"How can we afford to put our business on hold for a month to "mess around" with new ideas? How can we afford not to?"
Taking advice from today's 37Signals on how to build your company is like taking advice from Michael Phelps on how to become a competitive swimmer.
They are both FREAKS of nature: a perfect combination of natural talent, decades of hard work, expert coaching, and unlimited resources.
I love being an observer to their dominance, but you have to look hard at these "lessons" to take away what's the signal vs. what's the noise for your average start-up!
Attributing 37Signal's success, partially, to "unlimited resources" seems off. Except for a small investment by Jeff Bezos after they were already bootstrapped they had to make due with what resources they could get in exchange for their products and services. Twitter, Facebook, Zynga... those are the kind of start ups that can be accurately tagged with the "unlimited resources" descriptor, for 37Signals to get the resources they currently have they had to execute in ways none of those other "start ups" have been expected to.
If your analogy is correct, then it's probably advice worth listening to -- although Michael Phelps' swimming advice isn't going to get me 18 gold medals, it's probably going to make me a better swimmer than I am today.
It is certainly well worth listening to them if they describe what they did that was successful for them while starting out, but that's a very different scenario from describing what they do now.
I don't know swimming, but I do know powerlifting.
I had hip mobility issues when I started. Which meant I put in ages getting my form right and improving my flexibility to be able to safely progress on the back squat. My lightest warmup weight now - a measly 60kg - was a sticking point for me for months where it'd leave me in pain, until I got the flexibility down. Once I did, it took me just 6 months to reach 150kg, and I've improved steadily since.
Someone with the same flexibility problem that were to copy my current training regime, would "just" end up in pain for however long it'd take them to figure out the same flexibility issues that I dealt with if they were lucky. But if they were not, it'd take very little to end up in hospital, e.g. if they started with too heavy weights.
Similarly, I push myself a lot closer to my failure point than you want a beginning lifter to do, because I've had years to learn how I feel when I reach failure and how to manage it without harming myself. If I put too much on the bench when doing bench presses, I know how to put the bar safely down on my chest and roll it off. Meanwhile many beginners will panic and try to put the bar off at a risk of dropping it on their heads or neck. 50kg dropped on your head is way worse than, say, 120kg slowly put down on your chest and rolled down - the latter at worst gives me a slight bruise for a few hours.
What I'd say if I were to instruct a beginner vs. someone near my level would be vastly different. E.g. for someone near my level I'd talk about how essential a belt is, while for a beginner it is counter-productive. I'd talk about alternative grips and using chalk for the deadlift to prevent the grip from failing - something that is utterly pointless for a beginner. For a beginner I'd be stressing form, form, more form and flexibility.
Copying me, or listening to what I would recommend - that works and is safe enough - for someone near my level would either put a beginner at severe risk of hurting themselves or waste their time (I'm far closer to my natural limit - I progress at about 1/10th of the speed I did when I started, yet the effort involved is vastly higher).
good points. I guess Michael Phelps would have to tailor his advice to his knowledge of where I am as a swimmer, and that might be too far removed from his own current experience to do. He might ask me to warm up with 100 laps.
Not as a slight against you personally (I'm talking statistically, and you may mean something else), but whenever such articles pop up, I always expect a businessman to chime in about how only a superhumanly talented or lucky team can do such things. It mirrors my real-life observations of businessmen "innoculating" their subordinates against such dangerous ideas when they come up. (Implying that they and their underlings are inferior.)
(This isn't unique to corporations. Even progressive nonprofits seem to dislike working with outspoken, truly horizontal organizations where self-management is the norm. Because they ironically have bosses and other trappings of corporate hierarchy. Their employees often observe that the new boss is like the old.)
37signals have taken pains to explain that, of course, any company has to think for themselves and not ape some blogpost they read.
I had the benefit of exposure to members of the 37signals team in their early days when they did contract work, built their remarkable "redesigns", etc.
It was crystal clear to me instantly that they were ABSURDLY talented, their design work looked like nothing else at the time and influenced an entire generation of not only web designers, but entrepreneurs, etc.
So while I agree that "anybody can do anything", 37signals started the race with an incredible lead in just raw, unfiltered talent.
lol. I don't think it's necessarily that extreme. 37Signals just has a counter-culture mindset that leads them to experiment where other people just accept the status quo.
They're just trying to come up with solutions to intractable management problems:
1. Studies show that people aren't 100% productive.
2. Studies show that company cultures and the company environment tends to discourage (or at least not nurture) people from being creative at work.
So instead of accepting the status quo, they're experimenting with different ways to achieve these goals...
If you learn from what they did when they were facing the same challenges you are, rather than what they do when facing challenges at an entirely different level.
I definitely wasn't expecting that because Jason Fried didn't give his company a month off. Jason Fried just gave his company a new role for a month. People still had to show up to work and do work, it was just they could do whatever work they wanted.
For me personally, I wouldn't enjoy that month. The main reason would be purely selfish. I know that my idea and implementation could make money and instead of releasing it on my own and profiting, it would become property of the company. I would also feel pigeon-holed into working on stuff that the company already does or in the same realm (which in my case is Business Intelligence tools to work with Cognos) which, while interesting, is not where my interests lie which would also limit my creativity.
It should be interesting to see what comes out of 37Signals in the next 6 months to a year.
I worked at a company that did something similar. We would have "research" sprints where we basically got to do whatever we wanted for a few weeks. It was a time we got to implement all of the crazy pipe dream features we'd been thinking of. We got to learn new technologies. We got to work with different people.
People also implemented their own ideas. When the sprint was over, if they wanted to keep working on it, all we had to do was fill out a form that our CTO would sign saying that the company didn't want the project.
This reminds me of the article about Valve from a few weeks ago. They seem to take this type of approach all year round in which employees aren't shoehorned into specific roles and they are allowed freedom to work on the projects they want.
I can speak from experience that there is a lot that the team I work on would like to get done that gets trumped by management. Our first foray into this is an overnight hack-a-thon scheduled for next month. Not quite as creatively inspiring as a month long hack-a-thon.
Are you saying that the company you work for is OK with you doing non-work development tasks, but only if you do it on off-hours when you aren't being paid?
On the second part, I'd say you were not sure it would make money. If you were sure your idea would make money why didn't you do it. The exercise that 37Signals did was to provide a safety net for their team to experiment with wild ideas at the company's expense, the monthly paycheck. I'd take that deal any day.
True, I should have been more clear on that aspect. It would have the potential to make money for myself rather than the potential to make money for the company.
As an employee, I think it would be hard to get back into the rhythm of the day to day after a month like this. Similar to being on a really nice vacation.
In the article it sounds like they improved a lot of internal stuff, so perhaps they took the time to improve what they found as their biggest pain points in their day to day work. I do agree that my truest interests do not entirely align with what I'm doing at work.
Also, if I had a company and were to do this, I would implement a bonus system so that employees could receive additional compensation for putting forward their best ideas and efforts.
That would be wonderful. I notice that a lot of people are really generous with bonuses for their imaginary companies. But people with actual companies are always kinda stingy. What's up with that?!
The important thing is they let everyone set priority in what they see as important and go do it, rather than priority dictated from top down which has led to the neglect of the badly needed internal tools. This is a very good management technique on delegation and empowerment.
Very good point, it isn't always easy to work on tools or documents or cleaning things up when you are required to produce 'deliverables' at a certain pace
> Also, if I had a company and were to do this, I would implement a bonus system so that employees could receive additional compensation for putting forward their best ideas and efforts.
That's not a good idea. Look into extrinsic versus intrinsic rewards. You want people to put forward ideas and efforts because they actually address pain points, not because of a bonus they could get.
> I definitely wasn't expecting that because Jason Fried didn't give his company a month off. Jason Fried just gave his company a new role for a month.
Yeah, like a lot of other people, my expectation was that everyone got a month of paid, mandatory vacation. A month-long hackathon is a lot less interesting.
From what I've read of the origins of Portal 2 (and I can't provide a link citation, it was in The Final Hours of Portal 2, a long form piece released as an ipad app), Valve did something very similar to this, all the employees went away to work on whatever ideas, came back and presented them. The coop model with two robots for Portal 2 came from that, as did a non-portals gameplay device that evidently got them excited enough to start building Portal 2 around, until they realised they couldn't do a Portal sequel that didn't have portals.
A big part of the 37signals play book is awareness through blogs and magazines. Their business model can't be "hey, we're going to sit here for 70 hours a week and crank out code" because then there is nothing to write about.
In one sense, they built a business that allows them to do crazy/fun/oddball things. Great.
In another, their model is not the model of a typical HN style start up, and following their advice without tempering it to your own set of realities is likely a bad idea.
>A big part of the 37signals play book is awareness through blogs and magazines. Their business model can't be "hey, we're going to sit here for 70 hours a week and crank out code" because then there is nothing to write about.
I'd say that the majority of their customers could not care less what they write about on blogs and magazines. They just use their services because they work for them.
That is, their business model is not "promotion through doing various stunts and writing/having others write about it" as you maybe imply. It's mostly to use, fellow developers, HN/Rails crowd etc that this writing gets known, and we constitute a tiny minority of their customer base, judging from the customer stories they post.
Sure, 37s products are good enough to spread by word of mouth, and they have an awesome customer base, so stricly speaking they don't need any press. They could shutter their blog and stop all interviews and continue on as a successful business indefinitely.
However if you're a young company learning the ropes and looking to emulate 37s' success, you have to first understand that 37s is a company that is built on PR. They were around for years doing consulting work before they ever built a single product. They were one of the early noteworthy web design blogs, and they built a significant audience right around the time people were figuring out how to go beyond brochure websites. So when Basecamp launched in 2004 they had the most valuable possible audience in the palm of their hands. It didn't hurt that true web applications were in their infancy, and they were essentially competing with bloated desktop software like MS Project, but it's important not dismiss their reach in the web design blogosphere. Without that, there's no telling if the product would have had the uptake to become their sole focus or whether they would have gone back to more consulting work.
Hrm. You're right about software quality. Either their software works extremely well or the publicity is not signifiant.
However, I don't think their next 10,000 customers will be made up of majority rails/ruby/coder people. I think it'll be from the "Fortune 5,000,000" they are always writing about. To reach them, they must get ink in inc. Oh yeah...pun intended. :)
This is a great way to generate new ideas and get everyone involved. Google kind of did this with the whole spend 30% of your time on working on new projects. But yeah, this is a hackathon not a vacation.
This actually is better than the 20% dev time in Google and other places. 20% dev time sprinkled now and then won't help to develop an idea fully since there are still daily tasks that distract the pursuit. Development of an idea requires a long stretch of concentrated effort. 4 weeks off to experiment sounds right.
For me the interesting bit is that web 2.0 companies, unlike brick and mortar companies, have to some extent disassociated the manufacturing part from the service part. So you can take a month (unless you are in Ops :-)) and do something completely different and its not visible outside.
Now if a McDonalds franchise said our employees are going to spend this month figuring out ways to improve or innovate in the fast food space, nobody could buy food for a month.
Since this feature is relatively new, its not commonly thought of as an option. To be fair though in professional practices like Law Firms, this has been implemented in the more 'we are getting out of the office' kind of thing. In that case it seems to counteract burnout from the insane hours that people put in during litigation.
Taking advice from today's 37Signals on how to build your company is like taking advice from Michael Phelps on how to become a competitive swimmer.
They are both FREAKS of nature: a perfect combination of natural talent, decades of hard work, expert coaching, and unlimited resources.
I love being an observer to their dominance, but you have to look hard at these "lessons" to take away what's the signal vs. what's the noise for your average start-up!