Welcome to REWORK, a podcast by 37signals about the better way to work and run your business. We recently recorded REWORK Live, where we took our conversation to YouTube to share some current updates from 37signals and answer some listener questions live. Here's that recording. Enjoy!
We're trying something new. We've never done this before. We usually record the podcast and then push it out later. But we thought, why not just hop on live and answer some live questions. We know that you guys are here to hear from Jason David. So I want to spend a lot of time talking. We'll get right to them. I think first we'll start with a question we already saw pop up on Twitter, which is, you guys just launched the Hey Calendar. What about the
first version of the first product from the one's family out by the end of 2023. Now this is more of a padding us on the back, but not really true. It means true, but not completely. We did release it to some customers early at the end of last year. So some people have it. There's like, I think, some people have it. There's like, I think some people have it. There's like, I think, I think, I think some people have it.
So it's not really a 6 or something like that. It is out, but not really. It's a good example, frankly, of never making public promises. You just shoot yourself in the foot more often than not. Like with the Hey Calendar, we launched January and second, although with the Apple thing we had to push that off a little bit. But like we were ready to go on January and second. As we said, we would be all the way back in March of 2023. You predict, and we were, but we didn't promise that to the public. We just said early, to the public, we were just thinking about what would be the thing we wanted to do, you talk about the first
2024 and it turned out to be true. We didn't make a public promise. It was specific with once we did and we didn't hit it And so it feels kind of bad. That said We are very close in fact today or tomorrow actually gonna launch to a significantly larger batch of people It will not be public public for everybody But it'll be let's say wider beta and people be able to pay for it
The first part again is gonna be a it's called campfire. It's a group chat tool similar to Slack or teams But significantly simpler Kind of the way these tools used to be before they became bloated complicated convoluted, you know massive messes in a lot of ways
So I expect a week or two of that beta stuff happening before it's probably out for wider release So Anyway, just always always a reminder that you know, by the way the reason why it's bad to announce release dates Publicly is because they're always far in the future and they always sound easy to do It's very easy to say yes about something later and we have to continue to learn a lesson and we learned it again here So I don't know David you want to add anything on that?
Yeah, I think we've made this mistake several times over the last 20 years and every single time we make the mistake We say never again never again and then a couple of years past by I'm like, hey, let this seem so easily doable to hit this target I think one of the things that added some complication here was we were trying to do two launches at once We have never ever
Attempted anything as foolish as that you are a small company. So we had hey calendar Which is major new product that we've worked on for a whole year Happening at the same time because we're bigger and more capable company as we were developing once and felt really exciting Hey, we have two separate teams. We can do both things at the same time But there's just a gravity of attention that goes into any major public launch and like Jason or I can't split ourself
The rest of the team can't split ourself when it comes to a launch. So when we pushed out hey calendar Even though I've mostly been working on the one side of the product fence for a while I couldn't just sit over there and like wait. Oh, let's go have fun I mean the Apple thing added a fair amount of complication to it and I got drawn into that But even if that hadn't been the case a launch For a company of our size is always going to be sort of an all-encompassing event
And we had put both of these expectations a little bit on top of each other and the other part was that one actually influenced the other So already towards the end of the year we were starting to get excited about this PWA concept progressive web applications We were not going to build native applications for once first that started out actually being do you know what our native teams Are fully engaged with hey calendar hey calendars the most important thing we're working on right now
We can't also do native app for once then it turned into a little bit of like you know what this is actually a little bit of a feature Once it's an installable product you install by yourself if we have to have native applications We have to also run servers which kind of becomes a service then the whole point of once is that there's no service This is a set of products you install them yourself you operate them yourself
This is why I think people will be pleasantly surprised when we announce pricing that it's not as high as I think most people Think because we're conceiving of this as products as boxes on a shelf you take it off the shelf And it's mainly on you like there'll be a one eight hundred number I mean not really it's anything else but imagine on one eight hundred number at the back of some envelope Right like how many times did you call Sony when you bought a walkman?
I don't know anyone who ever called Sony about buying a walkman because that was a product and you were just like that's on you And you got to do it so all of these things came together and then of course the accelerant with Apple being just Absolutely been addictive
SOBs when it came to our own native apps and now this Epic games verdict just really lit a fire under the intention of pushing PWA as far as we could so it kind of raised the Quality bar we were trying to hit a bit that we thought at first you know what let's just push this out
It's gonna be fine and now we like yeah, we'd like it to be a little better than fine We'd like it to be quite good the PWA story Because we have to shine a light on an alternative path for all this app store gatekeeper nonsense and no PWA is not gonna be as good in all the ways but I also don't feel like they fully gotten a shot
Right like PWA as a concept this idea that we could just use web apps especially on mobile. That's really where the whole question is That dad Beels on resolve even though the term has been around for five years because it wasn't mainstream viable before now We have Apple actually supporting PWA's I mean trying to deduce like why and how much and what they'll change the future You can go crazy, but you could also just accept what's there right now
You can do a web app that you can install on your phone it gets pushed notification since it's actually kind of quite good Perfect no just as good as peak fidelity on a native app No, but for a lot of apps Including this campfire product. It's quite good and we'd like to put our best foot forward when it comes to this
We're also trying to validate sort of a category on two different levels, right? There's the PWA's One of validated that's a viable path and hopefully inspire others to invest in Optimizing that as much as we can and then we also trying to validate this idea of installable
Commercial software again like that used to be a thing 20 years ago you'd buy a CD whatever you'd set it up On your machine then to fill out a favor because of SAS Although it kind of continued all the long alongside like what is it half of the internet runs on WordPress? Every one of those installations was an installable app kind of thing, but that's an open source We're trying to do commercial software in this form. So yeah, we just took a little longer to get it just right and I think
Where was there? Okay, let me ask a quick question and then also if you guys have questions put them in the chat I can see them. I will make sure that we get Jason and David to answer them David and Jason tell us with the ones products you said we're starting with campfire Why do you guys pick that one is the first one to start with?
So one of the premises behind once is that besides it being installable software and not subscription-based is to look at Categories of products that exist that are widely adopted that everybody already knows how to use but are still being priced like luxury items and
Group chat is something that has permeated pretty much every business or every organization Yeah, some of these tools do some more things but fundamentally the core of it is like I need to talk to my co-workers in real time by chatting right and And the thing is is that this has been around now for you know 15 years Well actually longer if you go back to IRC or whatever but it's been around for a long time
Yet it's still price as if it's brand new and so we asked on in fact on Twitter like how much do you pay for slack and and like the bills that we're coming back We're like thousands a month some people tens of thousands a month even just hundreds a month even a hundred a month And we're like that's just obscene. It's obscene to spend that kind of money on essentially a Tool to chat with your co-workers when things like WhatsApp or signal are free like what what is it about?
Slack or teens that makes it worth thousands a month so we're like okay We know how to build this we actually built this way back in 2006 It was actually called campfire originally. We know how to make a simple thing. We haven't already in base camp This would be a perfect category where we don't have to explain how to use it. It's a known entity
You can actually build the UI with almost no words in it. It's that clear. It's like transcript box the bottom-right type List of rooms or channels on the side you know like very well known and we can price this and it can be hosted on someone else's box It doesn't need to require email or any complicated interactions with outside system to essentially it's very self-contained and It can be radically cheaper and just as good at the 80% level
So we're not gonna have video conferencing and it's not gonna have audio conferencing in a review on or any of that stuff It's just basic simple group chat But it just felt like the right thing to do the right category to start in and the right place to prove this idea
And so that's essentially why we while we chose that There's just so many angles of this too that are exciting to me Not only this idea that we're taking something old that was good like the installable software and we're bringing it into The present I was gonna say the future, but it really is the present the fact that the fun and loads have changed There's a reason why everyone moved to SAS in the early mid-2000s because it was such a pain in the ass to install an update and
Keep think in sync if you were running your own servers that was just Very poor ergonomics now the fundamental underlying technologies have improved leaps and bounds This whole thing of containerization where you can take an entire system not just a piece of software, but the entire system put it in a box that is Turned key that you just turned the thing on and then it just runs as it was designed is very different from how it used to be to
Distribute server-based software you'd have to worry about what machine are you installing it on did you have the right things? Can you get it wedged can you get it out of shape all of those questions have largely been solved? It's one of those things though that the fundamental
Improvement or advancement with containerization. I mean at this point is like whatever 10 years old But we haven't fully Digested what the possibilities are and I just find those things so fascinating where you have a Fundamental technology that as is done But people haven't still caught up with what does that make possible so this makes possible to Dispute these installable apps without having to have like service calls without having to send someone out and like look at your server without
Having to get access to your server all these things that used to be true if you wanted to distribute that kind of software boom gone So the compression or the complexity has just been compressed down to a thin sliver and we just like add our little
Special sauce on top to make it even easier in fact I'm about to record a installed video We just went it through on a walk through Jason I and that a couple people from the team yesterday Like what does it take to set up this kind of installable software on your own host
We just used a digital ocean. I've been testing with Hatsner if you use any of those cloud VMs You could do the same thing on your own server if you have an actual office I would totally recommend that someone just put like a little box in the in the corner and you can run chat on your
Internal network, but it's so easy to set up. It's literally you turn on a fresh box You paste in one command and it's gonna run through its things and you're up and running with auto update and all these other things so just a lot of like Technology Enabling things it's not about the technology. There's I don't think there's a lot of people who like she Care oh it runs stalker underneath that whatever can I do the chat thing?
Can you save me like 10,000 dollars a month on this thing? Can we own the data? This is something that's also huge. I mean, I just spent three years in Copenhagen living there and The way the GDPR this privacy framework has just Infiltrated in some sense is good in other senses. Yeah, I don't know about that But infiltrated European business mentality like how do you store data? Where can you keep it?
I think these kind of software is just like tailor made for the moment. I can imagine A Danish public school Installing this camp art tool and running it like that inconceivable that they would at this point into GDPR's advancement would use a tool from us as a SaaS product as an American company So I just find that just really exciting, but I think what's important to say here's all this is speculative Jason are so excited about the new product category. We want to push it out there
We've thought a lot about it. We put our hearts wet and soul into it But until people actually buy we don't know what we got actually I see some things from I want to respond to a couple quick things Yeah, so Justin is asking will we eat our own dog food with one's chat? You already used chat and basically so we've converted the entire company over to using campfire chat for now And so we're not really chatting in base camp or chatting in this we have you have to dog food your own product
You have to use your own thing as your building it's really start to understand what it's missing what it's good at what it's not So we've been doing that and you're also it says that you're surprised to see that we're doing chat considering we've been semi-antichat for many years We're not against chat
We're against chat as a primary method of communication. It's a terrible default method for all communication across the company And so most companies who've switched to something like slack all in or teams like it sucks You're bombarded with with with notifications all day you're balancing between dozens of different channels It's chaotic. We don't support that at all, but as a tool
It's a good thing to have in the tool belt. We do go to chat when we need to discuss something or hash something out real time It's very good for social interactions and just kind of scrubbing around shooting the shit kind of thing And it's also really nice for really small teams occasionally to make some quick progress
So it's it's a tool just like in base camp. It's one of eight different tools we offer within a project It's not the primary method So we primarily talk long form, but we do go to chat occasionally So part of what's interesting about this whole thing is that you know while this is technically could be a slack
Replacement for many companies. I actually see it as also sort of slack adjacent or team adjacent You could imagine many of the people in the company still using slack But you set up a separate corner for just the executive team or just a smaller team who wants to keep things completely separate
Like a separate space a private meeting room that's really truly private and that only six people have been invited to this thing It's so low cost that it's like a no-brainer to have also So this idea of also software that you already have something primarily for this But you want another
Similar version also for a different use case the other thing is that We are giving the code away So not only do you get this thing But you get to see how this project was built all the way through which is something you never ever get with commercial software So you might just buy it simply because you're curious about how it was built how a team like us put this product together
And again the price is going to be it's less than a conference ticket in most cases. So like It's becomes another no-brainer purchase to learn and to have a team dissect this stuff and look through it So anyway, that's just a couple quick things I wanted to get to on that note Kevin asked Who do you see is the target demo initially for campfire? You've talked about that a little bit But maybe Jason who isn't the target audience for this new product?
I would say this is a really interesting open question to be honest I'm not really entirely sure who's going to Like is it is it a company size is it is it a type of company? There is some basic technical knowledge required very low But some to kind of get this going if you're using slack and it's free. Why would you pay for anything at all?
Like there's some of that But I think that there's a couple things there's a privacy aspect of it There's a controlling your own data aspect of it There's just the ability to look at the product all the way through and know exactly what it's doing knowing that your data is not being sent to someone
Also servers and someone else's location There's the ability to potentially customize this because you get the code and you can mess around with it to some degree There's this idea of having a separate segregated place for certain discussions that are separate from the rest
Companies do this all the time they have like you know file system and there's like only certain people have certain access to a specific folder like that's And then you you know, of course you can do that in other tools, but to actually thoroughly separate them is even safer But I think we're going to see a lot of mid-sized companies jump into this I think we're going to see a lot of small teams who are product development teams who are curious about how this works by this
I think we're going to see a lot of large companies like what do with base camp the whole company doesn't use it But a team within it uses it they want their own thing they want their own place they want their own rules They want to set up so I think we'll see it in a lot of different places
And I think ultimately if we can get the pricing right in in other markets We're going to see this adopted all over the world and in markets where you know typical SaaS software is way too expensive To get going
So what we'll have to see I'm very curious we typically to be honest we don't think about Market so much at a time for anything we built we think like what do we want to make for ourselves And let's put it out there and then we'll find out what the market has to say about it and with campfire
Everyone's loading it themselves using their own servers. It's kind of answers Chris's questions Maybe you guys can address that we'll campfire have a mechanism for preserving messages for legal purposes We don't have the data in the sense that You have the data you have the database the system is built for you to be able to take backups of that database There are no sort of Interprisy retention controls in the traditional sense that you would with a slack or something
But it's in some ways it's not needed in the same way because it's literally your installation like it's literally running on your stuff Either you have physical server or a cloud VM that you control you have direct access to the database We've built a really nice system in where you can take backups of not just the database, but all the files that's been uploaded So if you say for example you have a preservation request you're in a lawsuit and they say hey you can't
Anything in the past three months you got to just store right you can do it back up and take that back up and put it somewhere Safe just that you are in compliance with that to Pina or whatever it is So yeah, I think in that sense it's quite well set up But it's not the same way you really have to shift your mindset a little bit when you go from multi-tenancy Which is what systems like slack and basecamp is when someone else runs under your path to single tenancy where you own the whole thing
Like you're not you're not renting you are buying a product here, and it's yours. This is the other Thing here. We're not making a license agreement with you that we can revoke your right to run the software There's a license agreement on what you can do with the code like it's still copyrighted we trademarked the name And so you can't just buy our code and then give it away for free or distributed or whatever But it is yours to run the way you see fit
You don't have to get any of our updates. You can buy campfire once Continue to run it on your service as you please and you can run it in the next thousand years. I mean I'm making them
Sort of broad proclamation here, but the software years the software's open source. I guarantee Well, I shouldn't say guarantee you who knows civilizations around in a few hundred years But if it is if civilization is still around there will be people who are capable of running this which is absolutely not true for commercial Das company's Like slack or even like basecamp right like you can't make
Declarations about whether this is gonna be around in a hundred years or two hundred years now is this actually a practical concern? I don't know not so much, but there's a philosophical attraction to this that really appeals to me One of the reason it does is because I've gotten really into retro gaming There's these emulators that allow me to play the video games
I first played when I was like five years old. It's incredible You can emulate a Commodore 64 which was the first computer I really had exposure to all those games on a modern sort of handheld gaming device where you actually playing that real software That to me is magic We have a history here of computers and software that we should be cherishing and I do worry a little bit that
Disassification of everything destroys that this is one of the other reasons. I'm so Thrilled that we still run silly things like to the list the free service we made like 18 years ago because it's trying to give Friends to this idea that software should have a legacy in a history all the major Material things that I truly enjoy whether it's watches a cars or cameras They all have these long legacies and you can you can take a watch actually
I mean, this is a watch from I think 1968 it is from before I was born. I can wear it on my wrist and it tells time Like that's amazing Software should be more like that and I think with kind of this kind of software We're trying to put our chips in and say like all right. It's it's gonna be that and I think that's a that's just that's just fun
I'm sorry can really go ahead. No, no, I was gonna go to shape up So if you want to say on one more thing about let's do one more thing about once first jump to shippo I saw David This is really more of a question for you. It says like if you're giving the code away Does that make it open source? Can people modify it? How are we thinking about allowing people to mess with the code and see the code? Yeah, this is where I think the parallels are so great to to physical stuff, right?
So this watch or you take a like a camera M3 or you take a a core vet from 1968 Those are your things like I didn't sign an end user agreement with Rolex or General Motors or Leica to be able to own those things and do whatever the hell I please with those things now The question is whether you can if you buy a mechanical watch from the 60s Do you know what you can take it to any independent service provider? They may be good
They may be bad, but they can work on it. They can open the case and they can rinse it out and clean it out Whatever you can take your like a M3 to an independent shop and they can fix it You can take your car if you're good enough interested enough in this up you can learn it yourself You can change the I don't know Corporate or battery whatever Do you know what you can't do if you buy a goddamn Tesla do anything?
Now I love Tesla So it's not I'm not taking a dig at him here I'm saying there's there's spinners shift here where everything has become software and all software has become closed when it comes to commercial systems So this is not that this is a Mustang
68 that you can buy and if you can teach yourself how to operate it and maintain it and change it You can you can install a different and you can do all those things That's not the same as open source as people traditionally understand it people understand open source in the same way We give away Ruby and Rails right you can distribute it you can build it into something else you can build a product Whether you can sell that product there's a lot of rights that come with that kind of open source
We're we're keeping some of those rights. So this is somewhere in the in-between land. This is commercial software the source code is trademarked It's sorry copyrighted you can't just take it and distribute it just like you can't just buy a book
Take photo copies of all the pages and then hand that book to someone else now Do you know what we have some limitations here to ensure that commerce endures But you can still get into the machine room you can change it you can adapt it modify it do whatever the hell you want and
And I think that's what it's really an intersection of two things I care about a care about commercially buy up software where companies can actually Make profits and pay employees and all those other things and then I also care about open source and this exists somewhere I don't know in the middle Do my sorry no no no there's a couple that some people are asking about one stuff since we're on the top Let me just knock out. I mean quick couple quick ones Nick. How do you order the economics?
How are you gonna charge for it again if you're gonna update or whatever? So Basically, it would seem to work like traditional software is always worked every like major version So if you have like 1.0 and 1.1 and 1.2 and 1.3 These are all included for free free updates if we ever launch a 2.0 or like a massive redo or a massive upgrade
We will sell that again as an optional upgrade. That's how that'll work Also secure we're gonna do what I think it's we're gonna guarantee three years of security updates regardless of what version you're on So we will do that which is let me just take one point in that because I've gotten some feedback on that too Oh, okay, so if I install my own software like how am I even gonna get updates?
We built all that in so actually this is something we did recently at when we started out It was like a manual process if you wanted to get an update you'd go in and update yourself now We build an auto-updator which is not not like something new right like your Mac has an auto update or it's not Sash your Mac is not sass it'll pull an update from Apple or you computer will ask like once a day Oh Apple is there any new updates here?
We've done the same thing so when you install this campfire through the ones command It'll set up an auto update or every night. I think it's at 2 a.m. in the morning the system will ask our servers Hey, is there any update and it'll autoply you can turn that off not everyone wants auto updates But if you want the auto updates, it's gonna be on by default and it's gonna be super duper easy Okay, another one's question. Will you try to have similar products of one products play together?
Are they completely separate or are they gonna? Don't know don't care not thinking about that right now Yeah, there's a lot of I saw some other questions about We'll not do so many things it will not do almost everything and let's do a few things each one of these tools to do a few things Really well what we're really aiming for here are high quality generics If you think about like what what is the canonical version of a group chat?
It's a transcript. It's a place to talk. It's a list of rooms. Maybe some direct messages It's like that that is what this is it is not more than that is not more sophisticated than that Intentionally, this is like the core nugget the 80 or maybe 90% of what these tools really stand for and then all the other stuff around it is not part of it So these are radically simplified straight forward versions of popular
Product categories that we've just stripped down and and that's why they're just you know, let's call it a few hundred bucks once I think this is one of the things Jason and I were talking about yesterday Like I've been so excited about like the prospect the new distribution forms everything we're bringing back and I mean I think it's fair to say we've been hyping that I mean
I've served you've been hyping that and we need to sort of peck down the expectations like two levels from like what is the actual software underneath? Because if you have the expectation that this is like exactly the same as slack with all the features belts and whistles that slack Those just massively cheaper and you get to own it and we built it all in like the amount of time we did I mean
I'm sorry, but that's the lusional like that's just not how things work You can't get all of it plus like 500 times extra So this is how it always is when we make new products when hey email launched right it included a ton of really novel interesting things
And then there was a bunch of baseline stuff that like wasn't there on day one now some of that baseline stuff still isn't there We've covered the majority of it, but some of it isn't there We're not trying to replicate everything that single thing that Gmail does
I think there's like 500 different items or configuration points and slack is grown into like a Gmail like monster in that regard to Daytona a few weeks back went through like to sign up process for slack and like holy shit like I don't remember it just being This much stuff and you can tell me I mean that's not a critique per se like Every single little checkbox that it has in its 500 million configuration screens like is there because it helped make a sale
So some enterprise the organization somewhere that's their business model totally fine great actually that should exist It should be good. We're making something else and I think it connects to this idea of like that watch I held up that 1968 to have something in juror for like not just two years, but ten years 50 years
You actually kind of want it simple. I think that's the recipe behind The magic of a life a camera from 1954 that still works like a A corvette from 68 you can still make run because they're actually quite simple products A do not think that my Tesla model S is gonna run in 50 years. That's just Unlikely, they're so highly complicated systems built with computers and software that it just seems like you know what This is a more of a disposable item and again, that doesn't mean it's bad
It means it's actually good for a lot of things and we get a lot of progress out of that But it also means there should be exist a category of software that's not that That is more like trying to be a like a m3 more like trying to be a 68 corvette more like Or Rolex GMT from 72 We're trying to make that Okay, last one's question before we go to shape up. I doubt it I don't believe this one is how do you distinguish products suitable and not suitable for the once model?
That's from Nick who's live with us the way I think about it is can you boil this down to a few things and be done For example, um people have been asking for like can we do a CRM? Oh once CRM like I'm not so sure because CRM requires a lot of integrations with email and some others Fisticated external systems and it that there's a lot to that that is not as simple as like literally
Group chat it's it's obscene that anyone pays more than 50 bucks a month for group. It's just obscene Like it's a transcript and a box where you type That is all it is That is it. I know there's other things that does like threading Yeah, you don't need any of that you don't and it's just like can we find ideas and we have a handful of them That are so simple in their concept conceptually simple that we can deliver a very high quality simple version another example of this
Which we might do next. I don't know is con bond the concept of con bond columns and tickets and moving Tickets between columns that is 99% of what con bond is simple conceptually simple um You can you can squint and draw it and cover all the bases. I think this is enough what way I thought about it is like if I could sketch the UI and cover 95% of the whole product with a single sketch with Eight lines
That's a once product con bond is like that chat is like that. There's a number of other things like that Things that people already know how to use already understand that are simple concepts that you can do on paper I mean you can you can make a con bond board for your office
Um by using this tape on your wall and post it notes that's con bond right like you can do that digitally of course It doesn't need to do all the things that something like trello does and all the other things that the other con bond systems do
What's the simplest version is there one that's attainable very quickly? We could build in a few months Absolutely that's sort of the bar for us And I think it's good to contrast this with what doesn't fall in that category for example Yes, hey is a perfect example like hey is an email service
Not an email client and running an email service today is actually Kind of Jockingly depressingly difficult ensuring deliverability of email has turned into a freaking PhD project I mean, I just even I'm trying to remember all the standards that you have to keep in your head decim this and I see I can't even keep it in my head on like a operating basis
Um, that's how complicated it is. It's not a good system to try to run yourself It used to be I used to run my own mail server back in like the late 90s I think it was I'd run my own well server lots of people did But today you really have to be a very dedicated hobbyist to attempt running your own email service If you care whether your emails reach the recipients So that's the kind of service that I think in the word actually service
Anything that's a service where someone has to tend to the operations of this thing on a running ongoing basis Otherwise if false apart is a poor fit for this now there are people who tried I actually bought like a physical product I forget what was the call but someone did a physical product that was a mail server in a box And it was just it was complicated. It was not a single sketch
It was not actually you see the setup even though it actually came as a physical thing. I'm so like I don't think this is a good fit for it
And that's the other important part of this when we talk about ones. We're not saying all sass needs to go away every sass product needs to be Installable product that is unrealistic and in fact bad There are lots of services that are best the services emails a great example of that anything that requires a bunch of Integrations or updates or continuous refinement doesn't really fit this model all that well I love that we're recording this live so you guys can actually see what happens
It's me just trying to not interrupt that basically. It's how it goes. Oh No quick here's a question that I actually a little off subject But I thought was a great one Jason you used to do lots of customer support work Which would have helped you stay in the loop with existing and new customers now that you delegate the work How do you maintain your customer muscles? I'm a little bit more involved in new product development than maintaining existing products these days so
Because there are no new no customers for new products that we don't have yet. It's a little bit different It's more about gut intuition. What do we want to build for ourselves? But we have someone named Brian for example Brian's for our head of strategy He's sort of keeping track of all the things that are on customer's minds He's doing a lot of the shaping work for base camp and continuing to improve base camp So he's very much in touch and and you know
In the weeds there and if I was doing that then I'd be in the weeds there as well But since I'm more on the leading edge of things that we're doing right now like the hey calendar Of course, we had to request for a calendar in hey, but like the thing we built was not what people told us to build That's sort of my focus. So it's a little bit different these days Although I will say that when we do launch a new product as we just did
Of course we step into the river of customer feedback. I mean both Jason and I have fielded absolutely hundreds of emails from customers giving us feedback On hey calendar and whether that feature requests a bug reports or what they'd like to see or just the appreciation for that
The fact that they found the product so Likeable all that stuff like we get the fire hose sort of occasionally But yeah, I think at some point I think we get I mean many hundreds of emails a day on customer support Gone are the day where Jason could just answer them all by himself
Which he did and I think the first three years I think a peak Jason was doing 160 emails a day on customer support while also running everything else And just for sense of scale what we ask or what we benchmark our customer support team is 50 to 60 tickets a day
So just towards working three customer support jobs while also being CEO and and running things in the early days like Yeah, good times and we walk by the way uphill uphill both directions and it was always snowing and we were bare feet and I have a snow machine indoors just to make sure I was up
But the thing is is like and I would recommend every Founder or whatever anyone making something new for the first time does that you must do that you want to step into the fire hose You you but but After you launch the thing so I would not go ask people what they want I would I would build something then he's put it out there then he stepped into the fire hose and you learn
There's no better way to learn than that. So All right, okay, I've been saying shape up for a while now because some people mentioned it on Twitter and then Parker I do see you I haven't forgotten about you the question is can you explain use of shape up when
Building new product lines? Yeah, so I was just on a podcast Hackers incorporated with Adam Watham yesterday two days ago when that launched And and he asked me about how we built a calendar and I talked all about it And then there was this one part in there where I'm like well, we don't really follow all the traditional shape up methodologies when building a new product and That caught a few people's eyes know or attention like gotcha gotcha. I knew you guys didn't use shape up
I know you invented it, but you don't use it. It's like we do use it There is a what we've discovered though, and this is a constant process discovery and evolution this this whole system evolved over 20 years cycles or what you're now six weeks used to be three months and before that we didn't have cycles So this is an evolution any product or any any process that's that's that stock is dead Like Latin as a language is dead because it doesn't change things things that don't change are dead
This process continues to change what we've discovered is that for new product development while we We stack up work back to back to back to back like you wouldn't a cycle the cycles are a little bit more fluid to some degree We don't shape everything ahead of time some stuff. That's especially small is just sort of done on the fly But what we don't do is we don't let things take as long as they want so that's like Also consistently shape up shape up has an appetite maximum six weeks
We're not working on one feature for eight months this way either there are limits um We don't have cooldowns typically during the new product development process where we do with existing product development So typically we do six weeks and then two week
Cool down and then six weeks. That's what we do on existing products for this we go back to back to back to back to back to back to back It's a little bit more of a constant jog Um without rest we're not sprinting because you can't do that for months and months and months
But we do that maybe a little bit more towards the end, but it's a little bit more chaotic a little bit more on the fly a little bit more feeling things out because We're going to be using this thing as we're building it We don't really know what we're making yet
And you can't be so rigid ahead of time to know what you're going to do over the next year when you're exploring something new But there are time boxes there are limits there is this urgency not to spend too much time on something We want to make the thing that we're using Uh, and we want to move on for things. We want to finish things up and move on sometimes you leave something sort of half done You know you're going to get back to it, but you also know you got to move things on
So it's it's an evolution. It's a different context. It's a slightly different variation And we should update the book and update the website and talk more about our latest discoverers and how to pull this off for new product development I think one thing I've realized is that
Where a shaper really helps us at this stage of the company is it allows a delegation Of decision-making power on an interval where jason and I don't have to be involved on like a day-to-day or weekly basis So with Brian for example
Shaping most of the pitches taking a lot of input from from customers and feedback Well, we otherwise want to do he can like go off and do that work for several weeks Maybe he'll sort of bog with jason a couple of times and then like every cycle we can look at What's on the menu?
And when you look at it in that way you end up with a certain courseness in your decision-making power You we cannot make decisions in that forum on like an hour by hour basis or even a day-by-day basis The minimum block we can actually operate with is a week and more likely it's two weeks Then most projects that get shaped they have like a two-week block That's fine when you're evolving and existing product and you can set a couple things to to go when you're doing
R&D that's inherently a explorative you don't even know what you want to build right because you don't know exactly the shape of the product itself Do you have to be working on a day-to-day basis and the decision-making power to change direction should be embedded in the team So you don't have this delegation in the same way with both hey calendar and with with once jason and I have been in it If him won the hey calendar side at least under the design part of it and I've been
Um on on the technical side with once like really in it all the time to constantly like all right
We hit out that wall here. Let's change direction. Let's go over here So you're operating almost like a different scale like if you think a frog view versus birdside view That the more you get up into the level of I hate the fuck word but stakeholders like people who want to see an outcome of something But they're not involved in the day-to-day of it shape up becomes more and more important more and more critical That you have this shaping and you have to
Repeating ways of doing it But I'll be perfectly honest like if I was starting a new company tomorrow and we were four people We would not use any process barely I mean we wouldn't even have we wouldn't have kickoffs We wouldn't have hard beats because there would be no one to communicate with
The smaller you are and the more isolated that group is from the rest of an organization The less methodology the less process you need and the more liberating that is this is why I think a lot of people A lot of entrepreneurs look back wistfully on the early days
Oh, remember when we were just five people like there wasn't any of the complexity Yeah, because the scale was so small it's just it isn't hard to organize more people it just isn't Organizing a company of like whatever 72 75 that's a more difficult problem Let alone organizing a company of a few hundred or a few thousand or 10th of thousands right? They're just different scales and if there's one thing I think we've been consistent in saying is you have to pick tools
That are appropriate for the scale you're at. This is why I'm so adamant that micro services is a terrible idea for most small teams Because these are techniques Built by and formed in huge organizations what works for Amazon at that level
It's not what's gonna work for you. So I think shape up has a little bit of the same thing I don't actually think most people go looking for shape up until they run into process pains You're not gonna have process pains with four people you're gonna have process pains maybe 10 12 Now you're gonna have to have multiple people and they have to have an eye on five different things They can't be involved in everything all the time
Shape up steps in makes a ton of sense. Do you not pick the ones team was we had um?
Yeah, how big was the ones team for the longest time two developers one designer Jason and me that's five You don't need any process with five people Okay, here's another shape up question before we move on to just the random questions How do you handle betting on smaller project like say three weeks during the six weeks to engineers focus on two shorter projects Rather than a big one just a general shape up question for us here Yeah, so before our cycle starts
We set up the work that we're going to do and not not the tasks, but the the big ideas and we say We're gonna pick let's I'm just for this example I'm gonna say we're gonna pick five things to do Two of these things are gonna be full cycle projects. They're gonna take the whole time. We just they're bigger things Um, I'll give you an example from hate calendar If we're doing this in shape up
Habit tracking and time tracking are both full cycle projects. They're gonna take the full six weeks But there's a bunch of smaller things that are gonna take a week or two to do and so we set the appetite for each one of these projects and Usually we have a team work on um, a big thing a team work in a big thing and then one team might work on four smaller things in a given cycle So there's like the the this small batch team which will do a bunch of things and the big batch teams
Which will do one thing and that's kind of how that how that comes together and like look The other important thing here is that this this isn't really you know This isn't We're not aiming for rigidity here. There is a a framework and a concept that's supposed to help guide things and prevent The worst parts of human nature from taking hold like just giving things and unlimited amount of time and
Perfectionism and all that stuff. So there's discipline here. It's built into the system, but there's also flexibility So if someone needs to jump over from one project to another or they need help they it's of course the answers up course It's all within reason But that's typically how we would assign the workout and then again once the work is assigned the work that's assigned is the big idea The actual bits that need to get done are defined by the team doing the work There's no architect or
Taskmaster or scrum master or whatever making all the individual tasks and tickets for each person The people doing the work make their own work. That's how that whole thing works and I think it's key here to contrast that with In my opinion the ways agile Big a agile methodologies when the stray because they absolutely did try to codify way too many things in Too high level of rigidity
Ironically given the fact that it's called agile by everything's called agile this day no one is gonna say I'm not agile right everyone say they're agile about something and then oftentimes they present a very rigid definition of what that agility actually looks like and It's far away from the agile manifesto which was this Idea of it's still online if you google agile manifesto um you can see these ideas that people over processes for example like if something's gonna bend or give
We're gonna give it to people we're not gonna stay rigid in the process and this is where the context setting is so important That you can't just take even shape up I don't think you can't just apply shape up as a whole to an entire organization of a hundred thousand people without making Serious modifications. I also don't think you can apply it as we wrote the original book to a team of four people It fits somewhere within the
Process is starting to hurt and we're not a mega company yet. So I don't know if I was gonna say something I'd say from ten people to maybe 500 something in there is the sweet spot for it the further you get away from that either on the small side or on the big side
You're gonna have to make modification. You're gonna have to make a changes to it And that should not be seen as a refutation of the ideas that are in there You can totally take a concept of for example, but it's over estimates right?
I think that is a univvursally applicable concept that goes directly to Jason says like the worst parts of human nature If you go with estimates humans suck at estimation even if they're for people they will still suck at estimation So you can take that idea and go like yeah, if you know what we're gonna apply that here
We're gonna set up some appetites. We're gonna do that. We're not gonna have the whole thing. We're not gonna do the Formal pitches and they're not gonna be at that level, but we're gonna think about estimates Okay, I'm gonna move on to this question about new products from Julian when you start something new How much time do you spend on it before saying it's a good idea or not?
So we're talking about a brand new product. It's typically it depends I guess like if we're for example this this once campfire like we've already built chat a few times So we kind of knew what this was gonna be, but let's say that the hey calendar. Let's take that as a I always want to get practical So if that by the way if we're talking too high level Tell us in the chat I wouldn't get practical in real, okay? so The hey calendar we spent a few months typically no more than a couple months max
Exploring in the early days like is there something here? We knew we were gonna build a calendar We decided we were going to do that But what was it going to look like? Well, it wasn't gonna look like a traditional calendar
But what what does that mean? So there could be a million other ways to do it So we spent a couple months playing it's really playing And then at some point like I think it was early March basic we started this I think in January I don't know something like that early March We're like okay
We kind of have a direction here. This doesn't mean everything's finalized basically nothing's finalized But we we've landed on a few interesting ideas that form enough of a foundation from which we can then build the walls and build the roof and build another layer and all the whole thing
So I'd say a couple months of exploration and play before settling in if you're spending more time than that I'm granted look there's always exceptions or might like if you're building an electric car from scratch And I'll never done that before for example you spend more than a few months software
Conceptually a couple months should get you far enough to go there's something here or there's something not That's kind of how we basically do it because otherwise you will keep going And if you feel like you need to explore every possible avenue before you decide to commit to something
You're you're never gonna get this thing done So you've got to go on faith at some point after you've just determined that there's enough of foundation here on which to build future things Okay, I'm gonna go to a question that came earlier from Victor Which is would your business structure be any different if you guys made products that you didn't use internally
We've talked about it all the time. We are our customers. We use basically if we use hay with the business looks different if that worked in the case I wouldn't be here What I don't know I mean, I like I'm not interested in building products for imaginary people and to be honest like I know it sounds really I don't know what it sounds like but I don't mean it in a negative way really it means like I don't want to imagine someone else's problems
I've got my own problems. It's hard enough for me to understand my own problems I'd rather solve my own problems that I'm close to that I can really understand if this is a solution or not I know what my own struggles truly are I can just decide to build something and if the struggle goes away I we've nailed it at some level Once you've got something out there in the world you do build for other people, but initially
um, we build for us. So for example There is no amount of money someone could pay us right now to build a uh patients scheduling software for a dental practice It's just not gonna happen. We don't care You can pay us a billion dollars. I just don't don't care not gonna do it not worth doing So we're gonna find things that we know how to do that that we struggle with that we want
And that's the kind of business we build. I think if you build another kind of business where you're doing things And you're imagining other people struggles and doing it for other people You don't really know where to stop You're probably gonna have a lot of sales people Because you're gonna need to sell this thing You can't just make something that's gonna be really good on its own Uh, and it just doesn't sound interesting to me. I'm not really interested in spending my time
I like to make tools that I'm gonna use. So that's my Misabond that I'm completely on board with that too. You could not motivate me It's not even that you couldn't pay me. Yeah, of course I'm not gonna pay me to to do that um and I just know this is one of the reasons I was such a terrible employee Because whenever I had to work on something for other people that I didn't care about like I literally could not make myself do it
So there's that and then the other part is holy shit. I'm glad not everyone feels this way We need someone to make the dental practice booking software from and This is where Jason or I are these oddities and we're all odd and weird in our own different ways
We just have accepted our own oddities and build a business to facilitate those oddities not getting terribly in the way But we need other people to do this Jason and I terrible folks to ask for advice on that because we literally could not even motivate ourselves to barely think about it
You need to talk to someone who've done that who built software for other people and there are lots of people do this And many of them do it well and I have tremendous respect for the fact that they are able to do this And I think the world is a better place because they do it Uh, not Jason or I Can I take Eric Eric and I on have both have a similar question
That was who I was gonna queue up for you. So you're good the price question. So let's talk about pricing because uh We've long had a policy that we don't increase prices on existing customers and in fact for the past 10 plus years we haven't we've changed prices a bunch
Only on new customers. So we have a new price model we experiment with we put that on the website and then when signing up We'll pay the new price existing customers continue to pay their old price Um, and we've done this for basically the tires gistens of the company early on
We had a little bit of price changes with a couple a couple different products But been a long time in some in fact some customers that we still have we've had for 20 years They're still paying the exact same price they paid 20 years ago
However, just recently um, we've decided that uh, it's finally time um our costs have gone up as everyone's costs have gone up Um, and uh, we've we've instituted a price increase on um some legacy products some existing products Uh, it's about 20% roughly give or take Um, on existing customers we've given them about 90 days notice Um, and the existing prices on the current site will not change moving forward But we are we are bringing uh people a bit more up to up to date
Um, basically our cost structure has just changed. We have a lot more employees than we used to have um We've saved a lot of money in the cloud But like our payroll has gone up significantly as everyone knows payrolls have gone up significantly for a variety of reasons
There's inflation. There's a whole bunch of other things cost are up and at some point like uh You know In order to maintain the kind of business we want to run we have to pass some of that on So We decided you know again after a long long period of time
That over 20 years or 10 to 20 years only to raise prices once about 20% seemed very fair very reasonable and necessary for us to uh to continue the business the way we want to run it So um That's that's how we did that What to me is kind of fun to look back upon is so we launched based in 2004
We still had some customers paying essentially those 2004 prizes right in 2004 We were paying developers including myself and i think jason as well I think it was 42 or 45 000 dollars a year that was the salaries right Do you know how much uh Programmer you get these days for 42 000 you don't get a whole person
You get some slice of a person somewhere. I don't know if you want a leg or you want a head or an arm You're not going to get a whole programmer At least not at the cost basis that we're looking at in our jurisdictions if you want to call it that So if you compare that like what is the average salary for Silicon Valley type uh levels like It's not 20% that's gone up And for it is many times that right so at some point it just seems like out of
Sync because to maintain those legacy products actually sorry let me restate to maintain those legacy services That's the key point here We need to continue to pay talented people to work on it That's to make sure that those things are updated is that there's still running
All everything that goes into offering a service Sort of requires human input and that is the biggest cost that we have in our companies So even for example jason said we've saved some money on the cloud very happy about that in the grand scheme of like payroll It's substantial, but payroll is so much larger than whatever those savings were so i also think it's just one of those things were um i hate getting the drip drip So i i use 80t for my security system whatever they freaking send me a
Well our prices have gone up like two three times a year and it's always like oh we're raising our prices 3.7 to four percent and always go like That sounds bullshit like if you have that many disamels like some things is fishy here I'd rather just go like you know what we're gonna do it rarely, but then we're gonna do like a chunk 20 percent first time in 20 years Do you know what i don't find that a reasonably and that's so funny like what is reasonable it is such an individual conception and
I've had the same thing i just had this thing with Disney plus so i was on a Disney plus plan that was 99 dollars a year I don't know maybe that wasn't an introductory pricing or whatever and then i get this email saying hey cool uh it's gonna be 139 now so a 40 percent increase and i just went no
Can i afford 140 dollars for Disney plus yes i can afford that But i don't want to and it's i was i was trying to look at myself in third person like why am i being petty about That increase it just felt like it didn't feel fair and i think this is the key aspect of pricing
That you should internalize is this sense of fairness now you're not gonna make anything fair for everyone we got some Pointed feedback under 20 percent people saying that's not fair But broadly the feedback was you know what sounds about right and i think that's you gotta Know that you're dealing with human emotions you're dealing with a sense of fairness or unfairness How often can you do this how much can you do this um and you really have to respect those things or otherwise you
You could get yourself in trouble. I I mean We we ruled over this for some time and it wasn't just like all right. It's that's what it is exactly because we hadn't done it for a long time But i think i mean given the feedback it seemed like it was Sort of well received but proof is always in the pudding Um and the pudding is that the price increase will hit the first few voices. I think February first Yeah, so that's when we'll see the moment of truth are people gonna pay
Okay, last question that we're gonna take before we wrap it up. We've been with you almost an hour is about AI what are your thoughts on generative AI any plans for doing something in this head-based hamper any of our products I think a is the most exciting interesting Development in technology that i've probably ever seen and i include the internet and that which is saying something
So i'm hugely bullish on the future of AI. I think it's amazing At the same time i don't feel like i have to be the first in the pool swimming the hardest Because if you paid any attention to startups doing AI stuff over the last uh
18 months you've seen that like two or three generations have already been steamrolled You think like oh i came up with this new idea and then brrrr the open AI steamroller just rolls right over you You're no longer a thing your feature in their setup and most everyone right now at least They're not doing AI. They're doing api AI That's different. You're not doing fundamental research that's giving you a lasting advantage here
Um, you're using the API of open AI or some of the other tools which right? I mean, I'm not saying that's bad I'm just saying that like To me, it seems too early like i'm not actually an early adopter Um, or maybe i'm an early adopter i forget what how the chart goes There's like a segment of people who jump in on something as soon as it comes out I don't like to do that. I like to give it five minutes Can the landscape settle just somewhat?
So instead we don't spend a bunch of time looking into something and then just go And then it eats all that work and swallow it up inside the open AI machine I don't want to waste time doing that um, I don't think it's clear at all Where AI is going to land even a year from now Like is AI going to end up in a place where we're even using graphical interfaces? Is everything just going to be spoken? Where is this actually going to be? So i i sit with this um
Paradox in my head. I think this is the most exciting thing that's happening in tech and also I don't mind being a spectator right now now eventually it will settle to whatever degree it settles and we will
Go right in on it. We've done a handful of experiments internally Like the the one everyone was excited about for a hot minute was like oh it can summarize your boring emails So we tried that and it's like yeah, okay cool ish Uh, that's not the part of genitive AI that actually gets me excited is that we take like shitty writing and turn it into another shitty version of the writing um
That doesn't get me fired up a lot of the other things do especially around media. I'm not sure it's clear Where we land yet, but it Hopefully will be in like whatever a year. Hopefully not maybe this stays exciting for another year or two or three And we just go like I don't know what's happening. Is anyone even gonna work tomorrow or
Sopper developers a lot of a job. I think that we've never had that amount of certainty in plain sight There's always been uncertainty about like what's new technology going to do But it always felt like something you had to dig for even the internet. I mean both Jason or I were there Like 95 when the internet started taking off and you have to kind of dig not everyone understood that the internet was gonna be
What it is right? I think everyone understands today that AI is going to be a major shift But we don't know exactly what He he Okay, well, I think that is the perfect way to end before we wrap it up I have two requests one if you were just coming to our YouTube channel for the first time ever
Please follow us that's 37 signals. I know we are putting this live on YouTube But we have a channel that we have videos that come out all the time So make sure to give us a like and follow there and let us know in check my second request What was that? That's the like button You on YouTube and then like get all the way up in the camera This is You guys know what to do if my other request in the chat let us know what you thought of this live
This is the first time we've done it. We've never done this kind of live Situation with Jason and David kind of branding it as rework so let us know if it's something that you like And we should do again, but I didn't get to your question. I'm sorry. There was a lot going on We will get to your question hopefully the next time if we do a live session again You also can email us at rework at 37 signals dot com or you clean with the voicemail and that's 708 I'll put that on the screen 628 785 0
You want to leave us a voicemail message? We often replay those in the podcast when we get those from lesseners Jason David anything else to add before we close it up and you can get back to work No, we would like to do these again. This is fun. So yeah, I'm curious to see what people want to know Thumbs up. Yeah, enjoy the energy of live questions. That's Yes, great Okay, thanks guys. Thanks for joining us and we will see you soon. Thank you