The 37signals Effect
Super-fantastic-caveat: Despite the title, this post isn’t really about 37signals, in particular. I’ve used them as an example, only. I probably could have called it the “Joel on Software” effect, too. This post is about all of us who aren’t 37signals, or Joel, and the dangers we face when trying to incorporate lessons they’ve learned into our worlds. 37signals is one of the companies I admire most and their book Getting Real should be required reading for software engineers.
37signals, for those that don’t know is a “web application company” that focuses on “usability, simplicity, and clarity” (quoth the wikipedia). For our purposes, this summary will do well. They are also the authors of the wildly popular blog, Signal vs Noise, and the Getting Real book about their philosophy on business, design, and programming. Oh, and, maybe most notably, they are the birthplace and spiritual leader of the Ruby on Rails project.
37signals is extremely popular because of how freely they give out lessons learned and other assorted advice about software design and the business of software. Each bit of advice has been extrapolated from their experiences. There’s interesting things to be learned from one company’s approach to their situation, but generalizing this to all business is so very dangerous.
When you take a single data point and you try to emulate certain practices to try to reproduce their success, you are entering very dangerous territory. In order to reproduce their successes, you need to understand the attributes that caused that success. Successful organizations have many attributes, but only a few of them really cause the magic to happen. If you don’t make the full effort to understand what is going on, and you just believe imitating some subset is going to reproduce the results, you’ve entered cargo cult territory. If you’ve never read about the cargo cults, I encourage you to go do so. It’s quite entertaining. The 37signals effect is cargo cultism in the business of software.
The 900 pound gorilla
Let’s make this part very clear: you are not 37signals (well, I mean, unless you are, in which case, hi guys). For everyone else: your application isn’t the same, your market isn’t the same, and your branding isn’t the same. That means every time they extract their experience with their applications in their market and their branding, and try to transfer it to you, it may be completely and utterly terrible advice given your situation.
Every time 37signals gives out advice, there’s this 900 pound gorilla in the room that no one seems to notice. They wrote Ruby on Rails. They have a huge cult following. They have a blog with 80,000 RSS subscribers. Do you? The next time you read some of their advice ask yourself if it makes sense for them only because of all these things you can’t reproduce. I’m pretty sure there isn’t a chapter in Getting Real that says “First, write and release one of the most important and popular open source projects of the last 10 years”. But should there be?
How about an example?
Conventional wisdom says that to beat your competitors you need to one-up them… This sort of one-upping Cold War mentality is a dead-end… So what to do then? The answer is less. Do less than your competitors to beat them. Solve the simple problems and leave the hairy, difficult, nasty problems to everyone else.
So while I consider Getting Real to be an altogether fantastic read, this particular advice can be downright lethal. I know you want it to be true. I know you want to believe this is the secret to 37signals success. It’s not. Even if they say it’s the reason for their success, they are wrong. It’s not. The vast majority of people get paid money precisely because they solve hairy, difficult, and nasty problems. People who solve easy problems are a commodity. French-frying a potato is an easy problem.
Doing 20% of the work for an 80% product, and solving only the easy problems, brings certain consequences. When you are 37signals, you have some other advantages, as well. The follower, however, isn’t so lucky. He is stuck with just the consequences, and none of the advantages.
A Mental Experiment (that actually happened)
So you decide to sit down, following the philosophy of minimalism and write your own application. You do 20% of the work and get 80% of the product, just like 37signals preached. You start charging money and maybe even start profiting. But all the sudden you have a huge problem. Because you did so …little, and solved a problem that was so easy, you have competition coming out of the woodwork (because any goofball can replicate what you’ve made in a week with a Jolt-induced marathon). And then one day a company we will call Moogle, comes out with some new nifty Application Platform and decides to code up some demo apps. Since your app is so absurdly minimalist (if minimalist is good, absurdly minimalist is better!), using their powerful new tools, a couple of guys at said company are able to clone (possibly inadvertently) your app in a few hours of their spare time as a demonstration. Let me repeat that: your product was so minimalist that it just got “stolen” by another company as one of their sample apps.
Now, if you are 37signals when this happens, you have 80,000 subscribers and a huge brand name. You can complain that you’ve been copied. You can get quite a bit of press, and bunches of bloggers crying foul. You can make a big stink in the media. You can posture about being copied and question the big company’s core values. In the end, you can make a big PR problem for the big company who doesn’t particularly want to fight that fight and so relents and takes it down.
But you aren’t the leader. You are just one of the followers. You don’t have 80,000 subscribers. No bloggers will notice that you’ve been copied. No one will be writing articles or quoting your opinion in their publication. Now what? It’s probably time to get to work on those difficult problems and start adding features.
January 19th, 2009 at 10:08 am
I appreciate this article. It gives a bit of perspective that is easy to gloss over.
Are there any other examples from 37signals?
January 19th, 2009 at 10:13 am
While I agree with some of your points, Getting Real covers a lot more than just this and taking one piece of their advice without noting the other is the dangerous thing.
Doing the bare minimum and coming out with a product is one step. What they’re good at is taking a stance and engaging people to explain why they came out with what they did. Some like it, some hate it but the point is that when you come out with an approach that isn’t clearly different, it’s tough to get followers voice their opinion one way or the other. In this world, if you’re do a lot of things OK, you’re less exciting than the guy that does one thing and will stand by everything in it.
That’s the killer feature – having followers that listen and speak up. The reason they won that fight is because they had people that would back them up. That’s what everyone should strive for, not more features.
January 19th, 2009 at 10:37 am
If you want to take the path of 37signals / FogCreek you need to strike the right balance between building your product and growing a community around your business.
It might therefore be a good start to read Seth Godin’s Tribes as well as Getting Real rather than just Getting Real on it’s own.
January 19th, 2009 at 10:40 am
I appreciate this article but respectfully have to disagree. I think the do less mentality they preach is all about racing to running software. Get up by doing less and iterate as the demand shapes your product. That idea alone has completely changed my development process.
January 19th, 2009 at 11:03 am
But, Joe, has success come with this change?
January 19th, 2009 at 11:48 am
I made a similar post back in October saying pretty much the same thing when DHH went on his rant about how VC is the enemy. In reality VC is right for certain startups with the potential to be very high growth, but most of the time it just doesn’t make sense.
http://dmix.ca/2008/07/a-rebels-answer-to-vc-or-bootstrap/
They are just playing the role of the rebel. They’ve built an interesting character, which is good for PR but frequently bad when you base business decisions on it.
January 19th, 2009 at 12:13 pm
What is this post about? I tried to skim, but got nothing except for don’t go copying 37signals…
January 19th, 2009 at 4:36 pm
Good points. It might be interesting to mention books like ‘In Search Of Excellence’ and ‘From Good to Great’, which imho are in cargo cult territory and correlation vs. causation fallacies, despite plenty of good ideas.
I think the basic lesson is ‘think for yourself’. I think it’s great to understand 37’s perspectives (or Joel’s) as they’re full of good ideas.
But there’s a huge difference between understanding the mode of thinking and their tradeoffs and emulating specific actions. It’s a principle vs. particular instance sort of thing. Learn the principles, but tweak the applications to your particular situation.
I guess that’s sort of obvious stuff, but it doesn’t hurt to be reminded. Thanks!
January 19th, 2009 at 4:49 pm
FAIL
January 19th, 2009 at 5:23 pm
Management by copying other companies doesn’t work. But many still try it. You are very right. You can learn from others but you need to seek knowledge that can then be applied not to copy (because pasting into a different organization doesn’t work).
January 19th, 2009 at 5:39 pm
But how often do we design and implement too little software? Are there really that many sites/businesses out there dying cause their software doesn’t do enough? Feature creep, scope creep, etc. is a MUCH MUCH larger problem than making too simple of software.
January 19th, 2009 at 6:35 pm
Many people who’ve read this and commented want to try to defend “Getting Real”. You guys have missed the point so very badly. Maybe I should have given more examples, but I didn’t want to turn this into a novel.
@BJ
Of course there are. You just don’t hear about them because they die silently and quickly. The big lumbering behemoth projects (let’s say, the entire enterprise) that are feature-creeped to absurdity, take years to properly die, and everyone knows about it.
January 19th, 2009 at 7:08 pm
It’s all about brand equity. No gorilla starts at 900 pounds, but if you feed it with the right foods to give it the energy and inertia it needs, it will grow that large—even if you are copying someone who cares less about their gorilla that has the potential for more.
January 19th, 2009 at 8:23 pm
You should investigate what process means. The whole purpose of process is to produce reproducible results. 37s has some process but not a heck of a lot, it relies on craftsmanship rather than process.
January 20th, 2009 at 2:14 am
To those of us who see that the article is attempting to refute ‘Getting Real’, you have really got hold of the wrong end of the stick. The author is not writing off the 37Signal’s chef d’oeuvre. He admits that ‘Getting Real’ is one of his most admired book. Instead it’s merely cautioning that if you do take a leaf out of 37Signals book, do so with a grain of salt. Things that work for one company may not quite work well for another for the reason that two companies operate in different environments . I couldn’t agree more. It’s common sense, actually.
January 20th, 2009 at 8:16 am
Interesting post.
I think Gustavo Duarte said it best:
>I think the basic lesson is ‘think for yourself’.
Draw good points from anywhere, but check, i.e. think
, also experiment to see if they are applicable to your situation and adopt them (with or without tweaks) or not, as makes sense.
BTW, those captchas are a bit difficult to read – text a bit too distorted, and the squiggly lines through the text make it harder to figure out an “a” from an “e”, for example. I had to reload captcha many times. Just FYI. (Hope it goes thru this time
- Vasudev
January 20th, 2009 at 1:34 pm
I agree with the logic of your argument here. While I found tremendous value in “Getting Real” and the overall philosophies promoted therein – I did feel like there were troves of advice that may work well for 37 Signals, but not for me.
For example, they are very keen on the iterative process of getting the product up and in front of customers early and often. Well – in my case, the problem that our company is trying to solve is a major clusterf*ck of data integrity issues and stuff that takes a very long time to solve. We’re finally approaching a point where we feel close to help solve that problem for our users (and therefore, provide them value). And I think NOW is the time for us to start engaging users (whereas earlier would have been counterproductive because we just weren’t even close to delivering on the vision of our product).
Now – we’re not successful (we haven’t even launched), whereas 37 Signals has tons of traction. So maybe I’ll look back and wish I HAD taken every bit of advice in there. But with all due respect, lessons learned from building apps like Writeboard that are essentially blank slates for users to drop their info into are quite a bit different than all the cycles and design considerations required of building database-driven applications (where the company developing the app also has enormous data population and maintenance issues). There are a lot of painful lessons that we’ve learned through trial and error in building our application (from thrashing over data model design at the beginning, to narrowing down the enormous list of feature ideas that were not so trivial to build that we could just throw them up there and let an iterative process guide us to the light, etc.) … and I felt like “Getting Real” really glossed over a lot of hairy development problems that go on behind the scenes.
Great book, great philosophies – but I agree that you really have to ask yourself how closely your product, skills, following and the million other “intangibles” resemble those of the 37 Signals folks.
January 20th, 2009 at 8:37 pm
Thanks for bringing this up – I was thinking the exact same things as I read Getting Real.
And I agree that Getting Real is a great read. It’s very good at crystallizing a lot of things that you’re probably already thinking if you have a background in software.
January 20th, 2009 at 11:50 pm
“Getting Real” is a great ideology for the newest categories of software — single-purpose, instantly usable, low-overhead, “apps”. There are many contexts in which this philosophy makes sense — small web apps, Facebook apps, MySpace apps, iPhone apps, etc.
It’s not a useful ideology to write the next great word processor or an SAP-killer. For that, perhaps Joel Spolsky’s ideology makes more sense.
And another thing — few people are going to pay you for solving a difficult, obscure, technical issue. They will, however, pay you for solving a difficult problem in their life or business — which often means simple, targeted software + all the stuff that goes around the engineering — domain understanding to choose WHICH few features, UI to make it fun and compelling, marketing to reach you and your peers, a community to support your efforts, documentation and books to help you climb a learning curve, business reputation to sell it to your non-technical superiors. You cannot isolate code from the rest of the value prop of any product.
January 21st, 2009 at 10:25 am
I think that, in all honesty, you’re the one missing the point Louis.
The idea of books like “Getting Real” and they’re business philosophy (and the same with others like Joel and books like “Good to Great”) are not about doing what they’re doing… It’s all about knowing and learning how they *did* it and then start *doing* it yourself. Anybody that read those books/articles and seriously went on to doing “something” themselves, considering they have half a brain, they have adapted the concepts to fit their users, business model and object, etc…
The knowledge and wisdom that comes from those books is invaluable though, and the best way to learn and build a successful business is by learning from others who “got there”. You can’t be a “900 pound gorilla” from day one.. They tell us how they did it… You do it as you see best!
Bottom line is: at the end of the day, their methods worked! How about yours?
Thanks for taking the time to write this though…
January 21st, 2009 at 11:44 am
@Levi,
The only complaint I have with what you wrote is your first sentence. It’s very difficult to successfully argue _I’ve_ missed the point when you then proceed to repeat everything I was trying to say.
January 21st, 2009 at 12:05 pm
Hmmm.. My “miss the point” comment was more of a sarcastic response to your “Many people who’ve read this and commented want to try to defend “Getting Real”. You guys have missed the point so very badly”…
I know you got the point and disagree… The same with me and your opinion!
Sorry for not making the sarcasm more explicit… Interwebz difficult makes! ^^,
January 21st, 2009 at 2:08 pm
Ah! Sorry!
December 23rd, 2009 at 4:03 am
Spot on Louis.
Ideologies are dangerous. 37 Signals owes more of their success to their establishment of a cult than to their mantra of “simple.” See the books “The True Believer” and “The Culting of Brands” to better understand what they’ve accomplished and why it has worked so well.
It’s important to note that true believers find identifying with the cult far more important than the doctrine that is espoused. Consider if 37 Signals were to decree next year that in 2010 things had changed and “release only when ready” and “feature rich drives value” should be the mantras? You can almost hear the stampede of agreement on those “facts” already…
JMTCW.