Less is more. Form follows function. Two phrases we hear all the time. Yet furniture designer George Nakashima considered them nothing but shallow slogans. In 1962, he published a manifesto that explains why while also lamenting the disappearance of design excellence.

In a world where manual skills are shunned we believe in them, not only in the act of producing a better product, but in the sheer joy of doing or becoming. We feel that pride in craftsmanship, of doing as perfect a job as possible, of producing something of beauty even out of nature’s discards, are all homely attributes that can be reconsidered.

It might even be a question of regaining one’s own soul when desire and megalomania are rampant – the beauty of simple things…

To look for clues, we can go into the past: the moss garden and tea house at Sai Ho Ji, the wonders of stone and glass at Chartres, the dipylon vase. These are all examples of excellence that can go unchallenged but also unnoticed. They are all formed inwardly with a nearly impersonal experience. Compared to our day, with its arrogance of “form-giving,” the shallowness of slogan design such as “less is more,” “machine for living,” or even “form follows function.”

In proportion to the flood of consumer goods, we are probably at one of the lowest ebbs of design excellence that the world has seen. It requires a genuine fight to produce one well designed object of relatively permanent value. One of the difficulties is the lack of integration between the designer and the producer – the evolvement of material and method into a well conceived idea. Big city architecture has reached such a profound state of boredom that man might unwittingly destroy it in one last tragic gesture – without humor. Sentimentally again, we can look back to the thirteenth century, when almost every hinge was a museum piece. Where there was a touch of greatness in the majority of acts and conceptions.

Some Nakashima designs:

Time: 11:20 | 12/13/2010 | Download MP3

Summary
A talk about the new office space: How’s it working out so far? What was it like being on the opposite end of the client/designer (or, in this case, architect) relationship? What’s the “right” amount of space for now and years from now?

Transcript
The transcript is also available now. Here is an excerpt from Jason:

We wanted to be surrounded by high quality stuff, because I believe that the things that you work around, the environment that you’re in, have a lot to do with the work that you do. And if you can be influenced by things that you know somebody spent a lot of time on, and is something that was carefully considered, and it’s just the right material for the job, hopefully that will rub off on you when you build something and you design something. So, the office, in many ways, is supposed to be an inspiration for us to build better stuff.

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Version 1.2 of Draft, 37signals’ basic sketch app for the iPad (with email and Campfire sharing built in), is now available in the App store. It includes bug fixes, faster response times, and smoother drawing.

More about the backstory of Draft.

Also, in Inc. magazine a few weeks back, Jason explained why we decided to charge $9.99 for Draft (“We have no interest in participating in a race to the bottom. Ninety-nine cents is not for us.”).

This is part of our “Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud” series which profiles companies that have $1MM+ in revenues, didn’t take VC, and are profitable. Note: Seth Kravitz of InsuranceAgents.com will respond today (12/7) in the comments section to reader questions.

The liability of growth

“In 2007 we did $750,000 in revenue with five employees. In 2008 we did $12 million with twelve people,” says Seth Kravitz of InsuranceAgents.com, a site that helps consumers save money on their insurance.

But it was far from a dream, according to Kravitz. “Every time I mention explosive growth as a huge potential liability there are lots of confused looks,” he says. “How could the revenue exploding possibly be a bad thing? All of a sudden our little five person startup went from $750,000 in revenue to $12 million in 11 months. We had to hire like crazy, expand our development platform like crazy, expand our customer service, payment processing, banking, everything imaginable.

“We had never really had HR issues and now all of a sudden we had to deal with employee troubles, benefits programs, and revamping of hiring practices. Our phone systems couldn’t handle the volume of calls we were getting. Our servers couldn’t handle going from processing 500 leads a day to 11,000. Suddenly, it felt as if the company had grown a life of it’s own and we were simply along for the ride. Every day was spent playing catch-up that year and it probably shaved off 10 years of our lives with the stress. Like so many before us, it could have destroyed the company, but we luckily got through it.”

“Suddenly, it felt as if the company had grown a life of it’s own and we were simply along for the ride. Every day was spent playing catch-up.”

The company decided to actively hit the brakes on growth in order to examine all aspects of the business — from the way they hired, to training, to customer service, to the call center. Kravitz says, “We slowed our sales down to rebuild our entire platform, increase stability, and code some new features designed to increase revenue.” Now that process is done, the focus is back on growth again.

The partners meet

What drove Kravitz, a college student when the company was founded, to the unsexy world of insurance? “It’s certainly not the flashiest profession in the world, but it is a very useful one,” according to Kravitz. “Our concept was to build a service where anyone in the US can hop on our site and start comparing rates from up to five local insurance agents.” The site then generates revenue by helping agents find new customers.

Kravitz and Lev Barinskiy, his business partner, originally met at a party on the Ohio State campus their freshman year. Kravitz says, “To be honest, we really didn’t like each other as far as first impressions go. We were both straight out of high school. Really just a couple of kids at that point and we acted like it.”

About two years later, they met again through a mutual friend. “Once we sat down and really got to know each other, everything changed,” says Kravitz. By this point, he had started a small web design company and Barinskiy had started a successful insurance agency. Barinskiy mentioned that he wanted to start building insurance websites and needed a partner to get it going.

InsuranceAgents.com co-founders Seth Kravitz (left) and Lev Barinskiy. (Photo: Jonathan Robert Willis for Inc.)

A shoestring operation

Within a week, they were working together out of Barinskiy’s parents’ basement on a couple of plastic folding tables from Home Depot. “We ran an ethernet cable out of his bedroom window down the outside of the house into the basement to get online down there,” explains Kravitz. “He owned a food cart business serving Ohio State football games, so in his basement he had stacks of candy and chips. That means lunch most days consisted of standing up, walking to the corner, grabbing a Kit-Kat and walking back to the desk.”

“We ran an ethernet cable out of the bedroom window down the outside of the house into the basement to get online.”

Verifiable (shut down August 1, 2010)
Stuart Roseman shut down Verifiable, a crowdsourced charting and data analysis site, to start SaneBox, a product that automatically identifies important email and separates them in a user’s inbox. Below, he explains how he knew when it was time to pull the plug on Verifiable.

“We couldn’t charge for it. It was pretty clear. I’ve done this for a long time. I said, ‘This is a bad idea. I need a new idea.’

“The Verifiable problem still exists. It hasn’t been solved. There’s still chart junk. It’s got to be easier. But Verifiable was something I thought the world needed. SaneBox was something the world was asking for.

“My new mantra is: ‘I will make a product that people want to pay for and that they will be happy to pay for.’ I wake up in the morning and I say that. And I go to sleep at night and say that. It really changes everything.”

Related: “Out with the old business, in with the new”

Wesabe (shut down June 30, 2010)
Wesabe launched as a site to help people manage their personal finances. While competitor Mint was acquired by Intuit, Wesabe eventually shut down. In “Why Wesabe Lost to Mint,” Marc Hedlund dissects what happened.

“Mint focused on making the user do almost no work at all, by automatically editing and categorizing their data, reducing the number of fields in their signup form, and giving them immediate gratification as soon as they possibly could; we completely sucked at all of that…I was focused on trying to make the usability of editing data as easy and functional as it could be; Mint was focused on making it so you never had to do that at all. Their approach completely kicked our approach’s ass.

“You’ll hear a lot about why company A won and company B lost in any market, and in my experience, a lot of the theories thrown about — even or especially by the participants — are utter crap. A domain name doesn’t win you a market; launching second or fifth or tenth doesn’t lose you a market. You can’t blame your competitors or your board or the lack of or excess of investment. Focus on what really matters: making users happy with your product as quickly as you can, and helping them as much as you can after that. If you do those better than anyone else out there you’ll win.”

Related: “Wesabe is discontinuing its Accounts tab as of July 31st”

Storytlr (shut down February 24, 2009)
Storytlr let members create their own lifestreaming service (i.e. connecting Twitter, Flickr, Last.fm, and other accounts) at their own URL. Founder Laurent Eschenauer on what happened:

“Storytlr started as a personal project to power my own site. People liked it, so we decided to build a nice UI and start hosting it for others. We were developing and operating the service next to our day job and families. We were quickly successfull, reaching beyond 10,000 users quickly and this meant a lot of strains on our lives (maintenance, support, etc.) and budget (~500$ monthly hosting bill) without any revenues.

“At that point, we started researching potential revenue models and investors, but quickly realized that the service was not well suited for a strong revenue stream. It was a tough choice, but, for the security of our families, we decided to pull the plug.”

Related: Laurent Eschenauer pitches Storytlr to Google’s Sergey Brin

TwitApps (shut down September 13, 2009)
Stuart Dallas created TwitApps as a technical exercise for himself. But after some early blog coverage, it attracted 4000 active users (and that number was growing). Despite that base, he couldn’t turn it into a product that was worth the effort.

“I considered the whole thing to be a toy project for a long time and it took me a while to realize that people were starting to rely on the service.

“Once you’ve established a free service and that service has other free competition, it’s very difficult to monetize it. It’s also very hard to change people’s impression of what something is once they’ve decided for themselves.”

“It became difficult to juggle the time demands of supporting TwitApps with the requirements of a full time job, several contracts and the need for downtime. In the end something had to go and it was clearly going to be the bit that wasn’t earning any money.”

Related: “TwitApps shutting down”

Time: 09:56 | 11/22/2010 | Download MP3

Summary
Jason and David discuss the new 37signals Suite, how its price was set, and how the project fit into our two-week iteration method of working.

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One of Steve Jobs’ biggest heroes is Edwin Land, the inventor of Polaroid. Former Apple CEO John Sculley describes a meeting they had years ago and how both Land and Jobs felt that products existed all along — they just needed to discover them.

Dr Land was saying: “I could see what the Polaroid camera should be. It was just as real to me as if it was sitting in front of me before I had ever built one.”

And Steve said: “Yeah, that’s exactly the way I saw the Macintosh.” He said if I asked someone who had only used a personal calculator what a Macintosh should be like they couldn’t have told me. There was no way to do consumer research on it so I had to go and create it and then show it to people and say now what do you think?”

Both of them had this ability to not invent products, but discover products. Both of them said these products have always existed — it’s just that no one has ever seen them before. We were the ones who discovered them. The Polaroid camera always existed and the Macintosh always existed — it’s a matter of discovery. Steve had huge admiration for Dr. Land. He was fascinated by that trip.

John Byrne, who worked with Sculley on his book, offers additional details on that meeting and Jobs’ reaction.

Sitting in Land’s laboratory, Jobs found the great inventor and management thinker in a generous mood. “The world is like a fertile field that’s waiting to be harvested,” Land said. “The seeds have been planted, and what I do is go out and help plant more seeds and harvest them.”

Riding back to a nearby hotel in a taxi, Jobs turned to Sculley and said, “Yeah, that’s just how I feel. It’s like when I walk in a room and I want to talk about a product that hasn’t been invented yet. I can see the product as if it’s sitting there right in the center of the table. What I’ve got to do is materialize it and bring it to life, harvest it, just as Dr. Land said.”

“The world is like a fertile field that’s waiting to be harvested. The seeds have been planted, and what I do is go out and help plant more seeds and harvest them.” -Edwin Land

So just who was Edwin Land? The instant camera made him famous, but he invented much more than that.

Blinded by the lights
In 1926, Land was a Harvard student walking along Broadway in New York City. He was overwhelmed by the glare from the headlights and store signs. He sensed a safety hazard and wondered if polarized lights could reduce that danger. He dropped out of school and began doing research at the New York Public Library. Eventually, he found a laboratory at Columbia University whose window was regularly unlocked. He would climb in at night and conduct experiments. He designed the first inexpensive light polarizing filters and eventually returned to Harvard and was provided a lab to do further research.

Pulse is raising $800,000 in venture capital. According to the New York Times, this is “the first step in moving along the path from building an app to running a profitable business.” So the first step to becoming profitable involves taking funding? Marco Arment ain’t having it.

It’s ridiculous, incorrect, and insulting to those (like me) who have chosen the traditional business model — charge money, spend less than you make — for this author suggest that giving away your product for free and paying your expenses with VC money is the “first step” to make your app development “a profitable business”.

The attitude of that Times piece is representative of a bigger problem with the business media. Reporters and magazines are in love with the sexiness of BIG NUMBERS! The more zeros, the better. Is it a round of funding or actual profit? Doesn’t matter. Is there actually a sustainable business underneath all those zeros? Doesn’t matter. By the time the reality of the situation comes to light, they’ve moved on to the next lottery winner/victim.

Case in point: “Digg makes $60,000,000 in 18 months!” is a cover story. But how much attention is paid when the company eventually lays off 37% of its staff while struggling to reach profitability? And you don’t often see a cover story with the headline “Funded Company Gets Sideways with Investors and Winds Up Going Under.” That’s just mundane, commonplace reality. Yawn.

And then you’ve got the blogs that track who got funding and what round they’re on. People follow along as if it all means something. In reality, it’s just scoreboard watching that’s more titillating than valuable.

While it’s easy to blame the media, they’re just playing this big numbers game because it works. People keep buying into the lottery winners plotline so the media keeps rolling it out. Circulation and traffic matters more than the truth. And as long as our startup culture keeps buying into the fantasy, the media will keep selling us zeros.