Word: 37signals
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Unconventional organization is proving to be one of 37signals' biggest assets. The company creates programs that facilitate teamwork, and it ends up relying on the very same tools it builds. "We are growing in the same way a lot of our customers are, so we build products that we need to run our own business," Fried says. "We just build stuff we want to use. If we need it, they need...
...heart of 37signals, named for an attempt to find signs of intelligent life in space, are four pieces of software that help business teams manage projects (see below). Subscribing to the Web-based software costs $12 to $149 a month, depending on the amount of disk space and the number of features you use. The thousands of paying users--Fried won't say exactly how many--provide 37signals with a steady revenue stream. The subscription model minimizes the up-front cost for small businesses and makes software spending more predictable for firms worried about cash flow. The monthly fees include...
...37signals team manages its products remotely, so when a problem pops up, it can be fixed without having to recall software or ask customers to install a patch. And if a new product isn't quite what customers wanted, 37signals can respond immediately. When the company launched Highrise, a contact-management tool, in March, customers pleaded for a specific format for freelancers. Within 36 hours, 37signals expanded its offering. "They implement a mix of what's on their own road map and what people suggest," says subscriber Chris Busse, a Web developer...
Fried admits the 37signals team is stretched thin handling its users' demands. He insists that the bigger a staff gets, the slower it moves. "A lot of teams have problems with overcollaboration," he says. "Too much teamwork, too many cooks in the kitchen, too many people making decisions...
Simplicity is one of 37signals' guiding principles, in programming as well as management. For most technical issues that arise, simple work-arounds will address 95% of the need with 10% of the effort that would be required to cover everything. For example, when designing Writeboard, for collaborative writing, the team wanted to let people track how much a document had changed over time. They pored over Ph.D. theses and complex algorithms. Instead, ace programmer David Hansson worked out a "cheat": software to track the number of characters in each document. The evolving total could be conveyed visually using dots...