Kimberly (00:00):
Welcome to REWORK, a podcast by 37signals about the better way to work and run your business. I’m Kimberly, joined by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, co-founders of 37signals. This week we’re going to talk a little bit about how we are interacting with customers and showing off our own product. Jason, I know you have been doing some live sessions with customers along with me and getting right up in there in our help queues and all of those things. Let’s talk about that.

Jason (00:26):
Yeah, it’s been really fun. I mean, we’re doing this thing kind of every week since we launched, not quite every week, but I think we skipped one or two where we’re announcing a live Zoom in the product with 500 slots for people to sign up. And the first few weeks we kind of oversold them. We were doing two in a week and they were all filling up. And now we’re about, I think we have about 360 signed up for the next one that’s coming up tomorrow. Probably get about 400 people to sign up and then maybe, I don’t know, about half of those actually show up, maybe a bit more. And it’s great because what we just do is we basically put our Basecamp account up on the screen for all these people and say, what do you want to know? Also, what don’t you like about the changes we’ve made for those who’ve come from a previous version? And there’s people who are brand new like, “What do you mean changes? This is amazing.”

(01:06):
Or, “I’m confused by this,” or whatever. And we just let the audience kind of guide the path and we just do these live demos. And we usually go for about 90 minutes and answer any question, everything’s on the table. And it’s really quite fun. What’s really also fun is the first thing we do is we ask everyone, where are you from? And people are coming from all over the world and it’s just really kind of a fun thing to do. And it’s like, we should be doing this all the time. And I’m like, I should be doing this all the time. This is actually, first of all, incredibly fun to show off your product. It’s also nice to show people things they didn’t know. It’s also cool to have someone be upset about something that they didn’t know how to do and then show them how it works or to maybe sometimes compare the way it used to be because there’s a degree of comfort and familiarity with certain things the way they were.

(01:50):
And when we change, people are like, ugh. Let me show you actually the better way to do this now that you could do this and here’s what you could do you couldn’t do before. And it’s fun. I’m finding it really one of the most fun things to do at this stage, especially in my career, basically, is to be really proud of a product and just spend all day showing people how it works. That’s kind of a great job actually. And I like to transfer the enthusiasm and the insights. And I also feel like we have this product which is exceptionally good, that can kind of do pretty much everything someone wants it to do, even if it’s not totally obvious on the surface because it’s so flexible and capable and still straightforward that I just want to show it to people. I literally would just love to show people things all day long if I could, if there’s an audience for it.

(02:31):
And so anyway, we’re doing this weekly. And Kimberly, you’ve been a huge help because you kind of moderate and draw out the right questions and rephrase things and it’s great fun. And I actually want to kind of do a live stream on X and LinkedIn and we haven’t kind of gotten around to that yet, but we’re doing these more structured ones right now.

David (02:48):
I think what’s nice about this sort of setup is it’s straight out of, again, Kathy Sierra’s playbook, you can either outteach or outspend your competition. We’re not going to be outspending any of our competition on banner ads or whatever, but I guarantee you that Jason can outteach anyone when it comes to showing you how to use product management software like Basecamp. And that is such a huge value of any product. It’s not just about what can the thing do? It’s also how can I use the thing to do what I need to do and maybe even do more than what I thought I just needed to do but want to do? How can I become better? I mean, the best products, the best services, they don’t just fulfill the needs that you have. They take you another step above. They teach you something more and deeper about how to work.

(03:39):
I mean, what is this podcast? What are our books? What are all our blog posts about? They’re about teaching you a better way to work. And when we do that in the context of Basecamp, all of it comes together. The reason Basecamp works the way it does is because we have spent three decades thinking about how to work, how to collaborate, especially when you’re dealing with people who are not in the same place or in the same time zones, asynchronous, all other stuff. And we’ve baked all of that into the product itself, but how to unlock that still requires a little bit of knowledge. It requires a little bit of nudging. And when you can have someone like Jason show you through all of that, you learn not just the product, but you also learn the way.

Jason (04:20):
Yeah, that’s actually a great point. One of the things I think I enjoy about this the most is not only showing the product and being proud of it, and there’s not a screen I don’t want to show. I’m very proud of the whole thing. It’s really, really good. But it’s also to show the philosophy behind how we work and how we use it. Sometimes people ask questions like, “How does this team know when this is happening? This team knows when this is happening. How do you coordinate all this stuff?” And I’m generally like, “We don’t coordinate all this stuff that way. We do it a different way.” We had this thing called What Works and every day people share what they’ve been working on. And we have separate projects for some of these things and teams have their own thing. And you can show the level of flexibility and you can see in the audience, people are going, “Oh, I didn’t know you could do that.

(05:00):
I never even thought about working that way. I thought everything had to be tied to this. And when something’s finished in GitHub, it has to send something back.” It’s like, no, you can leave that stuff here and you can do this stuff here and the teams are here. And one of the other revelations that we get to share is that we have programmers and designers working in the same project, on the same to-do lists that they make themselves. That’s kind of a big surprise to most people. Most people think, well, the programmers use their own thing over here and designers use their own thing over here. Marketing has their own thing over here. And everyone’s got separate places where they’re doing these things and then someone else’s job is to bring it all together. And I’m like, no, no, the team works in the same place on the same list of work and they comment on the same things together.

(05:40):
There’s not one list of programming things and one list of design things. It’s like a list of shared responsibilities to get the same thing done. And that simple thing, which is simple for us and common for us is like a revelation, total mind explosion for a lot of people. They’ve never seen people work that way. I actually showed my doctor recently Basecamp because they use Monday, Google Docs, Slack and something else. And I was just talking to him about it and he’s like, I’m like, “You should just see Basecamp.” So I showed him Basecamp and he was just completely blown. He’s actually like, this would be impossible for us to use because... the way I see you guys working seems so functional. We seem so completely dysfunctional. We’ve got stuff in five places and we think that’s normal. We’re missing things all the time and we think that’s normal.

(06:28):
We’re spending tens of thousands of dollars a month on software and we think that’s normal. I didn’t even realize that you don’t have to do these things. And wow, how much better would it be to have a single activity feed that has all the stuff that’s happening across all the different segments of the business, all in one place that I can just watch and filter down by person and kind? This is amazing. He was just blown away by, not the product as much as just how we just run our business and how we work together as teams. And of course the product allows for that. So that’s just a thrill. Now they’re not going to switch probably because it’s just, I’m not even pitching them to switch. It was just fun to show them because then something’s planted in their minds like, wow, we could work differently.

(07:07):
And that’s an exciting thing too. That’s a great thing to bring to the world. So anyway, I find these demos to be the only way to really do that. You can’t do this on a marketing page. You can’t write an article about this kind of thing. You can, but it doesn’t reach people in the same way. You can’t make a polished marketing video about this. These are experiences you have to share with people in real time. The other thing is we don’t record these sessions. Well, we do, but we don’t share the sessions. And I think it’s really important to make things live. This happens, you show up and you’re part of something and you get to this demo and you get this one-on-one interaction, and it’s much different than watching a recorded session. So we tend to always just do these live and that’s it.

David (07:47):
Yeah, I think what’s funny about this way of showing something off is that you get to reveal so many things about how you work that you would never have articulated if you sat to write it down because it just doesn’t strike you as interesting. Or maybe you don’t even notice, so much of this is just tacit knowledge about how these processes work. And the only way, actually, to communicate it is to show it because you can’t even capture it in a form that could be presented as an article or write-up or even a video. It has to come out organically. And I remember reading about this with university teachers and how the best of them, they haven’t prepared the entire lesson by the time they show up for the class. A lot of it has to happen in that spontaneous moment, that interaction with an audience when you have a general idea of what you want to show, but whatever magic comes out.

(08:44):
And I’ve had the same thing actually whenever I prepare keynote talks or otherwise that if I try to get too specific about what I want to say in advance, it sounds stilted. I’m not saying anything new. So much of that magic comes out when you haven’t prepared it fully, when you’re just showing things off your thoughts in the moment as they gel. The other thing I’d say is what I find so delightful about pair programming, which is not a practice we do a whole lot of at 37signals, but when we occasionally do, it’s usually because I want to solve some specific problem with someone and we get together on a shared computer. But I always pick up so much about how someone works. Oh, I didn’t know you have this tool. How does that work? Oh yeah, I don’t know. I just installed that. It would never have come up for someone to share that.

(09:29):
But when you get to sit next to them as they drive their computer, holy shit, you just learn so much. I’ve picked up so many little tricks and tools and ways of using mechanisms I already thought I understood in a new way. And it’s just such a delight. I think such an acceleration of learning in the workplace and the world in general would happen if you could just get to sit sidecar on people doing normal work, going through their processes, going through their systems, and you would pick up so much that they would never have thought to capture in a lesson. But you will pick it up if you ride along.

Jason (10:06):
It’s kind of like if you’re probably watching a Twitch stream or something for gaming, you’re like, oh my god, there’s a technique. What? What? That kind of stuff. Yeah, I’ve often thought that would be, I mean, it sounds boring to watch someone use, like back in the day, Photoshop or Figma today or whatever. But just to be able to, if everyone had a camera right on their shoulder or overhead or whatever, and you can just see them working throughout their day, you’re like, oh, that’s how you clean up that scratch on a photograph or something. Oh, I had no idea that’s how you do it. And so we’re trying to do it with Basecamp and that yeah, it has to-dos and has messages and has chat and has a Kanban and has a place to share files and a schedule and all these basic tools. But there’s more to it than just the tools.

(10:48):
And it’s not only how you use the tools, but it’s how you think about work and how you think about separating concerns or bringing things together and how you don’t have too many integrations. These are the things that you can’t really get across in marketing. These are the things you can only get across by having an experience or seeing someone else show you how they do something. There’s no other way to communicate that. There’s just no other way to do it. I think the other thing that’s really nice about this is going in and letting the audience drive where we’re going with it and not being afraid to take any question and having an answer for everything that you want to know about. Oh yeah, let me show you that. Let me show you this. Let me show you that. And it’s just fun. So anyway, I really enjoy doing it and I want to make it a regular, I mean, we’re making it a regular thing, but I like to figure out ways to make it even more regular if we can.

Kimberly (11:31):
I mean, I think they’re so fun, to be honest. And honestly, I think it’s easier to talk about the product live, just off the top of your head than...

Jason (11:38):
It is.

Kimberly (11:38):
... to record a video about it, in my opinion.

Jason (11:41):
Yeah. And that’s what you do. You record videos and your videos are amazing.

Kimberly (11:45):
Well thank you.

Jason (11:45):
But there’s also this thing that’s like...

Kimberly (11:47):
But it’s so much easier to just talk about it.

Jason (11:50):
Yeah. Well, you think about when you’re recording a video that’s canonical, it’s like this is the thing. You want to polish it to this place where at some point it doesn’t feel as natural as just talking about it. And I think it’s good to have both of those things. It’s nice to have a library of polished, here’s exactly how you do these things, because some people really respond to that. And then others just want to riff live and like, “Here, I have a question. Well, let me show you.” It’s always like, let me show you. It’s not really, let me tell you. It’s let me show you. And I think these show and tells are just hugely valuable.

David (12:21):
And I think one of the things that is especially magical about these shows and tells is that they reveal negative space. They reveal all the things we’re not doing. This was actually my first major presentation on Rails literally 20 years ago, was a series of look at all the things I’m not doing. Look at all the toil that’s not there. Look at all the processes that are not there. Look at all the ways of linking seven different systems together that we don’t use. And I think that’s so valuable, that you spark people’s imagination about they thought, as Jason said with the example of the doctor, that this is how you had to do things. You’re supposed to do it in this way. You’re supposed to link all these systems together. You’re supposed to search a million different ways to find what you’re looking for. No, you don’t actually have to do that.

(13:11):
So there’s also a form of permission giving when you’re demonstrating something with all this negative space that has just carved out huge chunks of work that people take for granted and they just assume that everyone, everywhere is doing. And suddenly you’re showing, oh, you’re writing like that? How does that work? And those seeds often don’t sprout right away, but they may three weeks from now when someone gets extra annoyed by the cumbersome nature of whatever they’ve constructed with seven different systems, they’d go like, do you know what? No, we don’t have to live like this.

Kimberly (13:48):
I also think what’s been interesting about, Jason, being part of these lives where you’re doing most of the demonstrating is there’ve been a couple times where you’ve been showing something and been like, oh, yeah, we should add that. Or, that doesn’t look right. Where it’s been an opportunity to make fixes in the product that you might not have noticed just going about your daily business, but you’re answering someone’s question that gets you to a screen you’re maybe not on every day.

Jason (14:10):
It’s actually a great point. I notice more things that aren’t quite right when I’m showing someone something than I do when I’m using it myself. There’s a different part of your brain. You can look past the things that are annoying you because you’re just doing the thing for yourself. But when you have to do that live for someone else and you’re like, eh, that was weird. Or, I don’t like this state. Or, that seems harder than it should have been to find that thing or do that whatever. Or you know what? That wasn’t obvious enough. You just notice those things and you notice those things in demos. Again, I don’t know exactly why, but I think it’s because there’s an extra level of I’m showing this to someone else and I’m putting myself in their shoes as to thinking, what is it like for them to see this for the first time?

(14:46):
If I saw this for the first time, I’d be like, that’s kind of weird. There’s something different about it. You’re less forgiving. And I think that’s a really healthy thing to do. I’ve seen when other CEOs demo their products and they clearly don’t know how to use the product. It’s so obvious and it’s really awkward. And I think it’s a real shame. It’s a real shame when the founder or CEO, whatever the position is, but when someone’s trying to use their thing and they clearly don’t know what they’re doing, it also just keeps you sharp. I have to look at every corner of the product. Actually, someone wrote me this morning, they wanted to upgrade early. They’re using a free version and they wanted to upgrade early. And I actually didn’t know, because I haven’t upgraded my Basecamp account like ever. Where do you do that actually?

(15:28):
I mean, we have notices that show up, but I actually can’t see the notices because they’re not in my account. So I was like, do they show up immediately or do they show up...? So I had to go figure this out. When do they show up? And if I tell someone to look for something, if it’s not there, it’s going to look bad too, and that’s going to be confusing. So there’s always these corners of your product and experiences that you don’t see. We talked about this with onboarding. I don’t know if it was last couple episodes ago or something. You don’t see that very often. And so it’s very easy for that to drift far away from what the experience that you want to give is, and you don’t see it, so you don’t see it enough. So I think this also keeps me sharp and helps me make sure I’m seeing every corner of the product. People ask for things I don’t use. I don’t use to-dos that much anymore. I’m using card tables more often. So sometimes people ask a question about to-dos and I have to go revisit to-dos and figure out how to do that again. And that’s just a healthy thing.

Kimberly (16:16):
And then Jason, you also mentioned using our own account when you’re doing these demos, which could be a little scary. Tell us a little bit about A, why you decide to do that, and B, are there things that you’re worried people are going to see?

Jason (16:28):
I’m conscious of I don’t show the accounting project or some financial things or some people ops stuff that’s really truly private. Other than that, everything’s fair game. I’ll show the What Works project, which is basically where people write up what they’re working on and what our teams are doing. And so sometimes people get a peek as to things that we’re doing that we haven’t done yet that we may or may not deliver. But I don’t want to run scared. Who cares? So they see some stuff. And sometimes I’ll say, “You’re going to see some things that we’re working on that may or may not ship. These are not promises.” Sometimes I’ll show people things that are on a beta, for example, that like, “Hey, we’re exploring this thing. I don’t know. I just thought you might want to get a peek at how we work.” And so I’ll show them something we’re exploring and thinking about.

(17:09):
And we did that before we made a few other changes recently with the home screen and Basecamp and the activity screen. I showed that stuff off before it launched and that was sort of fun to show. But generally, I’m not afraid of that. And if someone sees something they shouldn’t see, it’s not the end of the world. That’s the other thing. It’s not the end of the world. And to put up all these guardrails to prevent myself from showing things, then I’m nervous. I don’t want to be nervous about it. Whatever, who cares, doesn’t even matter. Another reason we don’t share the recordings because sometimes maybe 180 people will see something they shouldn’t have seen and that’s fine. We just move on and we just move on from that and it’s not a big deal. So that’s my general take on it.

Kimberly (17:42):
Okay. And then my last question for you, I feel like being able to do this live and walking through your product is a skill. Is this a skill you feel like you’ve developed over time, you’ve always had? Is it something someone can learn? I feel like not everyone would feel as confident to go live, hit the record button, and be able to talk freely off the top of their head while explaining their product.

Jason (18:04):
Yeah, I don’t know. I just want to do it. I’m proud of the product. So part of it is I’m proud to show the thing off and happy to take any question about it that there is. And I think if I was afraid of it, if I didn’t know it, if I was afraid of it, I was afraid of my customers, which a lot of companies are, they’re afraid of their customers. Literally, they’re afraid of them. They’re afraid someone’s going to complain out loud. They’re afraid someone’s going to ask them to do something that the product can’t do. They’re afraid of whatever. You shouldn’t be afraid of anybody. Yeah, that’s a good point. Sometimes people bring up requests or like, “I wish I could do this or I wish I could do that.” I’m like, “Yeah, I wish I could do that too. That’s a great point.

(18:36):
Let me put that down.” Not like, “Oh my God, we failed because we didn’t have the thing they wanted.” No, thank you for bringing that up. And by the way, yeah, I noticed that we had a little bug here. We should fix that. Why would I be afraid of those moments? And who comes away from that going, “This company sucks!” Rather they come away from that going, “Wow, they’re really on top of this and they’re listening. And I appreciate that the person who owns the place knows what they’re doing and what’s going on.” Which is why David and I put our email addresses up everywhere and people can reach out to us. You can’t do that with most companies. Most companies, you’ll write someone, you’ll never hear from them or it’ll be forwarded to someone else. And occasionally we’ll forward an email that comes in.

(19:12):
I’ll get an email that comes into me that’s really an account related thing that should be handled by somebody else and I’ll forward it to them. But for the most part, I’m answering all these things myself as David probably is when he gets emails from customers and we should be accessible. We should be that kind of company. Because I do think a lot of the times people have to choose... Look, a lot of software can do a lot of things and can probably solve most people’s issues, but you also have to choose what kind of company you want to do business with. And so we want to make sure that we stand out there as a company that you’d want to do business with, that you feel like you can reach out to, that you feel like we’re real people here, that we’re not this corporate machine that is just like every other corporate machine, that we are a different group. And whether or not that’s your speed is up to you, but we want to make sure that it’s clear that we are who we are and come talk to us whenever you want.

David (19:56):
In the watch world, there’s this great saying, I think Jason, you actually told me this, buy the seller. That so much of commerce is about finding people you want to buy from. You could buy from a bunch of different people. Some products are commodities and it doesn’t matter at all, and maybe you just focus on price. But even in those cases, I find that when you have some modicum of these loose connections with the people who are selling, it’s just more interesting. It’s more interesting to be part of commerce when you feel like, oh, I really actually like this company. It gives me great joy to buy from them that is beyond just the product itself. Now the product also has to be good of course, but there’s a lot of good products and some good products are made by companies I don’t care for at all really, and I’m less inclined to buy for them.

(20:42):
So embracing that notion of buy the seller, I think is just a way to have more fun being a consumer. I also think that this way of operating is what’s beneath what’s been labeled sort of authentic, even though that’s become this sort of brand notion that actually as soon as it becomes that, it becomes inauthentic. Just show up, be yourself, be a human, be able to recognize that your product isn’t perfect, but that you’re still proud of it, that you put a bunch of work into it, but you’re not done, that you’re really happy to show it off, but maybe you don’t know everything. That combination is just really a human thing. And that’s actually quite difficult to cultivate online because it’s not like you just pop into a store and you’re face-to-face with someone and you pick up all these other things. You have to work a little extra to do it.

(21:33):
And this is one of those formats of doing it. The email thing is another great example. I mean, I do get a ton of email and sometimes I let it sort of stack up in my reply later and then I’ll just do 40 emails in one go. And having that relation, sometimes it’s two lines back and sometimes it’s five paragraphs, is a key part of feeling like I’m not just selling into some void. I have some connection to customers who are actually buying it and they can have some connection in return. And together we just have fun with capitalism.

Jason (22:04):
I’ll give you another quick example. I just got an email yesterday from somebody who’s leaving Basecamp after 18 years and they need some other things and whatever. But the guy emailed me and he just said, “Hey, we’ve been with you for 18 years and I wanted to say thank you. We’re moving over....” He told me what they’re moving to and why. And I go, “I got it. Totally understand. We’re always here if you ever want to switch back or whatever. Thanks for your 18 years and the whole thing.” But I feel like somewhere along the way, he must have felt that we’re the kind of company that he could email and say goodbye to, which is a really wonderful thing to feel that we built a business where someone feels like they want to tell us that we’re leaving, not in a complaining way and in a fully honest way, but just, “Hey, thank you for 18 years of building a great product that we enjoyed.

(22:52):
We’re moving on for these reasons and thank you.” And so I wrote him back, of course, thank you and the whole thing. And to me, that’s what it’s all about in the end, is to build a business where people feel like they could even reach out and there’s someone on the other side that they’re going to be able to reach and talk to and say thank you or goodbye or hello to. That’s just a nice thing. I don’t know, isn’t it?

Kimberly (23:10):
That’s so nice.

Jason (23:11):
Shouldn’t we wish that for all interactions?

Kimberly (23:13):
Yeah.

David (23:14):
And I think if anything, there’s going to be more of a premium on that now that AI is starting to eat all sorts of part of the sales chain, the support chain, all these interactions you’re going to have with a company. There’s a lot of people who are very eager to stick AI in front of it. And it works to some definition of works in a lot of cases. Sometimes you can get an answer at 3:00 AM in the morning because they’re an AI that knows things. But I also think we’re going to switch over to feeling that when you can reach a human, that there’s a sense of luxury about it. Now, not a human that doesn’t know anything, that has only worked at the company for a week because there’s constant churn. But on our support team, for example, we have a bunch of people who’ve just been here for years and years and years and have talked to so many different customers who use Basecamp in all sorts of different ways, who can spot the ways that like, oh, you’re probably kind of like this customer I helped last week and just create a connection.

(24:06):
And as excited as I am about AI, I have that same instinct sometimes. It’s kind of like you reach one of these phone trees and you just try to hammer zero and I just fucking get a human. I get this whenever I call FedEx and whatever. I know the system could probably kind of answer me, but I want to talk to a human. I get the same thing with calling about travel. Especially when there’s a bit of a stressful situation. Oh shit, my flight is in, I don’t know, four hours and I need to make a change and maybe I could do it myself. I want to talk to a human because I want to trust that someone’s seen my problem and can actually fix it. And I find whenever I reach a human who actually knows what the fuck is going on, which is not that often, but when I do, I go like, damn.

(24:51):
I’ve had this Delta, for example, as this one hotline where, I don’t know, because I’ve got the status or whatever, you call and in 15 seconds of listening to that person on the other line, I know this person knows what’s what. I know this person can fix things, can help things. And there’s just such a reassurance. Something is not quite right. And when it comes to travel or your data on a system or something else, you really want to know that someone, it’s in good hands. And that experience, nothing is creating a greater sense of, I want to be with this company than having a moment like that. There was something high stress, high anxiety. There’s a human who could solve it, make it all right. Now I feel like, oh, this is the company I just want to stick with.

Kimberly (25:39):
Okay. Well, we’re going to wrap it up there. REWORK is a production of 37signals. You can find show notes and transcripts on our website at 37signals.com/podcast. Full video episodes are on YouTube. And if you have a question for Jason or David about a better way to work and run your business, leave us a video question. You can do that at 37signals.com/podcastquestion or send us an email to rework@37signals.com.