This is Signal vs. Noise, a weblog by 37signals about design, business, experience, simplicity, the web, culture, and more. Established 1999 in Chicago. Visit the Product Blog for more information on our products.

David asks:

How do most companies handle economic downturns? They keep a closer eye on spending, they cut back on hiring (or lay people off), they waste less time, they focus on their core competencies, they push to eliminate complexities, they cut back on long tedious projects and instead focus on quicker wins that have a more immediate impact on the bottom line, and they consolidate roles and trim fat.

This is what Getting Real is all about. Staying small, being frugal, focusing on just a few core things at a time, quick wins, eliminating abstractions that lead to miscommunication and complexity, only doing what you need to do instead of everything you could possibly do, etc. We believe companies that live these ideas are better off all the time — but especially when times get rough.

Charging for your product is safer

Another key tenet of Getting Real is charging for your product. You make something and your customers pay for it. Connecting your revenues to your customers helps you stay focused on the things that really matter to the people who pay your bills. It’s a healthy alignment that helps during tough times.

This isn’t the case when advertisers are the ones funding your operation. When the people using your product aren’t the ones paying for your product you’re at a strategic disadvantage. Your improvements can’t just be targeted at users, they also have to be targeted at advertisers. So now some of your energy is split into pleasing two different groups. It’s possible advertisers and users have the same goals, but it’s less likely. You’ll notice I’m calling people users now. That’s what people become when they don’t pay for your product—they are users, not customers. That changes the entire dynamic.

One more point on advertising-funding businesses: They’re at greater risk in economic downturns. Advertising budgets are among the first to get cut when things go bad. If your business is based on someone else’s advertising budget, you’re in for an especially difficult time in a down market.

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

Basecamp
Large monitors on production floor show company’s Basecamp milestones
“I love my new production schedule monitor. Great job and the best part is that I can see the red dates from my office. Everyone here likes it so far or until their project goes red for everyone to see.”

A monitor displays milestones at A. D. Williams Engineering.

VisioPlanning for Basecamp: Keep track of projects and employees in real time
“When an employee is working on a certain project, he must keep his interface up to date by activating the flashing light corresponding to the task(s) he is working on. This update is then automatically carried on to the supervisor interface. This way, the supervisor always knows what the employees are working on in real time.”

Basecamp FAQ: How can I upload or change the photo that appears next to my name?
Tired of seeing that generic person icon inside Basecamp? Then you and your team should upload photos. It’s a simple step, but it really humanizes things when can you see a person’s face next to their words.

Highrise
Highrise Deals API
Attention developers: The Highrise API now works with the new Deals feature.

Multiple products
Discussing when to use Highrise tasks vs. Basecamp to-dos
“There is almost NO time that seeing everything we have to do in one place actually helps us, other than by making us anxious. Theoretically, it sounds nice, but I don’t think there’s a practical application. Instead, I think keeping tasks somewhat separate allow you to focus on what is important right now.”

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Apple must be smiling whenever one of their competitors bill their next MP3-player as an iPod killer. It reminds everyone who the market leader is and invites them to evaluate the product on Apple’s terms.

If you’re going to be an iPod killer — and not just a great new music player — you have to first out-Apple Apple at all the things that makes the iPod special. That means superior industrial design, an iTMS-beating catalogue of content, and a better desktop experience than iTunes.

That’s almost an impossibly tall order. Which is of course why it hasn’t happened yet and probably won’t happen any time soon.

That doesn’t mean that there’s not room for other entries in the music player department, just that you’re going to have a hell of a time making it if you think cloning the market leader and saying you did it better is the way to do it.

Now replace Apple and the iPod with the gorilla and blockbuster in your niche. Are you setting yourself up to be a Zune?

Highrise has been on a roll lately. The new Deals feature has been a huge success. Let’s keep the good news coming. Today we’re excited to roll out two of the most requested features in Highrise: CSV (Excel) import, and exporting of notes/emails from contacts, cases, and deals.

CSV (Excel) import

You’ve always been able to import contacts from vCards, Basecamp, Outlook, and ACT!, but we didn’t provide an option to import data from a CSV file. Many people keep their contacts in Excel, so now you can export those contacts from Excel into a CSV file and import them into Highrise. Here’s how it works (from the Highrise help section). Jamis did a great job putting this feature together.

Export your notes/email

You’ve been able to export your contacts from Highrise in vCard or CSV format for a while now. But starting today you can also export your notes/emails from your contacts, cases, and deals.

Here’s how it works.

Scientists have created the first ‘humanoid’ robot that can mimic the facial expressions and lip movements of a human being. Full article at Mail Online.

My talk at the Business Innovation Factory 4 conference in Providence, RI last month. While you’re at it, be sure to watch Tony from Zappos, Dennis Littky walking the walk on school reform, Matt Cottam rethinking the nursing home experience, and Colonel Dean Esserman (from last year’s conference).

This gets a 10 for creepy and a 10 for clever.

The creepy part

This is a 240 pencil set made from the carbon of a cremated human. Each pencil is foil stamped with the name of the deceased.

The clever part

Only one pencil can be removed at a time. You sharpen the pencil by putting it back in the box. The shavings then occupy the space of the used pencils. Over time the pencil box fills with sharpenings — turning the box into a new urn (it’s filled with the shavings which are made from the cremation).

Designed by Nadine Jarvis. Linked via Marc Ecko.

Stream of consciousness rant:

I’ve been in too many meetings, too many conferences, too many discussions where someone goes “I’m having a hard time explaining this or that…” Then they say “I just really want to say this…” And then they say it and it’s clear, concise, and obvious. But it’s as if they aren’t even listening to themselves because they’re right back to thinking about how to say what they just said. Only now they’re back to trying to make it more complicated than it needs to be. They should just say it like they said it a minute ago.

We’re all told to be good listeners when someone else is talking, but we should work on being better listeners when we’re talking. We might find that we’ve already got the answers.

This week I’m having a new roof put on my house. I did the research, got the quotes, picked a company, and they’re working on it now.

They’ve been at it two days so far, but I’ve already been surprised twice. It reminded me how important it is to set your customer’s expectations.

Day one

They tore off the old roof(s). You can’t see the sky, it’s just the old roofing material—the ceiling is still in place. I had no idea this would make a mess inside the house on the top floor. Paint chips, roof dust through some cracks and removed skylights. I guess I should have assumed, but I’ve never been through this before so I didn’t think much about it.

Would have been nice if the roofing company said…

Day two

Out come the blow torches. I didn’t know they’d be torching today. But I’m working from home and wondering what the acrid burning smell is and light smoke filling the house. Now I know.

Would have been nice if they said…

Day three

I have no idea what’s next. What happens tomorrow? They don’t tell you, they just do it and then you find out.

Would be nice at the end of each day if they said…

Setting expectations is key

I have confidence in their work, but the experience has been soured by the the lack of expectations. Just giving me a feel for what’s gonna happen today and tomorrow would go a long way towards making the experience significantly better.

Gapers Block has a great piece on Hanson, the band.

Hanson is a great case study for the music business and the business business. They’re a group of guys — brothers, no less — who love what they do and don’t care what you think. They’ve built a deeply loyal fan base, they’ve built a great business, and they’ve been able to mobilize their fans to support causes that the band — and their fans — believe in.

And they’ve done all this after being written off and largely ignored.

What I found most impressive about the story is how dedicated they are to their community. They are part of the community, not just facilitators of the community. For example, to promote charity, and their “Walk Around the World” tour, they are walking a mile with their fans before each show. For each mile walked, the band donates one dollar on the walker’s behalf to one of five causes the walker can choose from. That’s just cool.

I think the whole Hanson story is simple one of dedication, product, and patience. They’re dedicated to their music, they put out a solid product, and their patience has allowed them to sustain long-term success. They’ve made it on their own terms on their own schedule.

Sidenote: In a strange set of circumstances involving Ryan Singer and his former employer, I happened to go see a Hanson show at the House of Blues in Chicago a few years ago. I was impressed and thoroughly entertained. I also got a chance to meet the guys and was impressed by their down to earth nature and genuine love for what they get to do every night. They love their music, they love their fans, their fans love them, and their fans love their music. It’s the perfect loop.

I just got back from RubyConf 2008, in Orlando, Florida. It was really a fantastic conference. It came off really well, and everything was top-notch. What I loved most was reconnecting with the community, just sitting, chatting and hacking with people from all over the world with whom I normally interact only online.

It made me realize that what I really want to attend is an “unconference”, where people pay to come and listen to one (or maybe two) keynotes by prominent community members, but then the rest of the time is spent in unstructured hacking sessions, where people cluster and work together on any number of different projects. If people want to stand up at a mic and talk about something that interests them, that’s fine, but the focus would not be on presentation, but on working on interesting projects.

Barcamp sounds kind of like this, but the emphasis still seems to be on presentations. Has anyone ever attended something like this?

A lot of musician interviews wind up with a pulling-teeth vibe where you can sense the artist would rather just let the music do the talking. “Dion Pays Homage To Guitar-Rock Giants,” an audio interview with the singer-songwriter on NPR, is the opposite of that. You can sense he can’t wait to tell stories about his music and his peers.

You might think you don’t give a shit what Dion has to say, but take a listen. You’ll be fascinated. In fact, it’s a great example of promotion through education. Instead of just some old fogey plugging his latest record, he really gives ya something. He bring his guitar along and weaves in bits of songs, anecdotes about the greats he came up with, musical lessons, etc.

He covers “Summertime Blues” and explains how he loves the sense of humor displayed in the third verse. He talks about the song “Ruby Ruby” which led to the greatest compliment of his life: Little Richard’s mother telling him he’s got soul. He mentions how Johnny Cash’s “I Walk the Line” changes keys six times. He tells the story of writing “Born to Cry” as a 16-year old after he walked past a synagogue and heard the cantor singing. And he breezes through all of that in just a few minutes.

It’s a great lesson for anyone who’s trying to promote something. If you just show up to plug something, it’s easy to tune out. But if you give your audience a story they want to hear and/or teach them something interesting, they’ll eagerly pay attention.

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

Basecamp
Versatility Skateboards: “Basecamp is the body of our business’s communications and Campfire is our brain”
“Basecamp is the body of our business’s communications. Every project, from designing a new skateboard to planning a contest sponsorship, is tracked in Basecamp. Campfire is our brain. All three of us leave it up and running all day, which allows us the ability to brainstorm at the drop of a hat. The best feature of Campfire is that it’s logged and we can revisit the ideas we discussed 10 minutes, 10 days or 10 weeks later. Without Campfire, a lot of ideas would be lost!”

Campfire
How Beanstalk uses Campfire when things go wrong
“We just had a short outage on Beanstalk, which required a quick reboot on our slices at Engine Yard. While this situation really sucks, it happens. The best thing you can do is let people know you’re working on it and update them on the progress. By using Campfire, we’re able to give people an extra sense of comfort that real people are hard at work on the problem. In the end, a negative thing becomes a positive experience.”

Backpack
Plotters use Backpack to create “the greatest birthday scavenger hunt of all time!”
Tim Sullivan plotted out an elaborate alternate reality birthday game for his girlfriend using Backpack. He writes, “I don’t think we’d have been able to even conceive of organizing this without Backpack. It’s keeping us completely organized and allowing us to pull off what could be the greatest birthday scavenger hunt of all time!”

Multiple products
Video: Setting up 37signals Open Bar
If you use more than one 37signals product (or have multiple accounts within a product), you can make your life a lot easier with 37signals Open Bar. In this video, Jason and Jamie show how easy it is to set up Open Bar so you can switch quickly between your accounts.

37signals products are “essential web tools for virtual students”
Three 37signals tools made the list at “Ditch the backpack: 100 essential web tools for virtual students.”

37signals tools make list of 45 top cellphone resources
Mobile Maven, a site dedicated to cellphone tips, recently published “45 Mobile Resources Every Road Warrior Must Have.” Three 37signals tools made the list.

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+--------------------------+---------------+
| country                  | country_count |
+--------------------------+---------------+
| United States            |        403585 |
| United States of America |        201800 |
| USA                      |        127270 |
| Canada                   |         88615 |
| United Kingdom           |         77154 |
| Great Britain            |         41376 |
| Australia                |         27648 |
| Germany                  |         25266 |
| Spain                    |         23312 |
| France                   |         22422 |
| UK                       |         16280 |
| Netherlands              |         15488 |
| Ireland                  |         15439 |
| New Zealand              |         12391 |
| Belgium                  |          9648 |
| Italy                    |          9608 |
| Deutschland              |          9600 |
| Switzerland              |          9281 |
| Mexico                   |          8866 |
| US                       |          8351 |
| Denmark                  |          7044 |
| India                    |          6302 |
| Brazil                   |          5835 |
| Sweden                   |          5662 |
| China                    |          5139 |
| Poland                   |          4963 |
| South Africa             |          4894 |
| Schweiz                  |          4514 |
| Japan                    |          4168 |
| Singapore                |          4141 |
| Norway                   |          4125 |
| Austria                  |          3793 |
| England                  |          3434 |
| Hong Kong                |          3422 |
| United Arab Emirates     |          3410 |
| Thailand                 |          2705 |
| Israel                   |          2598 |
| U.S.A.                   |          2496 |
| Portugal                 |          2491 |
| Russian Federation       |          2360 |
| Costa Rica               |          2337 |
| Philippines              |          2269 |
| Viet Nam                 |          2142 |
| Jordan                   |          1973 |
| Nederland                |          1928 |
| Finland                  |          1848 |
| Brasil                   |          1804 |
| Argentina                |          1750 |
| Turkey                   |          1713 |
| Peru                     |          1488 |
| Malaysia                 |          1481 |
| The Netherlands          |          1433 |
| Russia                   |          1398 |
| Greece                   |          1144 |
| Chile                    |          1142 |
| Romania                  |          1106 |
| Danmark                  |          1063 |
| België                   |          1056 |
| Ukraine                  |          1048 |
+--------------------------+---------------+

For example, there are 1481 people in the Highrise contact database from Malaysia, 3422 from Hong Kong, 23,312 from Spain, etc.

Note: People can enter whatever they want in the country field which is why some enter USA, some United States, and some United States of America.

We’ve got a problem. We don’t know how to describe to average civilians just what it is that 37signals does.

Like when we’re at a cocktail party and someone asks, “What does 37signals do?” The answer typically starts with “a web software company…” and goes to something like “that helps small businesses organize information…” and ends with the other person snoring.

What do you think our hook should be for average people? What’s a good way to quickly describe what 37signals does that doesn’t put non-techies to sleep? How would you make what 37signals does sound interesting to civilians…in under 20 seconds?

In “A Radical Business Plan for Facebook: Charge people” [Slate], Farhad Manjoo proposes “something crazy”: Tech companies should start charging people to use their services.

David is interviewed in the piece and explains why “having a price is really cool for making profits.”

Read the full article for more.

Also recently published: Die Kraft des Mittelfingers [brand eins] is a recent article (in German) on 37signals. Even if you don’t speak German, you may be able to get the gist:

Related: The Secret to Making Money Online [SvN]

We’ve been slowly trickling some of our internal projects onto GitHub, making them more widely available in the hopes that (for one) they’ll be as useful to others as they are to ourselves, and (for another) that people will contribute patches back to make the projects even better.

Today I moved our CachedExternals plugin there. You can read all about it in the README, but read on for an overview (and justification).

Today we’re excited to unveil an enhancement that makes using Highrise even more convenient: The sidebar search-for-a-person feature is now significantly faster than before.

Searching for a person or company from the sidebar on the Dashboard or a person/company’s page is the most frequently used feature in all of Highrise. Highrise is about getting to a person/company’s page so you can enter a note or look up a previous conversation or grab a phone number. Now you can do that a whole lot faster. More speed and less wait time makes this experience markedly better.

Making this faster on the user experience side wasn’t the only goal here: The new sidebar search also reduces call-backs to the server. That lowers the number of requests to the database which, indirectly, makes everything else a little bit faster too.

Watch this video to see it in action

Sam Stephenson, one of our developers here at 37signals, has been working hard to make this a reality. And now that we’ve launched it, he put together a video showing you the before and after:

We hope this helps makes using Highrise an even better experience. Thanks for your continued support!

From 1973-1983, Harley-Davidson’s market share went from 78% to 23% as Japanese manufacturers flooded the market with high quality, low priced bikes. Unable to compete on price against the Japanese producers, Harley had to establish other market values and improve quality. A Case Study of Harley Davidson’s Business Practises looks at the management, marketing, and manufacturing techniques that brought the company back.

The company started to use an emotional appeal that hooked into something bigger than just technology/features:

Telling a story makes such a deeper connection than a feature list.

No feature list here.

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

Backpack
Basetwo Media: “Backpack’s ease of use encourages collaboration from all of our employees.”
“After having tried a variety of other online tools, shared calendars and a Wiki, we’ve that found Backpack’s ease of use encourages collaboration from all of our employees. Best of all, it’s fun to use.”

Backpack Tip: Jump to a specific date/month
Video shows you how to jump to a specific date/month in the Backpack calendar.

Basecamp
Owner of Adam&Co. (a design firm): “Basecamp CHANGED my life for the better”
“It really has made my life sooooooo much more manageable and I have to say – I didnt thnk about how I could leverage it to deal with non-work things until this situation arised. We have a growing list of contacts on there so everyone has the most recent numbers, a constant to-do list that we each can knock stuff off of as we accomplish it rather than each of us doing the same things twice – as well as a journal of events so we all have the same story. It’s truly been incredible.”

What we’ve found: When it comes to spreading a story, the mainstream media isn’t as important as the micromedia. Being written up at the right blogs has had way more impact for us than the press we’ve gotten in big-circulation publications.

Traditional media is losing ground
“10 reasons why newspapers won’t reinvent news” [via JK] explains why papers are having a tough time keeping up with the web:

This bit from “On the Bus, But With No Reason to Go?” [Washington Post], an article about the evolving role of the press in the presidential campaign, shows the impact: The mainstream media just doesn’t matter that much anymore.

We’ve noticed a similar trend in our sphere too…

Time vs. Daring Fireball
We’ve been written up in big mainstream publications like Wired and Time, but we’ve found that we actually get more hits when we’re profiled on sites like Daring Fireball or Lifehacker. Links from these places result in bigger spikes in our traffic and sales.

When 43 Folders’ Merlin Mann lists one of our products at his site, we get thousands of new visitors. During a recent 37signals Live we were conducting, Digg’s Kevin Rose posted a note to Twitter that he was watching us. We instantly saw a bump of 200 viewers. Articles in bigtime publications are nice and sound impressive, but they don’t result in that level of direct, instant activity.

These smaller sites don’t have the same volume of readers as, say, Newsweek, but the people who do read them actually care about what they have to say. There’s a relationship. The audience isn’t made up of random readers, it’s people who think a certain way.

The first graham cracker company that produces decent packaging will win my loyalty forever. There is very little as frustrating as breaking every cracker in the package as a by-product of opening the package—especially when you’ve got a yowling one-year-old watching impatiently as you do so. The plastic envelope around each set of crackers is all but impossible to open cleanly, and you can forget about it being “resealable”. Once open, you have to resort to a plastic bag to prevent the crackers from going stale in a hurry.

I won’t go so far as to say how hard could it be?, but this can’t be the best possible solution, can it?

Saltines could definitely use some packaging love, too, but graham crackers are the worst.

I’ve been doing research for my RubyConf presentation on November 6th, and while digging through one of my old projects, I ran into an interesting bit of code.

The project in question was Needle, a result of a brief love affair with complexity. (This was before I met 37signals, and both 37signals and my wife have since forgiven me.) It was a fun project, but I added features because they “sounded cool”, not because I had any practical need for them.

Adding new features always results in increased complexity. (For some features, the added complexity may be fairly small, but there is not necessarily any relation between the perceived complexity of the feature and its implementation. That, however, is a topic for another dissertation.) In the case of Needle, I wanted (essentially) to be able extend objects on the fly, and I had two ideas for how to do this. In one, you specify an existing extension to append to the object. I called this the “with” approach, since the object is extended “with” another one. In the other approach, you specify an anonymous block of code to extend the object with. I called this the “doing” approach, since the object is extended by “doing” something.

Both sound cool, right? Yeah, man! Extend objects on the fly! Whee!

So I implemented both. The problem was that I couldn’t immediately see how to make both work together. What would happen if wanted to extend an object both “with” something, and by “doing” something? Adding the features themselves added complexity to the project, and I wasn’t willing to further complicate things by making the two features compatible, so I created an artificial constraint: the library would raise an error if you tried to use both features on the same object.

Now, constraints are good, and you should certainly seek to embrace yours. But creating artificial constraints because you’ve painted yourself into a corner is code smell, and the solution is not to accept your corner and wait for the paint to dry, it is to unpaint yourself out of that corner. In the case of Needle, I should have either worked harder to make the two features compatible, or removed one of them. (Or both of them!)

Ultimately, Needle failed because it didn’t fill a real-world need, and so its code is a graveyard full of things like these artificial constraints. Real projects need real applications. But complexity being what it is, eventually you’re almost certain to find yourself heading for that corner with a trail of paint chasing you. When you do, pause for a moment and consider whether this is a true constraint you’re embracing, or whether you can do with less complexity. Chances are, the prospects aren’t as bleak as you thought.

This is all related to a RubyConf presentation I’ll be giving in Orlando on November 6th, entitled Recovering from Enterprise: how to embrace Ruby’s idioms and say goodbye to bad habits. If you’re going to be there, do stop by and introduce yourself!

Hands down my fave iPhone app: Instapaper (created by Marco Arment).

Whenever I come across a long article online that looks interesting — Bill Simmons’ list of the best sports pieces ever written is where I started — I click Instapaper’s “Read Later” bookmarklet and then the app automatically stores it on my phone so I can read it later.

The offline storage makes it great for subway rides in NYC.

Left: List of saved articles on Instapaper’s iPhone app.

The app downloads a text-optimized version of each page which removes the need to zoom or horizontally pan. No more accidentally side-scrolling from a long text column.

Left: How a stripped down article looks onscreen.

Very Clever: The Virginia Employment Commission preprints the return address of payment envelopes with their own address.

Not Clever: New York state Workers Comp Board tells me to mail my payment right away, but does not include the address to send it to. I have to call them to find out where to send my mail.