It's their narrative for getting attention. That is all.
Someone once mentioned how it was clever they (tiny, unknown little company) always pit themselves against well known things (Microsoft, Apple, VC X) to try and become more legitimate over time.
They also claim that they don't want to grow. That every business has a 'natural' size. That somehow that's better than being massive - again challenging the conventional wisdom that more profit = better. They are masters of PR to geeks. Their business model pretty much relies on them doing constant PR to pit themselves as the hip small but hugely knowledgeable 'startup'.
Even the back cover of Rework reads like a parody of 37signals other stuff.
Handful of guys doing what they like. Earning enough to pay for a modest lifestyle and I bet they get to put something away for old age.
Why does earning a living have to be an unpleasant and stressful experience?
By writing and talking about how awesome cool their careers are, they get to boost their sales. Hell, I think I might start writing about how awesome my life is.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with it at all. There are millions of small businesses doing exactly that. There always have been. Most of them just quietly get on with it and make profit.
For me, 37signals don't say anything new or very interesting. They just say it really loudly, and try to make out that they're doing something radically different - when in fact they're not.
37signals is not doing anything new. Tons of small-businesses have been operating on the same principles for eons. However, there is so much hype and misinformation in the e-business arena that this sort of otherwise brain-dead obvious business advice is in the minority, and stands out all the more. There isn't one single way for businesses to find success, online or off, but if web entrepreneurs followed 37signals advice more often than they do today they would probably be better off. For that reason I think they're loudness if fully justified.
I don't think that's actually true though. Sure, maybe if you only hang out in SF and don't know anything about business and just believe what you hear about startups, then you might have issues.
It's better to just think about it for a while, read a lot of different success stories, advice, etc and come to your own conclusions. But come on. Business isn't rocket science. You make something useful, work out a monetization strategy, and grow from there. That's easy enough for my kids to understand.
The disservice 37signals does is that they firstly only believe that a certain business model is viable (eg selling stuff directly), and secondly they suggest that it's simple for the reader to emulate 37signals, when they know full well that to do that the reader would need to create ruby on rails, build up a big readership/following, etc etc.
Any extremist view is dangerous when taken literally and in isolation.
Unless your definition of a "modest lifestyle" includes driving a Lamborghini (http://www.google.com/search?q=dhh+lamborghini), I'd say 37signals is doing very well financially. And that's probably because they're intentionally staying small, not in spite of it.
It's not that 37signals are the only ones doing what they do — they're just the best at promoting what they do differently from "conventional" business ideas. With Rework (and Getting Real before it), they're actually making "challenging conventional wisdom" part of their business.
For better or worse, examples of companies like 37Signals are used because their approach is empowering, and their confidence about it is reassuring.
IME most hackers are in a situation where they don't know how/want to deal with investors and don't want to sit around with business types and think up monetization strategies. It's a great feeling that you can just build something with barely any overhead and start making profit early.
Google serves this role a lot for the opposite model. How many times have you heard "don't worry about your business model, just get big and you'll figure it out. It worked for Google." I've heard that from so many respectable Silicon Valley investors, and it's made me cringe each time.
The real question is "why do people who give advice always do so in such black and white terms?"
The real question is "why do people who give advice
always do so in such black and white terms?"
My guess is that many people want to hear their personal hopes and biases confirmed. Hate to go to meetings? Sweet; I just read that meetings are toxic! These guys are brilliant!
Never mind the lack of context or backing evidence for various aphoristic claims. The folks who read what they want into such things don't care.
When you hear what seems to be simplistic black-and-white advice, try flipping it around to the opposite, and see how hard it would be to rationalize a belief in that point of view. TDD is good - TDD is bad, OOP is epic - OOP is toxic; Stay small. Grow large.
It gets to a point where such proclamations are little more than grammatically correct sentences, and all meaning is provided by the reader.
That's just not true. At all. Look at websites for sale on sitepoint, ebay, etc. There are millions of websites, making very decent profits. You just don't hear about them much.
For every startup like twitter that doesn't really seem to care too much about monetization, there's probably 1000 websites making $1m+ a year in profit. Guess which gets all the press though?
>There are millions of websites, making very decent profits
Millions?
I highly doubt it.
Those that make a profit do it largely on the backs of ads, which isn't what is being discussed. We're talking about actually charging for a web property which remains shockingly rare.
Yeah. Because earning money from advertising isn't real money is it. It's imaginary money you can't actually use for anything. You're absolutely right. How silly of me.
That's some cutting sarcasm there. You must be a grizzled internet vet.
Only it's asinine given that what we're talking about is CHARGING, not running ads. Meaning "To use Hacker News you need to buy a $5/month subscription".
I look forward to what your rapier wit comes up with next.
Because they are the self-selected standard bearers for that counter-example and because they evangelize the "getting real" business model. It doesn't mean that they are the only example, there are many.
(a) Because we're pretty sure they weren't bitten by radioactive spiders and we don't believe in supernatural causes for business success, and (b) because it only takes one counterexample to prove any given bit of business orthodoxy false.
Appeal-to-37signals is definitely a crutch argument. But that doesn't make it an invalid one.
Among a wider tech audience (i.e. outside HN), I actually hear Craigslist as the counterexample more often, when it comes to successful tech companies that are run as normal businesses rather than startups (no interest in IPOs or exits, not much interest in rapid growth, suspicion of investors, etc.).
You have no clue how necessary it is. They are elitist.
They have taken on something most others haven't because, they are intelligent and willing to bet on their own abilities. That alone puts them in a rare percentage of elite.
I annoys me that people never seem to realize that 37Signals is a company that has "won the lottery", as David likes to say when pejoratively describing the success of companies that have chosen a different route, in a major way with Ruby on Rails. The popularity of Rails is a huge contributing factor to the success of 37Signals. And without Rails, nobody would ever have picked up any of their books. 37Signals is a popular counter-example because they promote themselves, and the vast majority of their ability to promote themselves through talks and books is direct result of hitting a grand slam with Rails.
Someone once mentioned how it was clever they (tiny, unknown little company) always pit themselves against well known things (Microsoft, Apple, VC X) to try and become more legitimate over time.