Signal vs. Noise

Once again I’ll be speaking and giving a three-hour workshop at Future of Web Design in NYC this November 3-4. The workshops especially are a lot of fun.

What would you like to hear me talk about? Please post your ideas here or email ryan at you-know-where dot com.

I’d love to see you in New York, and especially hear your questions and ideas.

The #1 piece of advice you hear from frequent travellers: Pack light. Lay out everything you think you need. Then put away half:

You see that pile of stuff sitting on your bed, waiting to be stuffed into your suitcase? Take half of that stuff and put it back in your closet. Seriously. I know you think you’ve already narrowed your pile down from what you really want to bring. I know you don’t see how you’ll ever survive for weeks/months/years on that meager selection. But you will, I promise. And you’ll thank me when you’re dragging/carrying an already heavy suitcase/backpack down a 500-year-old cobblestone road. If you don’t ditch the stuff now, you’ll ditch it on the road. Trust us: unlike most scenarios in life, having too little is far, far better than having too much.

It’s pretty good advice for how many features you “pack” into a product too. Lay out everything you think your product needs and then cut out half.

You’ll be liberated:

1) You don’t have to spend as much upfront.
2) You don’t have as much weight to carry.
3) In truth, you won’t actually need a lot of the things you fantasize you’ll need.
4) You can pick up whatever you didn’t include when you get there.
5) You have extra room for future additions.

“Proper Trip Preparation” offers similar advice:

Remember and repeat these words: PACK LIGHT. PACK LIGHT, PACK LIGHT. A good rule of thumb is to pack half of what you need, then take half of that out of the bag. Face it, do you really want to be schlepping around a three suitcases on the train or dragging them up five floors of narrow stairs in Amsterdam?

Keep your product light and it will have a lot better chance of chasing down that train about to leave the station.

Related: Getting Real: Half, Not Half-Assed

Vinnie Cilurzo is regarded as one of the most innovative microbrewers in the country. He explains why he’s happy keeping his brews local:

Right now your beers are mainly available on the West Coast. How important is it to you to go national?

Not at all. We expanded three months ago into this new brewery space, so now we’re brewing in both our brewpub and in this brewery. And we started bottling Pliny the Elder, which until six weeks ago we had never done before. It had only been available on draft. We could be [widely available] like Stone or Lagunitas, and I get calls from distributors all the time from all over the country. But we do this more for the lifestyle, my wife and I, and same with our employees. I can ride my bike to work. I live one to two miles from either brewery. I fill my gas tank once a week. I think you can get caught up way too much in growth. We don’t have any growth goals.

[thanks MA]

{via Coudal}

If you have a problem with someone on your team, have the conversation in private: IM, one-on-one email, face-to-face meeting, etc.

But if you want to praise someone, do it in public so others can see it too: via a Basecamp/Backpack message, in your group’s Campfire chat room, in a blog post, an email that CC’s others, etc.

It’s a modern way to apply the advice Dale Carnegie gives in “Be a Leader: How to Change People Without Giving Offense or Arousing Resentment”:

Call attention to people’s mistakes indirectly…Let the other person save face…Praise the slightest improvement and praise every improvement. Be “hearty in your approbation and lavish in your praise.”

Related: A transaction makes a customer [SvN] discusses Carnegie’s suggestion that if you want to make someone your friend, you should ask them to do something for you.

Anthropologie
Interesting “walkthrough” metaphor at Anthropologie. You navigate through a room where everything’s for sale.

Threadless
Threadless adds some personality to the typically boring shopping-cart pattern.

Sad cart.

Happy cart.Gawker
The Gawker network of sites moves to threaded comments (threads open with a click).

Closed.

Open.

Programming/Tech Jobs

New York University is looking for a Programmer/Analyst – Interface Designer in New York, NY.

OpenCongress.org is looking for a Rails + MediaWiki Programmer located anywhere.

ActiveRain is looking for a Rails Magician in Seattle, WA.

NY Times is looking for a Ruby on Rails Developer in New York, NY.

Connected Ventures is looking for a PHP / MySQL Developer in New York, NY.

The Chronicle of Higher Education is looking for a Web Developer (LAMP) in Washington, DC.

Crispin Porter and Bogusky is looking for an Interactive Developer (Flash) in Miami, FL or Boulder, CO.

TheLadders.com is looking for a Software Engineer in New York, NY.

The George Washington University Department of Health Policy is looking for a Web Communications Specialist (Research Associate) located in Washington, DC.

Redpoint Technologies is looking for an Adobe Flex Senior Software Engineer in Chicago, IL.

Check out all the Programming Jobs currently available on the Job Board.

Design Jobs

Songbird is looking for a Visual Designer in San Francisco, CA.

eBay/Kijiji is looking for a Head of User Experience in San Jose, CA.

Wall Street On Demand is looking for an Interface Designer in New York, NY.

TechSmith Corporation is looking for a User Experience Designer in Okemos, MI.

Crate and Barrel is looking for a Senior Internet Art Director in Northbrook, IL.

Abcam is looking for a Web Designer in Cambridge, UK.

Interactive Factory is looking for a Front-End Web Developer in Boston, MA.

PARTNERS+simons is looking for an Information Architect/User Experience in Boston, MA.

Zepinvest is looking for an Web Designer and UI specialist in New York, NY.

Check out all the Design Jobs currently available on the Job Board.

More jobs!

The Job Board is flush with great programmer and designer jobs all over the country (and the world). The Gig Board is the place to find contract jobs.

Photos of Mike Rohde’s sketchnotes captured from Jason Fried’s talk at Discovery World, Milwaukee, WI on September 24, 2008. This talk was sponsored by Milwaukee Area Technical College. View the archived live video from the event.

Special thanks to Vicky Hennegan (MATC teacher and proprietor of Remarkable Parents) for making this event happen, Melissa Pierce (Life in Perpetual Beta Movie for keeping me company there and back, and to Matt (last name unknown) for his nighttime camera work for Melissa’s interview.

Related: Links to more of Mike Rohde’s sketchnotes from 37signals events.

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

Basecamp
[Case Study] UK-India development team keeps the beat with Basecamp
“We can all communicate in an efficient way and if we need to discuss or share something about a project, it goes on Basecamp. No longer are we searching our Inbox for Photoshop designs, snippets of source code or finding out what happened to a task. We all simply log onto Basecamp and there is everything we need, in one place. It’s that simple.”

Just updated Project Recon lets Windows users bring Basecamp projects and to-dos to the desktop
Project Recon, which gives Windows users browserless access to Basecamp projects and time, just released a major update with a completely redesigned interface (inspired by the iPhone).

Backpack
Backpack reminders can help you quit smoking
“What the World’s Healthiest Guys Know” [Men’s Health] talks about quitting smoking. The magazine’s hot tip? Use Backpack to send yourself daily text messages encouraging quitting. A study showed that reminders like that double your chances of success.

Tips on using Backpack for travel planning
“With Backpack, I can create a page far in advance to capture the basics of the trip. I was recently at a conference in Copenhagen for example where I had registered about 6 months in advance. I created the page, forwarded my registration confirmation to it, and the info was there waiting for me to polish off the details later on when the event was closer.”

Getting Real
Getting Real helps teachers too
“many Getting Real ideas are well suited for teaching, e.g. ‘Test in the wild.’ As a teacher, you can have a million great ideas and approaches to teaching. Many teachers try to work out perfect solutions spending a lot of time BEFORE the first run. If it turns out that the idea does not work well, this time is wasted. Instead, I’m trying to do a “rough version one” and if it looks promising I do “iterative cycles” polishing the procedure.”

Subscribe to the Product Blog RSS feed.

My wife recently ordered Henry Bursill’s classic Hand Shadows and More Hand Shadows. It was first published in 1859 and 1860 (in two parts), but what’s best about it is that, aside from the name of each pattern, the book is simply a book of pictures. No text. No preface by a famous hand shadow practitioner. No page of text describing the history and variations of each pattern. Just pictures.

Each page is a single picture, drawn in mid-19th century style, demonstrating how to position your hands, and showing the resulting shadow. No text is needed; the book explains itself.

Obviously, this extremely minimalist style wouldn’t work for every book, but how many books could be improved by including less than they have? How much do you really have to say about a hand shadow, when a picture says it all?

We missed out on doing the promised 37signals Live event last week, so now we’re going to make it up by going double this week. Today, Jason will be speaking to the Milwaukee Area Technical College at 4:45PM CDT 5:30PM CDT. Tomorrow, we’ll both be doing a show from the office that’ll mix debates and the regular Q&A style at 11:00PM CDT.

Both shows will as always be available live from http://live.37signals.com/. Hope to see you there!

Update on Milwaukee chat: Actual start time is 5:30PM CDT. Apologies for the confusion.

Even though we don’t see each other everyday, our team still manages to trade normal water cooler conversation. Part of that is recommending products we use each day and trading our reviews in Campfire. Here’s a few we’ve all been enjoying:

Jason and Sam love their Jiffy clothes steamer because it makes them feel like they work in a very small dry cleaner.

If we’re in the office, we can’t avoid a walk over to Sip for a coffee fix. The rest of the time Jason and I consume large quantities of Sprite Zero.

After David and Jason got their AppleTV’s, I was convinced. Then I convinced Jeff, and we’re all quite happy.

Jeremy loves his masticating juicer and says it works better than any centrifugal juicer. Jason loves his Omega juicer, too. Jamis and Mark are on the fence in their juicer quest.

A few of us are excited about the release of Fitbit in a few months!

Now that Jeremy is working while standing up just like Jamis, he picked up an anti-fatigue mat after I recommended one. Unfortunately, he hates it. (Whoops!)

We all have company cards, but most of us are also using American Express for our personal accounts.

Jamis. Loves. His. Bandsaw!

Jason bought this simple sound machine after I mentioned how obsessed with it I am.

Jason, Jeremy and I are big Calexico fans. Sam and I are loving an album by Beruit and the Darjeeling Limited soundtrack. (Though my favorite work music is the soundtrack to Little Miss Sunshine!)

Big up to our friends at West Loop Gym where a few Signals and Coudals are happy members.

We’re also customers of the awesome Irv & Shelly’s Fresh Picks. Highly recommended if you’re in the Chicagoland area.

In my past experience, I did not like designing and producing HTML email marketing campaigns. The emails that I created had their conceptual birth in another medium altogether: a Catalog, an Advertisement, or the Website. The concept and strategy was already finalized before it had gotten to me. At that point it was all about production.

How I see email working for 37signals
I want to take a different approach with 37signals email. Because we are not ready to start redesigning the marketing sites, I see an opportunity to use email as a means to experiment with concepts in anticipation of the redesign. That’s right. I am reversing that conceptual flow often practiced at many online retailers. Email isn’t going to follow what’s already been laid out. It’s going to lead the way. This is email as an inexpensive design and content testing platform.

Here’s the original design for the first Highrise email test:

I am hoping to address some marketing site issues with this email. There is no place currently on the Highrise site where customer stories or tips can be found. We have a great Product Blog with stories and tips, but you can’t sign up for Highrise there. It is also difficult to know that we have Basecamp and other products if you’ve come to the Highrise site directly. Maybe Basecamp will suit your needs better. This is how we did it with this particular email. A few emails down the line might take a different direction altogether.

One caveat about using emails as a design and concept testing ground is that email clients are not perfect. The original design had to be adjusted slightly. You can see what we finally ended up with here: http://www.highrisehq.com/newsletters/090908/

Design compromises aside: Email becomes the perfect platform to perform this synthesis experiment. Elements and concepts from the design above may or may not make it into the final site design. That is still a ways away. We’ll cut our concepts for a site redesign over a span of several emails in the coming months. Would you like to see how it comes along? Sign up for our newsletters to see where these emails take us.

“Want to attract and retain Gen Y? Better rethink everything” [The Arizona Republic] explains how employers can attract younger workers and discusses 37signals (including some quotes from Jason).

In order to appeal to us, employers need to rethink their rules a bit. Forget rigid 40-hour workweeks. Forget traditional company hierarchy…

One company that has led the charge in shifting the work-life paradigm, especially when it comes to employee relations, is 37signals. Headquartered in Chicago, it’s a multi-million dollar organization deeply committed to maintaining a work-life balance for its employees.

President Jason Fried says today’s employers present the biggest roadblock. “Simply put, employees are treated like children. They are not allowed to think for themselves, and there are too many layers of approval, just too much insulation that prevents anyone from doing anything. The traditional workplace is broken, and until someone realizes that, there’s always going to be conflict.”

This suffocation by protocol is dead on and will never allow an employee to “go beyond” or achieve something extra for the company. This is a critical link that most organizations continually fail to acknowledge. They are too focused on ensuring employees do no wrong that they actually prevent them from achieving anything beyond status quo.

But there is hope, and a solution that is more common sense than radical procedural change.

To counter the “traditional workplace,” Fried had this to offer: “We challenge them. We give them different, interesting projects. We encourage them to do something outside of work and teach us what they’ve learned. It’s no help to our company to hire someone based on a skill or to get stuff done.”

It is a simple, no-brainer solution, but one that is too often lost.

A good portion of this industry is still trying to figure out how to make money for the first time (hint: charge people). But for those who’ve mastered that, I want to talk about the next step: making money twice (or three or four times).

Making money off original content isn’t hard as long as you aren’t afraid of making money. You can sell it, you can offer subscriptions to it, you can talk about it, etc. But what’s more interesting — and easier — is making money again of something that already made you money before.

Repackaging

Repackaging allows you to earn money multiple times on the same content. It’s a great way to grow your revenues without significant marginal cost.

Money One: A lot of our ideas originate on this blog. We post articles which generate traffic. We make money off the traffic by running Deck ads in the sidebar. We make a few thousand a month off The Deck ads.

Money Two: We bundled up the best blog posts about our software development philosophy and turned it into a PDF book called Getting Real. We sell the PDF for $19. We’ve made a few hundred thousand dollars from the PDF.

Money Three: We take the Getting Real PDF and turn it into a paperback at Lulu.com. We sell the paperback for $25 and we make a few thousand a month on royalties. The paperback is currently ranked the 4th best seller on Lulu.

Money Four: We took the content from Getting Real and produced a Getting Real conference series. We held a few conferences a year and made about $50K per conference. We’ve produced about 5 of these conferences.

It adds up

So if we add this all up, we made about $100K on The Deck ads (The Deck has been around about two years and we are a founding partner), $350K on the Getting Real PDF, about $65K on the Getting Real paperback, and about $250K on the Getting Real conferences (before that they were called Building of Basecamp).

That’s roughly $765,000 over a few years off roughly the same content. Insight and ideas about how we run our business. Blog entries, PDF, paperback, and conferences.

We probably could have done a few more things and pushed that total over a million. Regardless, making a little extra here and there over something you’ve already produced is a great way to grow revenues.