37Signals: A company I (predictably) admire

I really admire 37Signals.

[Pauses whilst all the internet industry people groan at the predictableness of it...]

However, unlike the last company I wrote about - Feedburner, who are certainly on their way to universal admiration and the undying love of net natives and geeks worldwide, these guys are already there, and - being frank - me admiring ain't gonna rock their boat one tiddly liddle bit.

But still - I do hugely admire then, and am inspired by them, and felt the need to share why.

I think 37Signals was a web design agency like the rest of us once. Or they did interaction design, or information architecture or user interface or one of the other jargon-y terms that is to do with making a website easier to use for normal people like us.

And then they started building stuff themselves.
Online stuff.
Amazingly usable useful web services that helped you do stuff. Easily.
It was brilliant!

Basecamp was the killer app that caught many people's imagination.
It's basically an online project management service - you can give access to people on your team or associates or clients, you and they can upload and download files, you can whack in project timelines with milestones in a no-way-as-painful-as-Microsoft-Project-Gantt-hell, you can search for stuff, you can categorise info you upload, you can discuss things online, and keep records. It does more.
But what it really does, and a core principle of 37Signals and a reason we all love them so much, is it does all of this very simply - in a very lean, user-friendly, 'oooh, it works' kinda way.

I use Basecamp all the time, and so do my team and our clients. None of us ever read an instruction manual. It just works.

They say:

"We believe software is too complex. Too many features, too many buttons, too much to learn. We build web-based products that do less, work smarter, feel better, and are easier to use. We pay enormous attention to the details and overall customer experience of our products."

How cool is that?!!!!
WHO could disagree with it.

A good way to pick up on 37signals' philosophy is to take the 10 minutes or whatever to watch this video clip on collaboration...It really prompted some interesting thoughts in my mind about productivity.

And that's the second thing I love about these guys.
They have a simply stated worldview that carries through everything they do.
It's great marketing and business vision done right.
It has so much clarity, and so much appeal with customers, and they apply this perspective so profoundly, that their initiatives seem to just turn to gold.

And this next quality is the bit that inspires me when I look at 37Signals.
It's how they just keep rolling one success into another.

Basecamp now has a whole suite of brothers and sisters sitting in the teamworking/collaboration/online tools to make life easier space.
But there's also a book.
And now a job board... a job board....Ummmm... brilliant!
See most people in the online technology and marketing world's sit around wondering about the BIG IDEA, the 'light bulb moment'. Problem is they do lots of sitting around 'thinking' and not much doing.

And then a few people just keep whacking things out there - sometimes radically new, but often just an incrementally better but unusually everyday thing than something else out there already. Jobs boards have been online since dinosaurs roamed the planet. But 37signals did one anyway.

So 37Signals now has a big head start launching something like a jobs board because it has the online profile, the page views, the Google juice to direct straight at the new project.
But that won't make a project succeed.
It'll give it the initial interest and buzz, but if the dog food is crap, the dogs won't eat it (to paraphrase What they don't teach you at Harvard by Mark McCormack)
And they say it's different and better, and I for one expect it will thrive based on track record alone.

So yeah. 37Signals. They rock the party that rocks the body..
And if you want to take a small sprinkling of their goodness away with you, remind yourselves of their worldview:

"We believe software is too complex. Too many features, too many buttons, too much to learn."

Nice.

PS. I also think these guys are a great example of some of Seth Godin's thinking - of finding customers who share your worldview (All Marketers Are Liars) and of being remarkably different (Purple Cow). Fucking A.

Comments

[Jason Fried]

Well... THANKS! ;)