Interview: Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson of 37signals

By Chris Karr in Miscellaneous on Feb 28, 2006 3:34PM

Within the last two years, the small Chicago Internet company 37signals has quickly gone from being one of the many web site builders to one of the more influential members of a collection of companies managed to grow and thrive in the post Dot-Com era. With their collection of web applications that enhance personal and small business productivity, they are one of the current standards bearers of the "less is more" school of thought among application developers. Their open source product, Ruby on Rails, has exploded in usage and mindshare among aspiring coders looking to build the next generation of web sites and applications. (Apple's even jumped on the wagon.) And finally, their Signal v. Noise weblog is a popular destination for those chatting about design and usability in the web space and beyond.

Last week, we trekked out to their offices west of the Loop to chat a bit.

Chicagoist: Who is 37signals?

Jason Fried: There's seven of us. There's five in Chicago, one of us in Utah, and one of us in New York. We are four programmers and three designers and we build web-based applications. We used to do website design - that's how we started in 1999 - and in 2004, we shifted over into web-based applications. Basecamp was our first product. We built Basecamp because we needed it for our own work and we started selling it when other people saw it and wanted to use it too. We really didn't know what we were doing, we just put it out there to see what happened. It turned out to be the right decision and we've built four other products since then.

(You know the drill. You know, the one below the fold...)

Chicagoist: Tell us a bit about these products.

Jason: Basecamp is our flagship product. It's a web-based project management tool. Project management and project collaboration. We're calling it collaboration now because management has this stigma of charts and graphs and reports, and Basecamp isn't about that at all. It's about communication. We feel that project management isn't about charts and graphs and numbers - it's about communication. So, collaboration sounds better than management. It's used by hundreds of thousands of people around the world in many countries. It's pretty cool, actually.

So, we built that first - that was 2004, we launched in Feburary. Our next product was Ta-Da List, which is a very dead-simple to-do list maker. You can't do anything more than the bare necessities - to-do's. You can share the lists. We launched that in January of 2005. The idea behind that was to-do's were such a popular part of Basecamp that we pulled the to-do functionality out and simplified it some more and made it a product that was completely free. It's a very useful tool, but it's also an ad for Basecamp and Backpack, our next product.

Backpack is a slimmed-down version of Basecamp - more for personal use. It has some business uses as well, but it's a basic tool - to-do lists, notes, files, and pictures. It lets you group all this information together on a single page. Let's say that I'm making a trip to San Francisco. I can make a list of things to do there, my airline itinerary, my hotel reservations, a map of stuff I want to do when I'm there. It's a lot of life's loose ends - kind of tied together on one page. That was in June of '05.

Then we launched Writeboard, which is a collaborative text editor. You can do collaborative stories or articles, or just write on your own. It keeps all the versions of the things that you've done and you can compare them. That's totally free as well. And we just launched Campfire last week. Campfire is a web-based chat tool. It's like instant messaging, but web-based. There's no need to worry about different clients. And since it's web-based, you don't need to worry about software - it all happens at a specific URL. Every chat has it's own URL so you can e-mail that URL, post it in a Basecamp project, put it on a weblog, or whatever. Everyone can chat in real-time, with group chat. You can upload files and images in real-time. It's a really nice collaboration tool for the times when you need to get stuff done right now instead of posting a message and waiting for comments. You can just get in there and talk about it right now.

Chicagoist: In a recent Signal v. Noise blog post, you talked about leaving out the features that "don't matter". Can you tell us how that principle manifests itself in your work?

Jason: All of our products are about doing a few simple things well and leaving out the rest. We like to solve the easy fifty to eighty percent of people's problems and forget about the rest. You'll never make those people happy, you'll never totally nail that solution. Everyone always needs something a bit different and we don't go after that. We solve the simple problems and let our competitors rip out their hair solving the rest.

The challenge, of course, is figuring out what's simple and what's just enough. Our feeling is that it's better to err on the side of doing less. You can always add something later, but it's hard to rip something out that people are using than it is to just add it later. It's more of an art than a science. It's like, "What's your gut feeling? Is this really necessary?" We ask if this changes a user's behavior or is it just nice to have? Or is it necessary to have? We go through that process using our own products as we build them we get a good feeling for what's necessary and what isn't. Of course, everyone has their own opinions of what's necessary. We build the tools and make those decisions up front. We listen to what people say and maybe make changes as time goes on. But I think it's up to us at first to innovate on behalf of our customers and make decisions on behalf of them so they don't have to make them on their own. They just want something that works and we figure out what are the most common features people need - like the most intelligent defaults so they don't have to worry about setting things up on their own.

Chicagoist: After going through the exercise of determining what matters, do you worry about copycats who say, "Let's let them do all the thinking. We'll just copy what they make and sell it cheaper?"

Jason: That's always the problem. Potentially. Our feeling on none of this is rocket science to begin with. Basecamp's a pretty simple tool, Backpack's a pretty simple tool. We want to own the low end. We want to own the simple end. So, if people want to beat us, they're not going to do what we do, because our prices are pretty low to begin with. So, to beat us or match us, they're going to try and do more than what we're doing and we think that when they do that, they'll run into the situation where they have a bloated product - a kitchen sink product, we call it - with all this bloated stuff. Fine - they can have that, because that's not the market we're after.

Someone could copy what we're doing, but I think the difference is in execution. These ideas are not unique - it's how you execute the ideas. It's how you present the ideas - how you write about the ideas. It's in the interface, not the technology. It's how you do the experience that matters and I think that it's very hard to copy an experience to the level of detail that we try to add to our products. Someone could copy that initially, but as they add features, they won't know why decisions were made. They only know how to copy, but when it comes time to make decisions in the future, they move farther from the experience.

And if someone truly goes out and copies us and calls the product something like "Tent" instead of "Basecamp" and it's a product management tool, we would take action on that because that's plagiarism essentially. I think that the interesting thing about this stuff is that everyone seems to think that stuff on the web should be free. That's fine, but you can't steal from other people if they don't give you permission to use their stuff. It's just like a writer - if you copy someone's book, that's plagiarism. In my opinion, if you copy someone's interface, that's plagiarism as well. And I think that needs to be out there a bit more because a lot of people think that it's okay to copy people's interface because "it's just web design". A book is just writing - it's the same words - it's just the same old words. They're in a certain order and mean a certain thing. We think the same applies to interfaces and that would be plagiarism as well.

I hope that people pay more attention to that and don't just think that they can take a look and feel because it's easy to copy the source. They should think that's stealing.

Chicagoist: 37signals has made a splash in the open source community with Ruby on Rails - how has that worked out for you?

David Heinemeier Hansson: I think that it's worked out extremely well. Whenever Ruby on Rails is mentioned, they usually mention 37signals or one of our products as the kind of applications that can be built with Rails. It has a nice flow both ways. People find out about 37signals when they're looking at Rails and some people find out about Rails when they're looking at our site and products. They really benefit each other.

But I think that's just a PR boost. On the technical side of things, it's a huge benefit for us because we have hundreds of people around the world who bring to it technical additions that we would otherwise have to do ourselves. We're getting a ton of work done by having other people help us. It's also a commons, so we also contribute - we are by far the largest contributors - but we would have to do that code anyways. We don't lose anything by giving it away. 37signals is not a tech shop. We don't make money selling Ruby on Rails. We wouldn't want to be in that business. So it makes no sense for us to keep that code to ourselves. It has no value just lying on our hard drives, whereas it has a lot of value out there as open source because there's a ton or people using it and testing it. Some people take what we contribute and extend it and contribute it back. That's really the basic open source success story.

I think that's the most successful kind of application of open source for firms like us where the product is not the open source infrastructure. The infrastructure is something that we need to make our projects - true - but it's not part of our business. I think that's a way that a lot of small companies can help each other by contributing to a shared commons and thereby lifting up all those to compete against Microsoft, Sun, IBM, or whoever. That's what I think is the primary success of Ruby on Rails - the vast majority of companies that use Ruby on Rails are companies like ourselves. Small teams and small shops that are not in a position to pay for thousands of dollars in licensing fees for Microsoft tools or have some salesperson from Oracle gauge how much you can pay for a database. These open source tools help small shops like us get off the ground. It's also a nice way to pay back for all the open source stuff we use. In addition to Rails, we use Ruby the language, the MySQL database, FreeBSD - all open source. Our entire tech stack is open source. It takes a particularly selfish person to not want to give back after using all those parts.

Chicagoist: How has it been running a small tech company in Chicago?

Jason: I think it's been pretty good. I like not being in the heat of the coasts - the pressure, and the BS. It's nice to be able and hide in Chicago. I'm from here, so I like it anyways. It's nice to not to have to deal with that. For us finding talent, we're not opposed to hiring people anywhere. David is from Denmark. For the first couple years, he was still in Denmark. He just came in on a visa. So, I think you should hire the best people you can - no matter where they are. I know a lot of companies have a hard time thinking of Chicago because they can't find the talent and the engineers. For us, that doesn't matter or impact us much. I do like not having to deal with the pressures of "the scene" in some of these other cities. I think that wears off and you need to raise a bunch of money and have a nice office because it's something you're expected to do because your friend who works in another company has that. It's nice to hide out and stay under the radar.

We've gotten some national press, but Chicago hasn't paid that much attention to us. The Sun-Times wrote a really nice article about us. But it's been hard for some reason to get press in Chicago. I think that if we were on the West Coast or in New York, we would have gotten a lot more press. Chicago, for some reason, doesn't like to talk about small companies. Everyone like to write about the Motorola's and the Boeing's. But I like it here - it's livable. People actually live here. If I were in San Francisco or New York, I'd be in a small miserable apartment. Here we can have a nice place.

If you're like us and have a monster to-do list and too few hours to do much about it, check out these guys' work. If you're involved in creating web apps of your own, Signal v. Noise is a must-read and we hear that Rails will help you out of the seventh circle of "enterprise" software development hell. We've been a big fan of 37signals for some time already and we're eagerly awaiting to see what these guys pull out of their hat next.