there were snags. If I did it again, I’d want to be more on top of the schedule, more available by phone, and more certain of an always-reliable Internet connection. I felt guilty toward my team and our customers whenever issues along those lines arose. My next computer will likely be an Air — the MacBook Pro is great, but probably packs more oomph than I need, and it’s a bit of a beast to lug around. And I’ll likely be more mentally prepared to work different hours from the rest of my team. Euro hours are quieter and I could get a lot done, but they’re also kind of lonely when you’re used to hanging out in Campfire with your work buddies all day. Of course, now that we’ve hired a few folks overseas, that may be a moot point.

Overall, though, I found my work was highly portable. I could always get what I needed, and my team and my company were super-supportive. I had an amazing time, and felt beyond lucky to work for a company that lets me — encourages me, even — to live a life like this.