
Know Your Company grows up and moves out - stirno
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3700-big-know-your-company-grows-up-and-moves-out
======
pixelmonkey
Parse.ly has been using this product for the past several months. In fact, I
think we are the "smallest customer" that Jason cited, with 16 employees.
We're a fully distributed team (as I described in [http://bit.ly/distributed-
teams](http://bit.ly/distributed-teams)), so it was a particularly good fit
for us.

Our team loves the product. They loved it from the first week it was in use.
It sends a weekly email rounding up what everyone is working on every week. It
also has team members sharing interesting social things like favorite recipes,
childhood stories, books, and movies. And the "Company Question" (a weekly
question picked by management) allows us to get regular feedback from
employees, which we used to do sporadically using hacked-together Wufoo
surveys, but this has much less friction and actually works. One of my
favorite of these questions that we recently asked was, "Is there anyone at
the company you wish you could apprentice under for a few weeks?"

I don't want to reveal too much about the product because I don't want to
preempt their own marketing of it, but here's a quick glimpse of how the
"Questions" view of the product looks -- this is where you can see the answers
from employees of past questions. In general, it has a simple, sparse, and
beautiful design that achieves the goal of the product with ease.

[http://ubuntuone.com/3gYi3mg65rCM30dTSGsYB8](http://ubuntuone.com/3gYi3mg65rCM30dTSGsYB8)

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anon808
I always feel like 37signals shares just enough to make you think you're part
of their community, but not enough if in fact you actually were.

~~~
jasonfried
What did you want to know that we didn't share?

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anon808
Why are you spinning off the business if it's profitable? Why isn't Claire
joining 37S instead? What's happening to ClarityBox? What other operating
scenarios did you guys consider? Who is going to run the business . . . will
Claire be doing product development, programming, customer support herself?
What exactly will she be doing? Is she hiring people? Who are these people?

Of course you don't owe anyone any of that info. However, if you crack the
door open just a little bit, don't be offended/surprised etc. if my curiosity
is piqued and I want to open it.

~~~
jasonfried
Know Your Company was a big experiment from the start. A totally new kind of
product for us, an entirely new kind of business model for us, etc. And now
we're taking that to the next level with an entirely new strategy for us:
Spinning it off into it's own autonomous company and letting it find its own
direction.

As I mentioned in the original post, we wanted to hire Claire to run Know Your
Company inside 37signals, but there was a fundamental conflict of interest:
She had interviewed everyone at 37signals as part of a consulting project, and
knew a lot of details about how everyone felt about the company. Everyone
spoke to her in confidence as an outside consultant, not as a colleague.
Bringing her into 37signals as an employee later would be a violation of that
trust, so we weren't able to hire her.

You'd have to ask Claire how she plans on staffing the company, but initially
it's just her with a little bit of our help during the transition. As far as I
understand, soon she will be bringing someone on part time to help with
product development until she's ready to make a full-time hire. Slow, steady,
and prudent.

Hope that was helpful.

~~~
anon808
yup, it makes sense why Claire wouldn't be part of 37s, and if the fit with
her and the product is one-of-a-kind, makes sense that it would be organized
separately if thats the only way to have her be a part of it. Of course now
that you add more color, I'm more curious. I always got the impression you
were more personally associated with Know Your Company than the other 37s
products (having your signature on the marketing page), if so, are you
personally bummed to give up the product and not direct it's continued
development? Are you going to be working on something new?

~~~
jasonfried
I'm not bummed at all -- I'm excited! I can't give Know Your Company my full
attention forever.

The product is in great hands now with Claire fully-focused on making it
better as her full time job.

I'm standing by as an advisor and eager to help when called upon.

We also still own a sizable piece of the company so it's in our best interest
to see it succeed.

And we're customers - we use Know Your Company every week.

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jmduke
I'm surprised by the decision to spin off KYC: from what I understand, it fits
nicely in 37signal's toolshed and would help cross-marketing quite well --
especially with those great numbers.

If I were to guess (and this is with the caveat that I'm not too privy to what
the actual product _is_ \-- from what I can guess from the marketing copy,
it's a mixture of one-time consulting and internal SaaS), the growth rate of
the project is increasing in a way such that scaling on the part of 37signals
is infeasible.

(Edit:) Napkin math: if a company grows from 25 to 40 over the course of two
years, that works out to be $1500 over 24 months, or effectively $62.5/mo for
KYC. It also strongly incentivizes the product (er, company) to help with a
company's HR attrition and growth, which is neat.

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swombat
I read through part of the slightly scammy-looking long sales letter (complete
with bullet points and money-back guarantee) at
[https://knowyourcompany.com/](https://knowyourcompany.com/) and still don't
have a clue what this product does.

Can anyone enlighten me?

PS: @jason - the comment about the sales letter is not a comment about 37S, of
course, but I'm sure you're aware of the format you're using there...

~~~
mst
I'm fairly sure there was a post a couple years back by 37s along the lines of
"this style of sales letter is often used by somewhat scammy companies ... but
that's because they don't have a real product at all so they _have_ to be
really good at marketing copy".

Which is a fair point - and, well, the last time I read one of those I started
off thinking "this is weirdly high pressure" ... and then ended up reading the
whole thing and signing up for a basecamp trial anyway (which I promptly
failed to try properly, so I have no opinion on the product ...).

I think my point is "call it high pressure instead of scammy". If I actually
have one. _goes in search of another coffee_

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ihaveajob
I like the pricing model. At first it reads like a one time sell ($100 per
employee, once), but considering attrition, this is much more attractive for
KYC since most companies have significant attrition. What's the typical tenure
length at an American corporation? 2-3 years? 5 years? Also, the organizations
that need this service the most might also have higher attrition to begin
with. Clever.

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thesausageking
The pricing model creates a strange incentive: it's in their best interest for
their customers to have a high rate of employee turnover.

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AndrewKemendo
The issue of knowing your people is such a basic fundamental tenant of
leadership that every year or two another tool is invented to solve it. 360
degree feedback was the previous hot company evaluation tool and 15Five had a
pretty interesting approach to this as well. I haven't used know your company,
but it seems to me that at its core it is an employee feedback tool - with the
caveat that it is as minimally intrusive as possible (which is always the goal
by the way).

I would love to see how it actually works compared to other management tools,
but my company is not big enough to actually be able to implement it.

I do think this is an example of the way that startup/technologists/hackers do
things when compared to the rest of the universe of management/leadership:
reinventing the wheel that the business management community has been
chiseling on for over a century. Hopefully this will do great things.

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cjstott
This will be interesting to watch. Given the sales page currently is simply a
letter by Jason Fried, my assumption (and it is just an assumption) is that
companies have gone with this offering because it's 37Signals. That said now
momentum is built, that in turn should generate the referrals rather, perhaps
more so than the initial buzz of working directly with 37signals people, so I
guess this makes sense.

I've always seen 37signals as a very focused company, and this spin off
enables them to focus back on their core business. I just finished reading
Focus by Al Ries, hence this is top of mind, but 37signals seem the masters of
relentless focus in the modern age.

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Gaurav322
It is really a good idea to know our employee's ideas and their work culture.
It also provides a great things about our employee through this. We can know
that what exactly our employee wants from us and are we giving or not??

And 100$ is not a big deal...

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jenniferqq
So basically, 37signals sold this product just like they sold Sortfolio.

(They seem to be on a bad run lately given Breeze was shutdown after a few
months. Sortfolio sale. etc)

~~~
jasonfried
We didn't sell Know Your Company.

No one sold anything and no one bought anything. The piece of the company that
Claire owns was a gift from us - and she can earn more as the company does
better.

We moved it out into its own company, which Claire now runs.

Nothing at all like Sortfolio.

~~~
jenniferqq
Is 37signals still the majority owner in this new company?

~~~
d0m
yes

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mathhead
Isn't the thread in breach of HN rules?

The title of the post is: "Big: Know Your Company grows up and moves out."

Shouldn't it be exactly the same?

