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A year ago we put Sortfolio up for sale. We entertained a variety of offers, met with a few potential suitors in person, and negotiated numbers. Ultimately nothing came together. Then we shelved the process so we could focus all of our efforts on designing and building the new Basecamp. Sort…
Remember way back to, oh, six months ago when champagne was popping and markets were roaring? Back when companies with no or few profits could premiere on the world stage to grand applause by merely converting a dollar into fifty cents? Those were the good times of boom, boom, pow. It’s am…
Every time a young, promising start-up is bought out by a stodgy, old incumbent, the world is flush with congratulations. Congratulations to the team, island mojitos now await them. Congratulations to the venture capitalist, their past nine flops can fade in the background for a week. Congratulatio…
Exit Interview is a Signal vs. Noise series that talks to founders to see what happens after companies get acquired. Webshots Webshots has been acquired multiple times. Webshots Founder Nick Wilder: Webshots has quite a sordid history: we sold it to Excite@Home in 1999, they went bankrupt, w…
I love when people call what we do at 37signals a “lifestyle business” — but probably not for the reasons they think. When the lifestyle card is pulled from its tired deck, it’s usually meant as a pat on top of the head. An “oh, that’s such a pretty drawing, dea…
After fielding over a dozen offers for Sortfolio, we finally came to an agreement this weekend with a couple of entrepreneurs who will be the new owners of Sortfolio. This is big news for our Sortfolio customers. Back in May we said we’d either be selling Sortfolio for $480,000 or retiring…
Verifiable (shut down August 1, 2010) Stuart Roseman shut down Verifiable, a crowdsourced charting and data analysis site, to start SaneBox, a product that automatically identifies important email and separates them in a user’s inbox. Below, he explains how he knew when it was time to pull t…
You can’t say your company is not for sale these days without incredulous stares and doubtful gasps. The big flip has become the holy grail. Worshipped to the point where non-believers are chastised, straight-faced, for refusing to give up their life’s work. See, the new world of …
I was watching a Q&A presentation at a conference a while back. Several questioners said something along these lines: “I was so inspired by what you say that I decided to quit my job and start a new business!” And then the whole room broke out in applause. Seen this sorta thing e…
There are many reasons why someone would want to start a company. There’s the pursuit of wealth, glory, and fame, but above all, I believe most founders are searching for freedom. Freedom to run things the way they see fit, freedom to be the masters of their own domain. But until you have …
Matt asks: In my experience, credit card processing has been one of the major hurdles in starting an online business. Especially recurring/subscription charges. You’ve got PayPal, which seems a little unprofessional (and is a pain in the a*), and an absurd number of 3rd party vendors …
Quick prototypes. Small teams. No bureaucracy. No lengthy documentation. Limited meetings. A Skunk Works approach to design. They were all essential to Clarence (“Kelly”) Johnson’s process for creating some of the most remarkable planes of the past century, including the Lockheed …
We’ve been talking about the basic wonder of putting a price on your product for such a long time that it almost seems trite at this point. I certainly thought that point would have lost propulsion long ago, but I keep being surprised by the contrary. It seems that the web has been so thor…
Facebook sucks you in because everyone you know is using it. You go to eBay to find something because you know someone is selling what you want to buy. Oracle wins in the enterprise because there are tons of experts and plenty of auxiliary software available. All these business rely heavily on the …
On top of making Basecamp, we write books about what we’ve learned running our own business. They’re filled with practical advice you won’t find anywhere else.
When Gruber first linked the TripLog/1040 UI by Stevens Creek, I wasn’t kind either. Bright colors, controls seemingly placed at random. It was the opposite of what designers strive for in our circles. A mess. Soon the Flickr page was a schoolyard of insults. And then something interesting ha…
When it comes to acquisitions, there are only two things worth buying: products and customers. When you buy either, you’re buying a solid stream of revenue. All you have to do is not fuck it up. That’s harder than you think, but the good news is that there is room for error. Fuck it up …
We’ve never had a lot of chargebacks (a chargeback is when a customer calls their credit card company to dispute a charge they don’t recognize), but last year we made a simple change that reduced our chargebacks by 30% as a percentage of sales. I can’t be certain the reduction …
Khoi, who’s consistently one of the best writers on the web, recently took a swipe at enterprise software. Who can blame him? We agree. If you work at a big company and you’ve ever had to do something that should be simple, like file an expense report, make changes to your salary withholdi…
Yesterday, during an interview with Andrew Warner at Mixergy, I spoke about my early work experience bagging groceries, selling shoes, pumping gas, etc. There’s nothing particularly unique about these jobs – they are common jobs. But they taught me some important lessons about people, h…
Startup mythology demands that to create something great, you need superhuman sacrifices. You need to work for no pay, you need to put in 120 hours/week, you need to preferably sleep under the desk and live off pizza as a sole form of nutrient. As a result, you need to abandon your family and risk …
Alright, the big day is finally here! REWORK is now available in stores. You can order the US version online from the following booksellers: Amazon.com Barnes & Noble Borders Indie Bound 800 CEO READ International versions are either out already or coming so…
How do you hire a programmer if you’re not one yourself? Some things to look for… 1. How opinionated are they? Ask them about a juicy programming topic (e.g. Ruby or Python?). The tone and reasoning of the answer will reveal a lot. In our recent podcast on programming, Jeff said, &#…
Aesthetics have a bad rap in geek circles. CmdrTaco infamously slammed the original iPod with “No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame”. In other words, it’s all about the features and the functionality. If you don’t do more than the other guy, you’re useless. I don…
Some have doubted our advice that you should hold on to your day job and start something on the side. They argue building a business requires such persistent effort that you need to devote all your time to it to do it right. And it’s true that building a business requires plenty of time an…
When 37signals first started out, we didn’t make products. We did client work. From the beginning, we allotted plenty of time for side projects. Things that would get us attention (eNormicom), experiments with new ways of selling our services (37express), ways to show off our design thinki…
The media is biased towards stories that want to be told. This is especially true about the media covering the web world. It’s much easier to write a story about Facebook, Google, Youtube, or any of the other limelight stories where much of the juicy details are willingly shared. We have s…
Sequoia Capital’s “R.I.P. Good Times” deck made the rounds on the web last week. It’s Sequoia’s take on what happened with the economy and what their portfolio companies should do to weather the storm. Sequoia Capital on startups and the economic downturnView SlideSh…