A Founder's Retrospective

Back in 2006 when I was diving full-time into MetaGeek and hired Brian Tuttle to join me, 37 Signals was the “it” startup in my world. They were a small company making BaseCamp for project management and publishing a blog with strong opinions about how to build a successful business. When they published Getting Real I bought it immediately and Brian and I both devoured it. It’s one of those books where a topic is anywhere from one to three pages long, and consecutive topics are not necessarily related to each other. It’s just a bunch of their learnings and opinions that were probably originally blog posts, all packaged together in a book. 

I no longer have this book on my shelf and am reviewing it from memory, which really fits the theme of the book. 

One of their opinions that immediately stood out to me was to not log every single customer complaint as a bug. If enough people complain about the same thing you’ll remember to fix it, and if only one person complained about something it might really be a problem to most customers, so don’t worry about it.

Another opinion that greatly influenced the user experience of MetaGeek software was that the developers should choose good default settings and NOT have giant configuration menus. Write opinionated software that works great for your target persona, not software that can work for anyone, and generally sucks for everyone (I’m looking at you, Atlassian).

I can’t remember all the individual lessons in the book, but the key takeaways for me were to build great software for your target audience, keep it clean and simple, and stay focused.

David Heinemeier Hansson and Jason Fried, the founders of 37 Signals and the authors of Getting Real, have continued publishing business books. Rework was good, and I just discovered they’ve written one about remote work, called “Remote.” I need to check it out… from the library – I love libraries 😀