Welcome to REWORK, a podcast by 37signals about the better way to work and run your business. I'm your host Kimberly Rhodes, and I'm joined as always by the co-founders of 37signals, Jason Freed, and David Heinemeyer Hansen. This week I thought we'd talk a little bit about product development, specifically about a tweet Jason recently wrote, for he is discussing how product development is more about what people are going to have to give up, the post to what they're gaining
from your product. Jason, I'm just going to start with you. You had a great tweet. I loved it. In fact, there's one line that I particularly was drawn to, which is when you're thinking about your product, think about what it replaces, not just what it offers. Yeah, this is based on the jobs to be done theory. I mean, I guess it's not really based on that, but jobs to be done incorporates this thinking, which is there's this idea of the present or the habit of the present,
which is like what are people already doing? We often think we're making something new, and you might be making something new. Sometimes, I mean, sometimes there is something radically new that is new, new, new that people weren't doing before at all. But most cases, people are already doing something. They're solving this problem some way that they have, they're dealing with it one way or the other. For example, we launch Basecamp, people are using email. They weren't using
other product management tools or project management tools. They're using email, meetings, phone calls, whatever. And they had to give up that habit of the present, what they were used to doing already before they would move to something like Basecamp. So it's just important to know and to recognize, right up front, that you're not very rarely are you picking up someone who's not doing anything. So they have to put something else down essentially before they can pick up your thing.
They might use both simultaneously for a while until they figure out which one works best for them. But they're already solving this problem one way and your solution has to be typically so much better or open up new opportunities. They didn't know they needed or new situations. They didn't know they had whatever it might be for them to break free of the habit of the present and to have something new pull them into a new way of doing things. That's what the tweet was about. That's what's always
always has to be on your mind as a builder, as a maker. And that's what you're always up against. Rarely are you really up against like a competing product that's so obviously a competing product. You're often up against whatever people are doing and it's often a series of different things. For Basecamp, the way we've often thought about this is that the number one competitor, the thing we are replacing is email. That email is the baseline for people who do any kind of
project work together. And then most projects, even if people do have other tools, they start with email. And I think what's so useful about knowing that, knowing that you're replacing email more often that you're replacing a competitor or some other tool that's similar to Basecamp, is that you have to compete against the on-ramp of email, which is essentially flat, which is
essentially zero. There are no barriers of entry to get a project going on email. All the trouble with email comes in when you're trying to add a third person or a fourth person or someone two weeks or two months into the project. Or when you have to find something later, all of that is kind of backloaded. But email is actually really good. It's really good for that initial definition of what are we doing, kicking something off. You're just typing people in there.
And I think it's been one of those competitors that we have, I don't know, struggled with. I'd say appreciate it in terms of Basecamp's design, in terms of the onboarding flow, in terms of how do you get someone who's not on Basecamp already involved with one of those projects into the loop. And I think what's so powerful about this lens that you're always replacing something, and that replacement is often not a competitor, is that it forces you to look at all these other tools
and ways of doing things that aren't necessarily obvious. But that's the competition that the customer is looking at. And I think what's also remarkable with that is someone using email does not necessarily think of what they're doing as project management. They don't think of email as a project management tool. They just think, like, oh, I need to tell these three people that we need
to have this done next week. And part of the challenge in competing against something like that is to convince people that they have the kind of problem that a more sophisticated solution could solve. And some of that comes from just listening to the language. This is what I've really enjoyed with the framework of jobs to be done over the years. Is searching for the terms the customer use? And some of the ones that stand out for me with Basecamp has been things falling through
the cracks. That was one of those ideas that came out of our jobs to be done research that that was how people would speak about email. Why email wasn't good enough in a bunch of cases because things would fall through the cracks. So I think the lens really just guides you towards the kind of marketing that works and also the kind of product positioning that works when you
realize it's not just about other tools that are like your own. Okay. So on that marketing chain, let's pull at that a little bit because I think it's interesting when Basecamp launched what 20 years ago there wasn't other project management tools mainly. A lot of people were just using email or using nothing at all. Now I would think 20 years later there is that getting people off of other systems. So how are you guys thinking about that in terms of marketing the product 20 years
ago versus today? I'm going to take issue with your perspective or assessment of a fun job, of course. And that people were using tools. People used tools. So the tool might have been a phone call. The tool might have been a meeting. The tool might have been visiting the client's site. The tool might have been a whiteboard. The tool might have been a lot of there's a lot of things that the tool could have been mailed literally. So this is the thing with software as people think
when you're in the realm of software that you're always competing against software. But sometimes you're just competing against communication. And there's a lot of different ways for people to communicate. People have been communicating in all sorts of ways for all sorts of years. So I do take your point. And it is slightly different today than it was back then. But you're always getting someone to shift behavior. That's really the more I think the deeper piece here.
Shifting maybe even not even behavior but habit. Again, I'm going to come back to this word habit. People had to manage projects for decades for a hundred years. Projects have been managed. Right? Some way. And so that's what we're always fighting against. Now, of course, there are more obvious options today than there were 20 years ago. Back then in the software realm, it was kind of like email, Microsoft project, Microsoft Word, spreadsheets of some sort, you know, Excel or whatever
else was around back then. And those things still exist today. But now there's of course a lot of other name brand options that do other things that are really closer to what Basecamp does. Our point of view is still not to really talk too much about the competitors. It's more about, again, relating to people's situations, relating to people's struggles, understanding what they're going through, what they're dealing with, things slipping through their cracks, like David said.
That's as true today as it was back then. In fact, in some ways, it's even worse today. Because a lot of people are using like four or five multiple software products or packages. So data has to move between these packages. And that's where things can get lost. So you can actually play to that, this idea of scatter, which is a word we use often, which is like stuff is scattered all over the
place. And when you say that people go, yeah, I got that problem. And it doesn't matter which tool they can be using Prello or Asano or Jira or Monday or Notion or whatever or Slack and all, it doesn't even matter. It doesn't matter what they have. You don't have to talk about the products. You talk about this situation they're in. Stuff is scattered. I don't know where to look for things. People are putting it over here when it should be over there. How was I supposed to know? All
that kind of stuff is just as relevant today. And you don't have to go after the names themselves. What I really like about that is you get to invest in a kind of positioning that is timeless. When we were competing more against Excel spreadsheets or Microsoft project or in-person meetings or even damn facts machines, I mean, this was 2004. There were still some of those around too. The figuring out how to precision the product in a way that resonates with people because
that's the moment they're motivated to switch. I think this is another thing I picked up from the job to be done idea is that you have to be present with the right shape of your solution in a moment when it feels like whatever they're using already is not good enough. Something did fall through the cracks. Someone did drop the ball. The client is mad. Leadership is breathing
down my neck. We can't continue like this. We have outgrown whatever system we had whether that was the facts machine and the in-person meetings or it's the clutch that is the Asana, the drop box, the everything all over the place idea. These are timeless problems and the positioning can be equally timeless to some degree. I think you can see a red thread even though we've tried different ways of speaking about base camp over the years. There's so many of the fundamentals of what it is
that base camp does and when it does it that have stayed constant. This idea for example that when people predominant would come from email when we were relevant. We were relevant when you couldn't find the latest version when you were adding someone to the project and they didn't have all the emails the three months that went before it or you forgot to see see the right person. All these problems or archetypes that still exist even with all this additional technology we've
added to it ever since. And then I also think we are facing something new which is essentially the over-consumption of technology. This idea for example that if we adopt Slack we will have sold all our communication problems. That maybe in mid-2010s was an idea you could sell to people like oh you just need the chat thing and then people adopted and they realized we're using technology more than ever. We're now in Slack all the time and somehow we're getting less done.
We're actually better off halfway back to the fax machine than we are with the modern tooling. There's something very curious and peculiar with that and I think you can see there was a global trend introduction of information technology is not sort of just like a productivity enhancer by itself. It doesn't do it automatically. You can absolutely add technology to a mix and end up worse off. So I think some of our positioning now has to address that too. It's not just that you didn't have
any tools at all or you were just using email for everything and that was not enough. Now we're also dealing with way too much and I think what's funny is that kind of positioning things falling through the cracks, you're dropping the ball, you're looking bad to climb, you're not getting enough done, you're not knowing where are we with this project, are we close to done and we far away from done is a problem that is present on both sides of it and we're trying to sort of swim right in
that middle golden lane of just enough not too much. Now the problem with that positioning is it's easy for that just to be words and as long as something is just words, anyone can say it, anyone can
say we're not too little, we're not too much, we're just right. Like that's something you could slab on any products, page, our challenges to actually prove it, it's to actually show it, it's to demonstrate, hey, here's a collection of five tools that you thought you needed, you thought you needed to slack plus drop box plus a sauna, plus maybe a gira plus plus plus and here's how all these problems are solved with one tool. Okay, so let's talk about our new products that we're
working on. I know we're not talking about what they are yet but I'm curious about this kind of mindset of what do people have to give up if that has gone into the development of these new products. It is and it will but it's these products aren't done yet. Soon we'll be beginning to use them ourselves and then we will realize what we're going to stop doing and stop looking to somewhere else to solve and that'll help us I think understand more specifically what is different about these
things. We have ideas for what's different about them but we have to see if our behaviors are going to change. So pretty soon and this is there's always a challenge because we run our entire business basically on base camp and it becomes so used to base camp and love that it's one tool versus many, many tools. It has many tools in it but it's one product. The interface is universal, everyone knows how to use all the different tools in the product. You don't have to go somewhere
else and log in somewhere else and deal with some other thing. You know, once we begin to try to peel people off of base camp internally to use something else, it's always a little bit of a challenge and it's a good reminder that we're not the only ones who are going to have that problem. Other people are going to have that problem. They may not be moving from our stuff to some other thing that we make. They might be moving from some other tool to something we make or other tools
or other behaviors or rituals or traditions inside their company. These are all on the table when you put something else on the table and go do we clear the old table off and try this new thing or can we mix these together or do they not or there's it like oil and water we can't use them all together. We don't really know but we have to see and we have to use it ourselves first to figure
that out. I mean, we've already gotten a couple of them stood up to some degree but we're probably like a good six weeks away from having enough there to be able to begin to really use it seriously or use them seriously and then we'll have a much better picture. And that's what I really like about dog fooding as a general tactic. When we insert something new into our own process that kind of has to work because it's a tool that employees we have have to use to get their job done. I find that
they're very critical audience. When we inject and tell say the programming team, do you know what right book, for example, we've talked about this example in the past, that's now where we're going to store our runbooks and our maintenance manuals and so on. They're very critical about whether that's good enough to replace what we did in the past. Specifically with right book, we were using
GitHub before as essentially a manual repository. That's not what GitHub is made for at all. But it turned out that it had some properties that the people doing this kind of work really responded to. Well, it has marked down, for example, okay, that was one of the inspirations that right books
should probably use markdown. And then it has other tracking features that again, we're not designed for this, but the team have learned to cope with the limitations, which is an interesting point in and of itself, because oftentimes when you're trying to convince someone to use something new, the hardest part is not teaching them to use your new system. It is teaching them to unlearn
all these quirks and bandages and sideways that they were using the thing they had before. The thing they had before was not ideal for their situation, perhaps, but they became used to it. They became used to all the ways it was a little quark and a little funky, but now that's the devil we know. And you're trying to persuade them to give that up, give up the known of an existing solution. Come over here, solve it better. But you know what, whenever you adopt a new tool,
there's always going to be the dip, right? There's going to be the dip where you don't know the tool fully yet. You're on quite sure how you want to use it. And while you're going through that dip, it is very tempting and human to just go like, nah, nah, nah, let's just go back to the old thing. We see that with our customers tool the time. People come to base camp and for whatever reason to decide this is not right for them. And they go on this path as Jason has referred to many times,
not they tried this thing, they tried that thing. And then they come back to base camp with a new appreciation of not just why they didn't like those other tools, but actually what is their problem? What are they really trying to solve? Where's the actual hurt? What's painkillers? What's vitamins? What would they pay for to have taken away? And I think that education of even understanding
your own problem, it's not that straightforward. It's not that straightforward. And we see it internally, we see it externally from customers outside that until they really appreciate what the hard part of the problem is, it's not easy to sell them. So part of this education has always been for us the out teaching. We're not just going to give you some software tools. We're also trying to educate you a bit. How to understand project management? How can you do it better? This is what we
talk about on this podcast. This is what we write books about because so much of the value that both isn't base camp and what we offer is helping you understand your own problems. And I would imagine some of this like getting past the dip of trying something new also comes back to the free trial. I know it's like use it, practice it, try it out so that you can see how it can work in your own life. I imagine that's kind of just a standard for everybody these days.
Yeah, it is. It's hard though. It's really hard, I think, to commit really to changing everything in 30, 60, whatever days. But it definitely helps. We played with this idea of, was it last year? Yeah, so what about kind of this idea of extending the free trial for a year? It was very interesting because then there's like there's no ceiling over you that's constantly like going to knock you over or this thing that's pressing down on you. As you're like, oh god, we have one more week to
decide if we're going to change everything. So there are other ways to relieve that pressure. And there's also moments where you do want to have someone make a call. So kind of trying to find the right place to decide are you in or are you out? Are you willing to make a change? Are you not? Because even if you use something for a year, there's going to be this point where it's like, okay, are we switching or not? And so sometimes you want to accelerate that sometimes you want to give
people some more room. So yeah, there's lots of techniques there. But ultimately, at some point, someone has to go, you know what? This just feels better. This is better. We're going to think what we're making is better. And someone else is going to think what they're making is better. But better is not always the criteria. A lot of time, it's like, how does it feel? Is this intuitive to us? Does this make sense? Are other people using it? Yeah, it has more features. It's better on paper.
But I can't get anyone to use it with me. It's not better, right? So actual usage, actual progress, that's ultimately what the measurement of better is, not the on-paper version of better. And to your point, Kimberly, the only way to figure that out is to actually use something. So sometimes people will say, how does your product compare to this or that? I can't tell you. You should try them both. Try them both. And you'll know. Because whatever I'm going to say,
it's like, we have this feature and they have that feature. And they're going to say, we have this and they don't have that. And whatever it's like, none of that matters. What matters is, use them both. Feel them out. See how they feel to you and to your team. And then you'll know, you're the only one who can actually make that decision. Not us.
It's interesting because I feel like we get a lot of people who write in from day one, not even having signed it for a trial, who are like, can I get a demo of your product? Well, sure. Yes, you can. But why don't you just try it? Because it is so straightforward. It is built that you can kind of figure it out yourself. But I think the natural tendency is, like, I need a demo. Like, I need to sit down with a customer experience professional
to show me how this works. And we've kind of gone the opposite. Like, yeah, we can give you a demo, but also just sign up for a trial. You might like it. Yeah, that's true. That said, like, if we could, I'd love to offer a demo to every single customer who comes in the front door. Because Bayes Camp sells itself when you get to see how it's used or how it can be used. Unfortunately, because we have so many people signing up, like thousands and thousands a week,
it's, we just don't have the people to do that. But I agree that, like, you have to try it for yourself, but sometimes people aren't really sure where to start, or they can't quite imagine all the things it could do or how you could use something. So you might have a feature like the card table, which is like, our take on conbon. And they might not quite get why they should use that versus
to do. But we could say you can try them both. And they might try them both. And they still might say, I'm not really sure which one to use when someone asks to be happy to give them a guided walk through. So they can kind of go, Oh, oh, yeah. Okay. Now I see. And then they can try it on their own. I also think there's a matter trust that you can really only establish when you're dealing with another human. We can sell it in the best possible way. They're just certain people who just,
do you know what? I need to look someone in the eye. Like, is this the real thing? Is this what I'm going to invest my time in actually discovering? And I think you see that in commerce of all kind. Did you have this sort of like, well, you just go look through the rags yourself and then you walk into another story and you're like, all right, here's the salesperson who's knowledgeable and
gives you a lot of trust that you're going to pick the right thing together. And what's difficult both in that world and in our world is that usually it comes at different pricing tiers. So if you walk into a full service high end store where a clerk is going to spend 20 minutes with you picking stuff out, it's not going to cost the same as if you go to amazon.com and click it. That seems to be easier to understand in the physical realm that it is in the digital realm. And
we have to straddle both of it. Our stuff is quite cheap. And yet still you have that impulse that some people just want to see look someone in the eye. So I think one of the ways we've tried to solve this, which I think is actually quite nice, is the idea that you can sign up for essentially a demo seminar and we can speak to a group of 20 or 30 people at the same time. And that is somewhere in between in the middle. But what I also think is interesting is this idea that when
you're evaluating something, you don't really know what your problem is. You can't truly evaluate whether you're solving it. And I think wonderful illustration of this is what happened in the TV business. If you go into a big box store and you look at a bunch of different TVs, the TV manufacturers have figured out that the only way a customer, potential customer will decide is
they'll pick whatever is brightest. So they crank up the nits, the brightness on these TVs, to levels that just blow out the color, blow out what the director of the movie intended, and actually really ruins it, really ruins the core material that this TV is supposed to convey. But that's how customers pick, right? They pick on the brightest thing. And then every single reviewer of you watch any of the TV reviews on YouTube or so on, the first thing they say is you
have to turn off all that junk. It is just junk that's there to convince a buyer who's looking at a Samsung versus a Sony in a store and they don't know anything. They don't have time to sit for an hour and a half movie and appreciate all the shadows, all the softness of a cinema image. They just look at this in like in 10 seconds have to decide, yeah, that one looks better. And it is just a clear example that I know of of this in store good versus at home good, which is a saying Jason has
used many times over the years. We all want to be at home good. I think I think even the engineers at Samsung, they don't want to create these retina blasting, knit maximizing monstrosities that you see in the store room. They just really like, I got to do some of that. So I think we, I don't know if we struggle with this. I think all companies have to weigh these things. How much are we going to invest in the at store goodness? How many check boxes are we going to line up?
That's what a lot of the competition we face with often do, right? They take 100 features and half of it is just bullshit. And then they pick half of them to see we have more check boxes. Therefore we better just like see we have a brighter image. Therefore it's a better TV. Yeah, do you know what that's nonsense? And some of it again comes from from our perspective of dealing with that through education. If I was going to sell you a TV and I was going to sell it to you because I wanted you
to have a great TV to watch wonderful movies as the directors intend. I would have to teach you a little bit. I'd have to teach you a little bit about white balance. I'd have to teach you a little bit about HDR, how highlights work and why the brightest pictures not always the best. Do you know what? Can't do that in 10 seconds. You can do it in 20 years. We've been doing that in
20 years. 20 years worth of education essentially trying to teach people how to see the problem that they're facing the communication problem, the organization problem, the productivity problem, from a few more lenses than just like who has the most green check boxes because that's just such a nonsense way of doing it. And you know what? Even with all that investment we fail all the time. We fail all the time convincing someone that you know what? We can teach you how to do this stuff
better. And they go with the most check boxes. But then it is oh so satisfying when they go with the most check boxes and they live with it for a little bit and they realize it doesn't actually solve the problems they set out to solve. And now they actually know enough about the problem that they can evaluate something and now we look way better. Now we look way better because you've developed your eye for white balance. So you're not just going to take the brightest image if that totally blows
it out and everything is magenta right? That's not going to appeal to you anymore because you know so I think the investments in that kind of long-term marketing is my favorite kinds. Where you plan these seeds and you you bite your tongue and you realize you know what? Maybe I could have won this customer by just fucking adding green check boxes at the green check boxes comparison page after comparison page right? Maybe okay but I'd rather actually get the
customer after they come back. Maybe it's after next competitor or the one after that. And then they really appreciate what we have to offer. Yeah we just did the survey where we asked people how they got to base camp and about 40% of the 1600 people who responded. Didn't start with base camp but head base camp earlier in their journey path. Whatever you want to call it went through all the usual suspects notion of son
on Monday. Click up the whole thing ended up back at base camp. 40% who left came back which is really something we're proud of. But another way to think about this briefly I even know David just nailed it is that imagine you had two doors and you were looking to buy one of these doors and one door said more secure like that was a check box more secure like yeah I want a more secure door but then you find out when you install that door it has eight locks on it and to get
in your fucking house you got to unlock eight locks every time. It's like no yeah it's more secure but I don't want that it's a powerful way to market which is check boxes but customers should be savored than that ultimately. And what's behind this check box? What does it mean to be more secure? Well if it's way more inconvenient and a major pain in the ass I don't need that much security.
One lock is or two a deadbolt and whatever is good enough for me thank you very much. So that's one of the things that I think is important to keep in mind when you're looking at comparison tables and whatnot. Okay well David gave a little bit of a plug I'm going to make a shameless plug before our base camp classes you can find information on those on basecamp.com slash classes they are group sessions walking you through the base camp product so we invite you to check that out.
Rework is a production of 37 signals you can find show notes and transcripts on our website at 37signals.com slash podcast full video episodes are on YouTube and Twitter and if you have a question for Jason or David about a better way to work and run your business leave us a voicemail at 708 628 780 you can also text that number or send us an email to rework at 37signals.com