Visit 37signals.com → On Hacker News Apr 2007 – Apr 2024
Tech Industry & Business 104Startups 35Life, Learning & Writing 35Career & Management 33Society, Policy & Culture 28Design & UX 15
Apple’s design dominance over the past decade has been due to industrial design first, software design second. Their hardware designs have inspired a generation. Over those last 10 years their software has gotten better and better too (it’s really damn good now), but it’s been…
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…
One of the easiest ways to shoot down good ideas, interesting policies, or worthwhile experiments is by injecting the assumption that whatever you’re doing needs to last forever and ever. Which means that the concept has to scale from 5 people to 5,000 or from 100,000 users to 100 million. Th…
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…
Today I saw a great special on Fine Living TV called Quit Your Job!. Five little companies were featured to showcase the owner’s decision to leave their daily rat dace of a life behind and dive into the uncertainty of following their dreams. Here’s the kicker: These 5 companies are some…
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…
Don Norman, an author, professor, and partner at the Nielsen Norman Group, read the Wired article about us and wrote a piece asking, “Why is 37signals so arrogant?” Hansson said: “I’m not designing… for other people.” I think that simple phrase speaks volumes.…
A couple of years ago a lot of buzz started in the Ruby community about Erlang, a functional programming language developed by Ericsson originally for use in telecommunications systems. I was intrigued by the talk of fault tolerance and concurrency, two of the cornerstones that Erlang was built on…
Startups can bring new ideas to market. They can give people a chance to change the world on their own terms. They can create something where nothing existed before. There is no doubt that they are exciting things to be a part of. But, as much as the tech world tries to treat them as special, we…
For a while we’ve been exploring switching to WYSIWYG text editing in our products. Up until this point we’ve been using either plain text, manual HTML, or Textile formatting. Depending on who you are it’s either fine or annoying. We want to do a lot better. We’ve looked …
“I’d love to start a company / become a great programmer / write an awesome blog, but there’s just not enough time in the day!” Bullshit. There’s always enough time, you’re just not spending it right. Now that’s some tough love, but I’m sick and ti…
Early retirement is a mirage when you’re physically and mentally capable of doing more. Humans are generally not built to derive sustainable happiness from sipping mojitos on a picturesque island somewhere in the pacific. Once you’ve tasted the sweetness of a dedicated purpose, it’…
A couple of Getting Realish ideas spotted in Best Life magazine: Greg Gianforte is the author of “Bootstrapping Your Business: Start and Grow a Successful Company With Almost No Money.” In Follow Your Dream, he advises throwing out your five-year plan and focusing on building somethi…
Lately I’ve been seeing more speakers hop up on stage at a conference and say “I didn’t prepare anything so I’m just gonna wing it.” Or they’ll let you know that they’re “Sorry about the quality of the slides – I put them together quickly on the…
When designing a UI we usually go right from a quick paper sketch to HTML/CSS. We skip the static Photoshop mockup. Here are a few reasons why we skip photoshop: You can’t click a Photoshop mockup. This is probably the number one reason we skip static mockups. They aren’t real. Pap…
The classic argument for enduring 80 to 100 hour work weeks for years on end — sacrificing relationships, hobbies, and anything else that doesn’t progress the mission — is that at the end of the rainbow lies early retirement. The reward for risking it all on a crazy startup idea. …
Almost two months ago, I decided that I wanted to try working standing up, rather than sitting down. When sitting in my comfortable, reclining office chair, my posture was terrible, my attention span was narrowing rapidly, and I was constantly battling fatigue. After looking around online a bit, it…
You should never hire anyone for something you haven’t first struggled to do on your own. It’ll teach you most of what you need to know to actually interview candidates, it’ll allow you to understand the nature of the work better (do I even need to hire or can we outsource?), and …
A couple weeks ago we launched the new Highrise marketing site. We’re still iterating that design post-launch, and we have a big post brewing about that design process, but today I wanted to share some of the iterations we explored for the new signup chart. The start Here’s where we…
Mattijs asks: I am developing an internet product and I am rapidly approaching the point at which I will need to set a pricing scheme for this product. Problem: I have no idea what to shoot for! I have done some research which shows a wide range of similar products with varying pricing schemes. …
Venture capitalists are glorified gamblers in the Ace-from-Casino sense of the word. They try their best to collect intel on the players, but ultimately still just place bets. Bets that usually fail more often than they succeed. It’s the 1-in-10 blowout payoff that makes sure the piano keeps …
Great apology note from Hulu’s CEO [via DF]: This note, however, is not about the fact that episodes of ’’It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’’ were taken down. Rather, this note is to communicate to our users that we screwed up royally with regards to how we …
Most of the people I know who are money-making-machines got started really early. Lemonade stands, car washes, lawn mowing, baseball card trading. I think the reason they are money-making-machines today is because they started early. They learned the skills of negotiation, pricing, selling, and mar…
Last week we were dragged over the coals — and rightfully so — for failing to communicate clearly regarding a security exploit that was discovered in early August. It turned out that the issue was related to Ruby on Rails. The exploit affected multiple products (ours and others). Aft…