The more I read these 37signals articles, the more I like them.
I realize that a lot of their philosophy runs counter to the already unconventional wisdom here, but so what.
I also realize that we may soon hit 37signals saturation (much like techcrunch saturation) here, but again, so what.
Many of us are in less than optimal situations (money, time, resources, collaborators, etc.), so this is some of the best advice you can get...
"How about you turn your perceived weakenesses into strengths. Embrace your constraints..."
Excellent!
My own example:
I am frustrated that I don't have enough time to spend writing my own code because I still have several consulting gigs. So, instead of asking, "How can I get more time in my week?" I ask, "How can I use what I learn from my clients to cut through the fog on my own software so that I don't need as much time?" That change in framing has really saved me a lot of time.
Sometimes you just gotta change your view by asking a different question. A 37signals post has once again helped me to think outside the quadralateral. Thanks, DHH.
It's so nice to see this kind of thinking on YC News. There seems to be a growing trend that startups have some specific criterion for success (120 hours/week, absolute knowledge of programming, moving to SV). I find that a good amount of the passion I have for startups comes from the fact that there is no set plan for how it needs to be done. Interesting and creative ways of 'hacking' the business world don't have criterion. Just because PG or Google or 37signals did something a certain way does not mean that it is the only way, or even the best.
There is the old saying that there is more than one way to skin a cat. One way it to work ever waking hour of your day, but another and just as viable way is to work for 10 hours/week.
This mentality of absolutes in entrepreneurship can be detrimental to ones success and promoting it only devalues the usefulness of communities like YC News.
All the best things that I did at Apple came from (a) not having money and (b) not having done it before, ever. Every single thing that we came out with that was really great, I'd never once done that thing in my life.
I would take the new chips and redesign some computer I'd done before because I'd come up with a clever idea about how I could save 2 more chips. "I'll do it in 42 chips instead of 44 chips." The reason I did that was because I had no money. ... I know how to combine chips together very efficiently to get that goal done.
I like them too, but I'm a skeptic by nature, and I have some doubts about their story in terms of its repeatability by others. Thinking about it, this is what comes out:
If it's so easy to just create something with less time, less code, less people, etc... etc..., then there is also less of a barrier to entry, meaning that it should be easier for the competition to show up and grab some of the action. What's their barrier to entry? Popularity due to Rails?
"I like them too, but I'm a skeptic by nature, and I have some doubts about their story in terms of its repeatability by others."
I agree. One of the few consistent challenges I see in startup founders (including speakers at YC dinners) is DISTRIBUTION. They all say, don't underestimate the importance and power of distribution. 37s (with the SvN blog, Rails, Getting Real etc) essentially had "free" distribution...
If you add up all of the time/effort required to develop this passionate following, it'd be way more than 10 hours per week.
> So, instead of asking, "How can I get more time in my week?" I ask, "How can I use what I learn from my clients to cut through the fog on my own software so that I don't need as much time?"
Yeah, setting up CVS tunnelling to my client's site is the best thing I ever did ;-)
"Yeah, setting up CVS tunnelling to my client's site is the best thing I ever did ;-)"
That's not what I meant (although I suspect you said it in jest).
It has nothing whatsoever to do with using anyone else's property (intellectual or otherwise). It has everything to do with what I learned from the gig.
My most common example is so common and has so much common sense that it's easy to overlook. I call it the "suck test". Every time a client has me change something, I ask if it's because their business has changed since this was written or if it was just written poorly. It's often the latter. Every time I look at something that someone else wrote and say, "Who wrote this &#^$%? It sucks," I add it to my suck list and make sure I never do that.
This one thing has saved me thousands of hours. Stuff I never would have imagined unless I had seen it somewhere else. And there are a lot of other examples, too.
I think that this is what DHH meant when he talked about turning "perceived weakenesses into strengths".
This is what I am doing with http://timefo.com . I have a day job, and I do Timefo at night and on weekends, and still have a life. I have hesitated to outright list it on HN as an "Ask HN" item, but let's just see what happens with this comment... My main concern is that I don't have a lot of time for support, so that is why I have not publicized it more widely.
Definitely post it in its own thread if you're looking for feedback! What is more a part of this site than people doing that? It's much more productive than reading 37signals say the same thing a new way.
Here's some comments:
- The take a tour image is pixelated and ugly.
- It needs something more compelling, IMO, as a reason to use it. It is a neat widget, but nothing I'd think of using. Maybe there are some cool use cases that would get people excited about it.
- After just a quick glance, it feels like something that might be good as part of something else.
- Clicking and dragging on a timeline (the blog one, for example) is hard because there is too much 'link space' (even where there are no words) as opposed to 'drag space', if that makes sense.
The images are pretty bad, so I will try to do better ones this weekend.
As you and terpua wrote, it would be more useful if one could use it on a blog for visualization of entries, etc., and that is something I want to work on in the near future.
If you are using the "Free Transform" tool in photoshop to rotate the image, I found that rotating and scaling in the same "Free transform" session causes more jagged edges. Doing the rotate first, then doing the scale looked better. Not sure if you are doind that anyway, but the edges of your image looked like mine when i was :)
Basecamp was created with 10 hours/week of programming time and as a 3rd or 4th project alongside paying customers for the designers over the course of about 6 months. In other words, we didn’t drop everything we had to create Basecamp, and you don’t have to either.
I'm not sure how accessible this advice is to those whose name isn't David and who don't have a tendency to say "woops!" when explaining stuff.
(ie to the non-DHH's amongst us, which I imagine is the majority)
Here's a qualificative for the article: If you're capable of writing the best web framework in the world in your spare time, chances are you can also create a business at the same time.
I don't accept your argument, but even if I did, the article still has merit.
The opposing philosophy is, "drop everything else and go full speed ahead on your product". Ok, do that. Your likely outcome is still bad. We talk ad nauseum about the successes in our field, but fool ourselves about the failures. The failure model isn't Kiko. It's the 1,000 PHP apps that we've never heard of, because they didn't get off the ground after they used up the runway they got from their founders 3 month sprint.
No matter what you do, the odds are very much against:
* You making enough money with a web app after a 3-month sprint to eat.
* You closing a round of funding of any sort.
On the flip side, if you do your product "part time", the odds are very good you'll still be nurturing your product 3 months from now, or 6 months, or two years. The "lack of focus" hurts your chances, but the sustainability helps your chances.
Also, let's just be clear about something: DHH didn't write the best web framework in the world. Rails is nice, but it isn't a prohibitively awesome technical achievement. If you set the technical bar at "Rails 1.0", most of the programmer posters here can clear it. Find another excuse not to take a swing. =)
You make some good points, but I think this debate has been run round and round enough that I just want to see more data.
> DHH didn't write the best web framework in the world. Rails is nice, but it isn't a prohibitively awesome technical achievement. If you set the technical bar at "Rails 1.0", most of the programmer posters here can clear it.
Rails was perhaps not quite as technically hard as other things, but in terms of putting together the right technology at the right time, it was brilliantly successful, far more than most products anyone here will release. So in terms of shining some light on basecamp, Rails was far more successful than doing something technically great, but obscure.
As a programmer I couldn't clear the Rails 1.0 bar technically, let alone come up with the insights DHH did to make it so usable. But the good news for other people is that didn't stop me from getting my company to break-even after only six months of part time work. Definitely the team over at 37signals (don't forget Jason) are very good and would have been successful in almost any situation.
I think the key point that they make though, is that their success comes more from their decision to play to their strengths and be pragmatic, rather than their talent.
"If you're capable of writing the best web framework in the world in your spare time, chances are you can also create a business at the same time."
Don't make the mistake of underestimating yourself.
I'm not suggesting that you'll go out and write Rails in 3 weekends. What I am suggesting is that the more I meet "famous" hackers and the more I meet people from this community (online and offline), the more I realize that there's not really all that much that separates us.
Lot's of people here are (obviously) brilliant. And even for those who are a little less brilliant, brilliance is only one part of the equation. Work habits, determination, perseverence, passion, and maybe most of all, belief, are just as important. Don't sell yourself short.
I have no idea if I am as brilliant as DHH. Odds are against me. But he inspires me to achieve things just as cool as his. And I just know that I can. I suspect most people here can too.
Would you say that most of what PG says also can be discounted by your logic? If you're capable of writing one of the first successful web/e-commerce sites and creating a new Lisp dialect and starting a new type of venture firm and writing popular essays, chances are....
As far as I can tell from his articles, PG was pretty focused on Viaweb when it was starting up - not working on it 10 hours a week while holding a full-time job.
I'm attacking the idea that anyone can start a successful startup with 10 hours a week - not the idea that anyone can start a successful startup (although I'd say even there there's a bar, but it's much lower).
DHH, in this article, presents a method that he suggest applies to anybody. I'm just saying it doesn't apply to anybody.
A lot of things that applied to Graham in the mid-90s no longer apply. The 37signals lessons are still fresh; they're operating in the current business climate.
If you weren't working in 1996 (unless you graduated early, you were in high school, swombat) I'll say: do not underestimate how silly things were back then.
> The 37signals lessons are still fresh; they're operating in the current business climate.
The book "Growing a Business", written in the '80ies, about a gardening catalog company of all things, has a lot of the same lessons as "getting real", and to boot comes with its very own ISBN.
Here's my summary of it (but go buy it, it's a good one):
At first I was like another link to another business book about blah blah blah but after reading the short summary you provided. I must say sir if I could upvote you thrice I would. Looks like an awesome book! I tend to put more weight on age old principles than the conflicting advice I get from most blog roll submissions here. Thank you!
I'm not sure "Getting Real" sums up 37Signals' business anymore. Since they wrote that, they seem to have melded it with Joel's "hire smart people and keep them happy" strategy.
But this looks like an awesome book, and I just bought it. Thanks!
I think that, difficult as it may be, looking at statistics is the only way to really answer this one. One DHH anecdote only says that it's possible to do what he did, but says nothing about the likelihood that other people may be able to repeat his success.
The Feedburner guys were a consultancy --- BurningDoor --- since 1995. Nineteen Ninety Five. Our ISP used to host them. They had awesome offices. You know what? I'll take Dick Costello's experience over the idealized YC moonshot business plan any day of the week.
Come to think of it: BurningDoor, 37Signals; maybe this is just a Chicago thing.
EveryBlock's funding was from a journalism grant, and rather than have some of the destructive conditions that VC money has, it had a condition that the code they produce must be publicly available at the end of the grant.
While I'm name dropping, Threadless is another Chicago company.
I was also. I've worked for several startups, and indeed their first mistake was to develop software in crunch mode, and their second was to throw more people at it because it was late.
In every case, the result was software that required a huge amount of effort to do anything with (about as agile as a 16-wheeler with no gas in the tank and 12 flat tires), morale that tailed off as the burnout increased, and failure.
Most of those companies WILL fail, because their product will be poor, even if it's a good idea. Revolution health is a good example; they started out with a good idea and executed badly... now they're going through rounds of layoffs, making very little money, and Google is accomplishing what they've failed to (e.g. online health records).
If you're capable of writing the best web framework in the world in your spare time, chances are you can also create a business at the same time.
While I've never worked directly with Rails, working with Capistrano is making me use Ruby more and more and I'm starting to think the best qualities of Rails come from Ruby. Ruby seems to offer plenty of opportunity for an experienced developer to map their problem domain directly to language primitives.
Once you get good at doing that you'll be surprised how more efficient you become and how much more time you have for things like creating a business.
I think the problem with such an approach is its easy to lose your motivation. So you put off working a day here, a day there, and then 5 years later you are still in development.
At least when you go all in, you get that extra drive to get your project in gear.
And yes the failure/success rate is not talked about, but I would venture a guess that the guys who work on their start ups full time, have a higher success rate(even if its only a few %) than the guys who do it part time between work, going to home depot, and tending to their garden
A "guess" is all that is. If you want to be successful, build something people will love, and then charge money for it. The market does not care how crappy your garden looks.
The fields are littered with the corpses of full-time startups. The world is going to try to kill you in a thousand different ways that you can't predict. Your product plan should focus on building something people will love. Your business plan should focus on keeping yourself alive to build that product. The two things are seperate.
As is a huge bunch of startup advice purveyed via blogs, articles, books and so on. A lot of it seems to even conflict.
Not that it's necessarily bad, just that after a while I get tired of it and wish that there were more data. I actually think that that's a cool aspect of YC that's perhaps overlooked at times: with all the startups going through there, he's getting the chance to look very closely at a lot of different companies and people.
I thought this would be a problem for me, as well; and compounded by the fact that I am the solo founder. Surprisingly, this turned out not to be the case: I can always get a task or two done every evening. It helps that things come to mind throughout the day about how to best complete a given task; I don't have to think about what to do next when I am ready to work.
I realize that a lot of their philosophy runs counter to the already unconventional wisdom here, but so what.
I also realize that we may soon hit 37signals saturation (much like techcrunch saturation) here, but again, so what.
Many of us are in less than optimal situations (money, time, resources, collaborators, etc.), so this is some of the best advice you can get...
"How about you turn your perceived weakenesses into strengths. Embrace your constraints..."
Excellent!
My own example:
I am frustrated that I don't have enough time to spend writing my own code because I still have several consulting gigs. So, instead of asking, "How can I get more time in my week?" I ask, "How can I use what I learn from my clients to cut through the fog on my own software so that I don't need as much time?" That change in framing has really saved me a lot of time.
Sometimes you just gotta change your view by asking a different question. A 37signals post has once again helped me to think outside the quadralateral. Thanks, DHH.