I absolutely loved the interview. It taught me to be patient, create an enjoyable workday, and work on things to solve real problems. Learning that the first version of Basecamp took 6 month is refreshing. The most time I spent on a project is 5 months. It shows we should not be caught up on expecting results to come so quickly.
However, there is one thing about the interview that bothered me. DHH said your are not a product company but just a consultant if you don't create products for yourself.
There are tremendous opportunities in industries that don't have as many talented technologists. For example, I am interested in industries that I don't make a living professionally such as retail business and health care. Just because I didn't study medicine, shouldn't stop me or anyone else from trying to make a product to help the health care industry.
This route of emersing yourself with customers from another industries is much harder. However, as geeks, we already have too many products made for geeks. There are plethora of important problems in less tech savvy sectors waiting for us to solve.
On one end of the spectrum we have DHH who advocates scratching your own itches. On the other end of the spectrum, we have people like you and Patrick (patio11) reminding everyone that there are huge, virtually untapped markets which are typically not well served by programmers.
My take is that both strategies will work if implemented correctly. In the case of "products for others", heavily relying on customer development and similar Lean Startup principles will be particularly important, given that you are not a customer of your own product, and therefore may not fully grasp your customers' problems and requirements.
I forgot to mention the part about dogfooding. After DHH talked about the importance of designing software for himself, Andrew challenged him by asking if Sortfolio was designed for himself. DHH made it clear that it was. Even though I'm not sure 37signals has got a whole lot of use of it just yet, after hearing him out I am convinced that it was designed with using it in mind.
Even if I've seen the interviewee speak or get interviewed a few times before, I always know the Mixergy interview will be worth watching. This was no exception. Andrew Warner asked some great questions, including one about why feedback from paying customers is different from feedback from non-paying customers.
Something about how paying customers have a stake in the outcome of the feedback, so they try to make their feedback effective. The transcript should be out soon.
On the other hand, maybe free customers will give effective feedback because there are only a few things preventing them from upgrading. Obviously would have to be looked at on a case-by-case basis.
He mentioned that feedback from non-paying customers is great too and (imo) implied for this reason. The message started off with him saying its better to have feedback from paying customers, but then evolved into saying they're both valuable in different ways.
I find the notion that his approach to business is very Danish to be pretty funny. If you've read "The Black Swan" Taleb discusses that everyone thinks his philosophy is the direct result of having grown up in Lebanon and living in exile during the civil war.
I'm not sure such a thing alone can determine our philosophy. Based on his Twitter feed I feel like DHH is more libertarian than the average Dane you're likely to meet.
I think the best about this is interview is that DHH really sells and believes what he says. He's just not replaying the party line, but a core belief of his.
Saul from FreshBooks here. The cake is real...I promise. When you sign up and say you heard about us from the Podcast we pick on person a day to get a cake.
i think you sign up at freshbooks, let freshbooks know that mixergy referred you and you will get a cake.. maybe by dropping a note after signup or some coupon code field or something like that..
Not sure - I don't swear a lot, but there's a very big difference in how profane language is perceived.
In Denmark you won't see TV programs bleep over profanity and you generally wont see people write f##k instead of just the putting the real thing.
I think most of us danes find the "fear" of certain words to be quite perplexing. And the idea that it's somehow better to see f##k instead of fuck, even more so.
It's as if there's some mystical belief in the "evil" power inherent in these words, that rationally can't really be described as anything but superstition.
Since us danes have a really, really hard time understanding how a word in itself could possible be offending, it's quite tempting to just not give a damn and use a lot of them. Especially if you find some kind of joy in poking at other peoples superstitions. And I suspect that's the case with DHH...
No - pretty much everybody in Denmark speaks english, but as a second language.
Typically with a funny accent :)
[edit] On the other hand english profanity has kinda made it into danish. You will hear danes say "shit" or "fuck" when speaking to each other in danish...
Great interview. Thought it really brought DHH out at his best. He has a rare combination of being very honest and insightful, but also communicating really well in face-to-face conversation.
However, there is one thing about the interview that bothered me. DHH said your are not a product company but just a consultant if you don't create products for yourself.
There are tremendous opportunities in industries that don't have as many talented technologists. For example, I am interested in industries that I don't make a living professionally such as retail business and health care. Just because I didn't study medicine, shouldn't stop me or anyone else from trying to make a product to help the health care industry.
This route of emersing yourself with customers from another industries is much harder. However, as geeks, we already have too many products made for geeks. There are plethora of important problems in less tech savvy sectors waiting for us to solve.