Building in Public

Welcome to Rework, a podcast by 37signals about the better way to work and run your business. I'm Kimberly Rhodes from the 37signals team, joined by the co-founder and CEO, Jason Freed. This week, we're going to talk a little bit about building things in public. Jason's been sharing a little bit about our new product coming, Fizzy, and doing some demos online and showing it in the process of being built. So I thought we'd talk a little bit about that. I don't think everyone...

is doing that, showing things before they're done. So let's dive into it a little bit. Jason, let's kind of talk through the history. I remember... Back when Hay first started, you were doing this a little bit, showing things in advance. Is this something you've always done? Tell me kind of where this started.

Yeah, we've actually been doing this since the beginning. So we did this for Basecamp, the original version of Basecamp as well. And then future versions of Basecamp as well. But back then it was not videos, just blog posts. So we would kind of share some stuff that was coming or like... I think we did maybe about six weeks prior to launching Basecamp, we started really revealing some of the features that were going to be there. We had a blog at the time, so it was a small audience.

We don't even know, 1,500 people. We're talking like Basecamp classic days, like the original. Yeah, way back. We would write up these blog posts, just sharing some of the features and some of the ideas behind it to sort of build some anticipation and excitement.

So when we launched it, we just had people who were already like eager to get it. Because whenever you share something early, usually someone's like, oh, can I get that? Or how do I get that? And so you just build this. It's no different than a trailer for a movie, you know?

Yeah. This is sort of the model we follow, which is like the trailer model, essentially. And even some movies have like three or four trailers prior to actually releasing the movie. So we did the same thing we've been doing ever since. Now I'm doing it with video. And now we're doing it a bit earlier than we normally would. But I feel comfortable with that because Fizzy will be launched in a reasonable amount of time.

So I can't tell you when, cause we don't know exactly, but it's not like it's years away or something like that. You know, we're talking about months. So months is fine. It's fine to begin to share things early. And the other thing I wanted to do this time was to share work in progress.

And actually like on a weekly or every two week basis, like show just what we finished this past week, you know, like what changed this last week. So it's not about like necessarily highlighting new features every time. But actually like, so this got better and this got better and we got rid of this and we tweaked the way this worked. And now this has two options instead of one, just to show what it's really like, you know, to build something from scratch. Okay. And.

I'm sure you're getting feedback on those. These videos are posted on X, by the way, for those of you who haven't seen them, I'll link to them. Oh, and LinkedIn. Okay. And I'll link to those in the show notes. Yeah. LinkedIn is a 15 minute window. So like if the video is not less than 15, you can't share it.

Some of these go longer so they don't post there. And you're getting feedback on these from viewers. Yeah. Tell me about that. Are you listening to the feedback? Are you ignoring the feedback? How does that work? I mean.

we're not making changes because of what people say, because what they say is what they've seen and they've only seen a small sliver, you know? And so I think the best feedback you can get from people is people who are actually using something, not people who are looking at something as if it's. picture or moving pictures and assuming you know all the things i don't blame them by the way like

We've only given them short little video clips. Mostly when we launch V1 of something, it's our own version. It's our own take. It's just us. It's what we think. We don't really do a lot of public beta work or anything like that. We just kind of ship V1 when it's ready.

And then people start to use it for real, and then we get real feedback. And that's the only kind of feedback that I think is really worthy. There's a lot of questions now, like, does it do this? Is it part of this? Why isn't this not in Basecamp? All the things.

But as far as like someone giving you specific feedback, it's typically things that people don't see yet. They'll be like, well, can I do this? Or why can't I do this? Or if it was me, I would make it do this. And in my head, I'm like, it's going to do that. It already will do that. I just haven't shown that part yet.

That's the best thing for now. It's just about like really sharing the process of building something and making changes and tweaks and adjustments and not just sharing the final version of something when it's all done and perfect. You know, oftentimes you'll see like when a... company does a rebrand or something like that they'll like post this long precious you know post about their their new logo and all the different variations along the way and all the things they did to get there

but they're always sharing it at the end. And so they can really be very specific about what they want to share. I think it's more interesting actually to just share as you go, as you're building the thing and realizing some of the stuff we might show might not even make it in the final thing. We don't know. We'll find out at the end.

I just find it to be more real and more interesting and more engaging, frankly, more fun for me to do than just to wait till the end to do one video. I will say there is one, speaking of it feeling real. you did a video where you're like, oh, this isn't actually working the way it's supposed to, which was like from a viewer perspective was like, oh, this is real life, which kind of was fun to see. Yeah, I don't do any editing on these. So I just kind of hit record and.

just go. And I have an idea of what I might want to talk about, but I just go and I'll run into some issues. It's like, this is unfinished software. And sometimes that happens. And that's the whole point. It's not about polishing something yet. It's about showing something in progress.

With all the warts and all the ums and all the ahs and all the oops, that didn't work. And wait, how do I do this? And whatever. I find myself going to the wrong place sometimes. I'm like, oh shoot, the button's over here, but I went over here and no one's going to know that, but I know it. And so I'm in my head, I'm like,

Screw that one up too, but it doesn't really matter. You just keep going. Okay. So since you guys have been doing this and like sharing things publicly before they're ready since the beginning, have there been any situations where that has backfired?

Yeah. I mean, the place where things backfire is when you make promises about future deliveries or, I mean, frankly, like we announced earlier this year that we were working on two new products. One was Fizzy and this other one was called Know-It-All. Actually, I'm not sure if we even released the name, but I think this is the first time they've heard it. So we built a good portion of Know-It-All and decided not to continue on that product.

We're actually going to bake a lot of those ideas right into base camp instead. It turned out as we got through and got into it, we're like, you know what? I mean, a couple of things happened. Uh, we had someone leave, so we were short staffed and then we're like, you know what, this is maybe better in base camp anyway. And so we've moved those ideas or we will be moving those ideas into base camp, but we'd said we're going to release two new products this year. And so.

If I did it again, I would have made promises. Like it's actually not even a promise, but even a statement, like we will be, that's almost a promise. And so I try not to do that. So that's when I regret things. If you're going to use the word at all, I think it's best to be a little bit.

like we're working on this thing and we don't know where it's going, you know? And then you can just, when it's done, you just announce it versus saying like, we are going to do this thing and it's going to happen this year. You know, a few minutes ago, I just said like fizzy in a few months or whatever, like.

It could be a few is a good number, not a couple. It's a few. It could be a while. I don't know. We're actively developing it and very much using it internally. And that's always a good sign that this is going to actually happen. Okay. So tell me a little bit about... I mean, I feel like I know the answer to this, but listeners might not. You've mentioned it's kind of this building momentum. You could consider this a little bit of marketing. But do you have a plan?

As you're doing this, like, is there a calendar of I'm going to do this video then because this is all part of a bigger plan? No, I'm not organized like you. No, it's like, basically, I want to do a video roughly once a week, or every two weeks. And it started out sharing like the core of it, which was like this collection view with these two columns.

and the sort of bucket at the bottom kind of thing. That's where I started. And then I talked through some of the mechanics. And then last week, I did a video of the home screen or the activity screen, which is a screen I hadn't shown before. The next video I'll probably do, I'll probably show some of the early designs, some of the stuff that like the way it used to look when we first started building it. Oh, like the original fizzy.

The original genesis of the idea, first of all, and then some of the earliest screens and some of the issues that we ran into. We were excited and we ran into some issues and we changed it again and ran into some issues.

And eventually we moved into the current design, but I'll probably maybe do that next week. I don't know. Or this week, I guess it would be. Unless something else comes up that we just ship in the product that it's more interesting to share at the moment. We don't know every week what's going to be changing. Right.

So like, for example, we were working on a new text editor, which is not that interesting really to look at. It's interesting actually, like ultimately, but it's not a great, doesn't make for a great demo.

because it's just a text editor. There's some things you can do in it now that you couldn't do before, but I don't know. I'll share that at some point, but I don't think it's the next thing I'll share. So I'm trying to think about what the next thing might be. And I do think these previous designs will be kind of a good. next collection but and then after that i don't know we'll figure out what the next week comes what it holds and what we do and where we go and

At some point, there's another couple of features I'd like to wait for to be done before I show some of this other thing that I want to share. I know I'm being very vague right now, but there's something that's not done yet that I want to share. Or it's done, but it's not done quite the way I want it. So I'm going to wait for that.

So in my head, I do have like, not a calendar or schedule, but like some things that like this, I'd like to show, I'd like to show this. I don't know when I'm going to do these things. I don't know when it's going to make sense, but there's some sense maybe of what I want to share next.

Okay, so a lot of our listeners are small business owners, entrepreneurs, software developers. Talk to me a little bit about just the concept overall, separate from Fizzy, but the concept of just sharing as you go. I would imagine there's a bit of vulnerability to put yourself out there with something that's not finished or something that's in progress. I mean, the fact you're just clicking around going, oh, this actually doesn't work the way it's supposed to.

could derail someone to think like, I can't do that. Kind of talk me through how you get to that place of just being comfortable with it. It doesn't feel vulnerable to me to just share what we're working on because that's what everyone's doing. Everyone's working on something. Everything's always in a state of progress and in the middle of something. So it's just work. It's just like sharing your work.

It's fun to share the final thing that people can sign up for, obviously. But if you only did that, you'd share what, like five things in your career. So most of work is just like doing the work. And I think it's kind of cool to show that.

I've always enjoyed watching videos to people who are making something and building something. Cause I think it's a great way to learn a technique or an approach when they show like how they're doing the thing, not just the final product. You know, I used to watch like in the early days.

people who are like really good at Photoshop, like learning how to retouch a photo or something. Imagine if they just showed the retouch photo, like before and after, you're like, okay, that looks amazing. But like, how'd you do that? You just want to learn the how, how'd you do that is more interesting, actually, ultimately. than the final thing for people who are making stuff. So I just think it's important. I don't see enough people really getting into...

sort of the day-to-day nitty-gritty of making something. And I'm not sure that I'm actually doing that specifically, but I'm trying to get closer to that. There is a place where it is just flat out boring. Like you don't want to watch someone typing necessarily all day.

But talking through the design decisions, why we did this, why we did that, what tweaks we made, how things changed a little bit. Like, for example, recently I shared in the bottom right corner of Fizzy, we have these little cards, which are your notifications.

And in most products, pretty much all products, the notifications are like in a bell and you hit that and there's a menu that comes down. We're actually revealing them as they come in as these little cards, like in a tray. And it was a subtle change, but the cards used to reveal more.

And then they were taller and they didn't have a color on them. And then the next week we tweaked them and we made them a little bit shorter and stacked them a little bit differently and added a little color and the collection name and the ID. And it's not like a...

big deal, but it actually is on the experience side of what a few little tweaks can give you. And so I just want to, I like to talk about those little things because they're not things that you would normally ever hear someone talk about because you would just see them.

You'd see the final product. Well, that's just how it is. But how did we get there? And why are these small little adjustments, literally like a millimeter, you know, you don't really measure in millimeters on the screen, but like... Pixels. We'll call it pixels. Yeah, fine, pixels. But just like, I don't know.

15 more pixels revealed. It depends on your resolution, all the things, whatever. Anyway, to reveal a little bit more space and to add some color and a collection name so you can see things in a stack as it goes back, even though you can't read all the words, but now you have a sense of what's behind there versus before you couldn't.

All that kind of stuff really does add up. And so I think it's just fun to show those little small improvements because they do add up and to make something good and it ultimately makes something great. But you just assume when you see a product in the, in the final set, you assume that just.

how it started or maybe just assume like that's how, how they made it. But really there was like, you know, eight variations of this thing that eventually evolved into the final thing. So I think it's fun to show those. Okay. And then on a similar note.

to the videos you're doing. You've also shared online some of our design reviews when you're meeting with designer, programmer to talk kind of through something in progress. Tell me a little bit about those and how those are different from what you're doing.

Yeah. And that reminds me, I should do another one. I'll do one with Jay-Z today for Fizzy. Jay-Z can be like, thanks, Kimberly. Yeah. Thanks, Kimberly. That's another thing that I don't ever see, like ever actually, is it's like, what does it look like for three or two people just to like riff and talk about the work and review a product in progress and review a design in progress and just discuss it.

this is what everyone does every day, but it's never revealed outside that small little group really. And so I've decided occasionally we do these over zoom because we're remote. Like why not just record a few and just share them and just. share how ideas unfold and how sort of flow flowy these things are there's no agenda we just start to go through things and we talk things through and like you know i don't like the way that's phrased or the spacing doesn't seem right here or

I don't know if there's not enough differentiation or texture here. Can we try this? And sometimes we'll try these things live and we'll look at them together and live and reload and see how it looks. And I just think that's interesting. I'd like to watch more things like that. I'd love to see like. an architect work with his staff or staff on like some, you know, roof beam trust construction. Like how did they come up with that idea? And like.

What were they discussing when they came up with that idea? And what were they talking about as far as like, how are we going to pull this off? It's just, I find it interesting. All this is selfish in a sense. Like, you know, we build things for ourselves. We want to produce things that we would like to watch ourselves or learn.

and see i mean how fascinating would it be to be able to watch a a car manufacturer like explore the different shapes of the steering wheel and how do they discuss that and how do they decide which one's better and which one's worse and like

What is it like to think about that? Are they looking at like how it hits the dashboard and is it round enough or there's enough visibility through it or should it be more square or how thick should it be? You know, like all these things, I'm sure someone thinks about these things.

We never get to see that on the outside. And I think it's interesting to expose more of those things to the world, even if it might be a boring one hour for some people. But I think it's kind of a cool thing to share nonetheless. It's like being a fly on the wall. I feel similarly about... the office hour session we do when we like show our own account. Like this is how we use Basecamp. Like let me show you the projects that these different departments use.

I love it. Like I love showing that inside. It is really a behind the scenes look that most people don't give. It is. And we used to do these, these workshops in Chicago called how we work workshop basically, uh, or building base camp used to be called anyway, we would.

put our account up on the screen and like walk through it in detail over eight hours. And like, this is how we make decisions. Let's break this decision down. Let me show you how we wrote it up, how the comments came out, how long this thread was discussed. what the ramifications were for it. Like we would break everything down, but it's always real. It's always real stuff. And it was always like private stuff. It's like in our inner workings of our company.

But there was like 25 people in the room and or 35 people in the room, actually. And it was kind of a everyone this whatever happens in this room stays in this room. Like we're going to show you the real thing. But, you know, you can't take pictures of it and blog about it. And it was just great because.

that's where you learn about stuff is when you look at the real thing, everything else is an abstraction after that. And then you have to kind of piece it together. And what does this person really mean versus just showing the real thing? So yeah, I'm a big fan of revealing these things as much as we can and we're doing them anyway.

So it takes no effort to hit record. And then at the end, you're like, was that worth sharing? Yeah, that actually was. There was a good discussion there. There was an 18-minute discussion in 60 minutes. 18 of those minutes were really interesting and I think worthwhile. And we're just going to share the whole thing now.

And sometimes we've hit record and it's like this, that was just kind of a dud. Like there's nothing, I don't want to waste anyone's time with this stuff. Right. But, but oftentimes you'll catch something interesting. And I think it's, it's a good thing to share. I think, especially in the world that we live in now where it's like.

Social media is not real. You know, all of these images and videos that people put out, I mean, myself included, it's like this pretty snapshot. This is like, this is real. Yeah. Which I think is nice. It's good that there's all kinds. I mean, that there's polished stuff that's really considered and edited and thought through. And then there's good that there's not that stuff. I think the world needs both of those things and they serve different purposes.

And I think when things are all said and done with Fizzing, when we launch it, we'll do a nice launch video as well. It'll be a little bit more put together, but I'll also probably still have just a me, a single shot walkthrough of the product.

With no editing and all the mistakes, because I want to have that too. I think that's valuable as well. Okay. So on that note, because it is you, I think people know you as the face of 37 Signals and of all these products. You have a huge following on social.

For other businesses who might not have that strong of a spokesperson, do you think anyone can do this? Can anyone in the company take this role? Yes, I do think so. There's other companies that have other people doing this and they're really good on camera, way better than I am and smooth and have the whole setup and the lights in the back and the whole thing, right? Like you can do it, but it needs to come from a place of real true understanding.

I think of what it is that you're talking about. So if you're given a product to do a marketing video on or walk through, but you don't really understand the product, you know, but you can put together a good video, like it's going to show through.

Like Kimberly, you know, the product, you know, base camp really well, you know, Hey, really well. Like, so when you do a video, like it's clear that you know what you're talking about, but there's lots of videos that I've seen from other people and other products where it's like clear.

that someone else made this video like they hired an outside firm or something and you can see you can just see through it and i believe other people can see through it too it's not necessarily that it's like terrible it's probably a really good video it might serve the purpose

But I think you get an extra bonus. You get the plus on the A. You get the A plus, basically. If the person who's doing it really understands it, and it's coming from a place of understanding, I think people can detect that. And I think in subtle ways, it's just better. But yeah, it does need to be...

the owner or whatever of a company. In fact, in many cases, it's like a product manager or someone who's really just in depth in all the details, sleeves rolled up, doing the work that's going to make the better video, frankly. Yeah, perfect. With that, we're going to wrap it up. I will link to Jason's ex and LinkedIn.

all of those things where you're sharing these videos. Rework is a production of 37signals. You can find show notes and transcripts on our website at 37signals.com slash podcasts. Full video episodes are on YouTube. If you have a question for Jason or David about a better way to work and run your business, please leave us a video question. You can do that at 37signals.com slash podcast question. We're answering those a few at a time as we go.

And I even will send some rework swag to those questions that we answered. Thanks, Jason. Thank you, Kimberly. Good to see you.