David Mayer, a product line manager at a Silicon Valley company and creator of The Clean Bottle, just listened to the audiobook version of REWORK and wrote us the following note.

37signals Team – I just listened to your audio book – twice! It was affirming to me because a lot of your recommendations are things I am already doing or have done…

I am a product line manager in Silicon Valley. I’m also an avid cyclist and I’ve always had problems cleaning out my water bottles. If I’d leave them with a bit of energy drink for a day or two, when I’d come back they’d look like a petri dish and I’d have to chuck them. So, three years ago I started working on a sports bottle that unscrews at both ends so I could actually clean and dry the dang thing. So – it was great to hear your advice about ‘scratching your own itch’.

I kept my day job the whole way through, going part time instead of quitting, so it was definitely cool to hear that that footed with your advice as well. I didn’t take any outside money – another piece of your advice – since I wanted total control of the company.

It took me three years, but in May I finally launched my company, Clean Bottle.

I didn’t have the budget for a big PR launch. So, I had to get creative – just like you guys suggested. One of the things I did was that I made a costume that looked like a giant Clean Bottle and went to France. I ran up the tops of the climbs alongside the riders at the Tour de France and got some SERIOUS air time and props. So much so that in the 3 weeks during the tour we sold close to $200K in product, most of it from our website, which is extremely high margin. Check out some of the footage here.

I really like your advice about using your byproduct. I am active on Facebook and Twitter and in my blogging. And we are making 5 Clean Bottle costumes and then giving them out to people who want to dress up as the costume…It definitely makes us the “anti-camelbak / specialized / nalgene” (another piece of your advice) since we are highlighting that we are the little guy and that we like to have fun instead of being serious all the time…

Anyways, thanks again for the book and the tips. We are doing well – in about 500 stores including all the REIs – and hope to keep growing, but only if we can do it without raising money and in a sustainable fashion.

Neat idea — thanks for the note David.

If you have a similar story about being influenced by REWORK, let us know by emailing rework [at] 37signals [dot] com.

Time: 25:28 | 10/11/2010 | Download MP3

Summary
Part three of the roundtable talk with three members of the 37signals programming team — Jeffrey Hardy, Jamis Buck, and Jeremy Kemper. They answer more questions from SvN readers.

More episodes
Subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or RSS. Related links and previous episodes available at 37signals.com/podcast.

This is part of our “Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud” series which profiles profitable companies with over $1 million in revenues that never took VC.

“Our outfit Envato was started by myself, my big brother, my wife and my best friend,” says Collis Ta’eed (pictured below on the cover of Nett magazine). “We put in a bit of money we each had and mostly just worked hard.” In this Q&A, Ta’eed answers questions about Envato and its path to success. He will also be answering reader questions today (Oct 7) in the comment thread so feel free to ask a question!

What does your company do?
We do two main things: First we run sites that help people earn an income. These are our biggest sites in revenue and include ThemeForest which is the largest marketplace for buying and selling website templates and WordPress themes. In the early days selling with us would just be a sort of hobby income. Then after a while there were a few people who actually could manage to earn a living. These days there are guys earning, quite literally, tens of thousands of dollars a month. These sites are called the Envato Marketplaces, and there are 7 of them, with an eighth launching three days from the time I am writing this :-)

The second part of what we do is a set of sites to help people learn professional creative skills. These are our biggest sites in traffic and include Psdtuts+ which is the largest Photoshop tutorial site online. We also have tutorials published on a variety of other subjects including audio production, motion graphics, illustration, photography, mobile development and web development. The full network is called Tuts+ and there are nine sites with a tenth launching in a couple of months.

So learning and earning is what we do chiefly.

But we also operate a few other sites and services including Creattica which is one of the biggest design galleries online, FreelanceSwitch which is the biggest and oldest blog dedicated to freelancing, and AppStorm which is a very rapidly growing set of app review blogs that includes Mac.AppStorm, the largest blog dedicated to Mac Apps.

So basically, we do a lot of stuff :-) As you might imagine it’s difficult explaining to someone at a dinner party who casually asks what we do for a living.

How did the business get started?
Back in 2006, our plans were much more modest. We actually just wanted to build a marketplace for buying and selling Adobe Flash. At that time I used to sell my files on iStockPhoto, but as you would assume from the name, they didn’t give a lot of attention to Flash guys.

So we planned out a marketplace called FlashDen, and I put up a job ad for a PHP developer. But instead we got an email from a developer I had briefly known at an old job whose email text was quite literally “Pick me, pick me!” When I called him he told me that PHP was really not what we should use, rather we should build the project in this thing called Ruby on Rails which he’d gotten into. Back in February of 2006, Rails was still pretty new, but I trusted Ryan and we went for it.

Using Ruby was one of the best cultural decisions we made as it brought us to using test driven development, version control, and a lot of agile techniques. These days here in Melbourne, Australia we operate one of the largest, most respected Ruby outfits.

How much cash did you need to get up and running?
So to get started we spent about $40,000 or so, plus a lot of sweat and hard work. The money came from the cofounders’ savings and was pretty much the sum total of those savings!

Early on the project didn’t go as we’d hoped. By July we’d burned through all the money, exhausted our credit cards, and were busy working our freelance design jobs as well as trying to build and work on FlashDen at night time. For a little while there I recall wondering if the whole thing was going to flop.

But happily by August we chopped out a lot of the ‘nice to have’ features, cleaned it all up a bit and managed to launch.

Ta’eed: “Back in late 2009 after we’d moved to the new office in Melbourne.” Back row, L to R: James, Naysan, Oz, Justine, Lucas, Stu, Rod, John, Skellie, Erin, Jordan. Front row seated, L to R: Collis, Fred, Cyan, Vahid, Ryan.”

Shop or read?

Daniel J. Levengood tipped us off to the biking gear site Rivendell.

I’m in the market for new pedals for my bike and ran across this bicycle company called Rivendell.

The site had a different feel from the start, like the description to the Grip King Pedals I’m going to purchase. Very personal. The very type of information that I needed to understand what made these pedals different.

I think I navigated through the entire site, reading up on an array of different topics.

Here’s an excerpt of the pedals description Daniel mentions. It’s great in how opinionated and plain-spoken it is…

Grip Kings aren’t ten-times better than our other pedals, but the differences and refinements are truly upgrades, although technically hairsplitting ones. If you can spend this much for pedals (in this age of $150 to $350 ones), and you’re committed to pedaling without any connection, then go for these. They feel just fantastic under your feet—-like nubby, grippy frying pans. (not the hot kind).

If you’re just curious about pedaling “free” like this and/or you want something cheaper, go for our MKS Sneaker pedals. It’s in the “Related Products” section, and is still our Best Deal Pedal. Not e’en the Grip King will knock it off that exalted throne. Still, the GK is a killer deal.

...and it’s the same way throughout the site. For example, The Big Picture doesn’t shy away from bold pronouncements.

Most riders today are riding bikes that by our standards, are too small. They make you lean over too far, which puts too much weight on your hands, and too much strain on your arms, neck, and back.

If you’re a mid-50s rider of moderate fitness, but ride fewer than 3000 miles per year, and you want to ride longish and steepish hills, the standard road gearing you’ll find on virtually any stock road bike, is too high. You don’t need a top gear more than 100 inches. You’ll appreciate a low gear of 23-inches or less.

If you weigh more than 150 lbs and/or are not racing (meaning, even if you weigh 122 lbs and don’t race), the smallest tire you should ride is 27mm wide.

You may personally prefer welded frames, or fillet-brazed frames, and that’s fine. We prefer them lugged, and so that’s all we make.

Modern bikes have too many gears…Our attitude toward the number of cogs on the rear hub is: Seven is heaven, eight is great, nine is fine, ten is kind of getting ridiculous, but it won’t kill you.

Gotta love the lack of hemming and hawing there.

Quick prototypes. Small teams. No bureaucracy. No lengthy documentation. Limited meetings. A Skunk Works approach to design. They were all essential to Clarence (“Kelly”) Johnson’s process for creating some of the most remarkable planes of the past century, including the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird [SvN]. Johnson was once described by Time Magazine as perhaps the most successful aviation innovator since Orville and Wilbur Wright.

Six months for the first jet fighter
Head Skunk [Air & Space Magazine] describes how, in 1943, Johnson promised a commanding officer the first jet fighter in six months. The prototype was designed in 150 days in a space built out of engine crates and a circus tent.

Johnson flew back to Burbank to present the project to Lockheed president Robert Gross. The company was working for the war; with three shifts a day, six days a week, it produced 28 airplanes daily. There was no space and there were no people for another project. But Gross, who thought Johnson walked on water, okayed the project and put him in charge of it.

Johnson went around the factory collecting people: “I simply stole them,” he later wrote. He set up a secret shop beside the wind tunnel in a space walled with wood from Hudson engine crates and roofed with a circus tent. Once the facility had been set up, the time remaining for actual design and construction of America’s first jet fighter was 150 days. This was not impossible; North American had designed and built the P-51 Mustang prototype in even less time. Johnson’s team beat the deadline—and the budget—with what would become the P-80 Shooting Star.

The P-80 Shooting Star.

Skunk Works
Johnson’s Skunk Works was the official alias for Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Development Programs (ADP). Of course, the term is now used in many fields to describe a small group that works under the radar on a project.

Time: 20:14 | 09/15/2010 | Download MP3

Summary
Part two of the roundtable talk with three members of the 37signals programming team — Jeffrey Hardy, Jamis Buck, and Jeremy Kemper. They answer questions from readers of SvN.

More episodes
Subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or RSS. Related links and previous episodes available at 37signals.com/podcast.

Some screenshots we’ve discussed recently in Campfire:

Wopata “takes your temperature” in order to identify urgency on its web form.

Interesting approach in the new Google Chrome menu. Edit and Zoom are compacted to a single menu item.

Billings lets you play with this table to see how much you could save with better time tracking.