Jason Fried of 37Signals @ New Denver Ad Club – Audio + Notes
The New Denver Ad Club hosted Jason Fried of 37signals the other night (Thursday, 7/31/08). I convinced a couple of folks from the o2 Group to come along and listen to what he had to say.
It was a bit funny, watching the schism between product-centric people like Jason and client-services people (like most agency people) flare up. However, I find that a lot of what Jason talked about was what I tend to agitate for when starting new client relationships. Client-services people are generally terrified of saying things like “We think we can do something great for $X, let’s get started”. My thinking is that if you do good work, and are worth what you’re getting paid, this can serve as a great filter for clients and projects. Clients that want everything specced out, discussed, wire-framed, etc, before they open their checkbook are just asking for free work.
I managed to get a decent audio recording on my laptop, and took some notes. Here are the notes and audio. Perhaps I’ll add more commentary later:
Audio: jasonfried_20080731.mp3
Notes:
NDAC Presentation – J. Freid.
7/31/2008 @ Oriental Theatre in in Denver=============
Planning is overrated: Start doing stuff
Don’t let planning scare you out of doing something
Blah blah blah, sharing/teaching/open-sourcing is good… blah.
Interruptions bad. Open-floorplan offices contribute. When it’s easy to interupt somesome, you break their time up into smaller and smaller chunks.
Passive collaboration techniques can help with interruptions.
Big companies wish they were small.
Err on the side of simple. 37s’ big mistakes were trying to do too much.
Focus on things that don’t change. Let your competitors thrash about and “compete” with each other to do “something new”.
Fancy PM charts/documents etc create the “Illusion of agreement”
QUESTION: How do you figure out ROI possiblity? How to determine if a client (for those of us who do client work) can afford to finish what they start?
Jason claims that they won more work when they got rid of abstractions and started building stuff (or something).
Make dirty comps. Things don’t need to line up. Don’t waste time on things early on. Designers want to be perfectionists, but they’re stupid assholes.
Hire good writers (duh)
Meetings are toxic.
Need, Can’t, and Easy are BAD WORDS. When you say easy, you’re always talkinga bout someone else’s work. (QUESTION: I say things are easy all the time, because I see a simple solution — but easy combines with “need” for some idiotic feature.) You think you need something to launch, or can’t launch without something. This is just limiting, etc.
Decompose problems into the smallest atomic things possible. If you can solve 1/4th of a problem in a few mintues, do that, instead of spending days solving a whole problem.
========
Q&A
========How to apply all this shit to client-work?
- Promising stupid deliverables all along the way is dumb. Clients don’t are about that. They want to see stuff done. How much will it cost, when I can I see it, etc?
… the best frameworks are the ones extracted from real projects.
- When customer/client proposes a solution, they’re really describing a problem, your value is that you might have a better/simpler solution to their problem.
Favorite website? The drudge report – it’s clear, one page, etc. You can scan it all in 20 seconds and get it all. Compare it to CNN, MSNBC, NYTimes, etc.
Despite free stuff, people who usually pay are paying from day1.
Backpack started out as free-first, upgrade later. Offering the option to pay right from the start improve revenue huge.
Roles @ 37 signals.:
1 cust service
1 jason (biz and design)
1 full-time designer
1 full-time writer
5 people are programmers5/5 chicago/elsewhere.
Duffy design in minneapilis — their site just shows pictures of their work, that’s it. Jasont thinks that’s cool.
Internal disagreements: (ultimately, J will decide, but that never happens). Generally, whomever is more passionate about something, they get to hold the bag/take responsibility.