Heads up: I’m a big fan of David & Jason and this post deals with the beginning stage of startups

I’ve been following their blog posts, talks, books for quite sometime and without any doubt they’re doing amazing work. I agree with most of the things they say except for their stress on work-life balance and remote working teams.

Background
37signals was founded by Jason Fried as a web design shop in 1999 for which David worked as a contract programmer. It was a perfect combination of programming + design and they already had a bunch of paying customers. Basecamp was started as a side project since they wanted a neat way to manage clients’ requests, status, etc.

When you are starting up, the situation is going to be far from how basecamp started.

a. They had a huge set of beta users right from day-1 (or before they even started basecamp) and a good amount of them were ready to pay.

b. It was more like a side project and they were well paid from their main design shop – technically they got paid every month

c. They had a great reputation amongst their customers (who would eventually become Basecamp users)

9/10 times if you were to start a startup for the 1st time, none of the above would actually work in your favor . The hard part is to get the 1st check from a customer which in turn implies building a product that users actually want.

Their recent blog post on firing the workaholics does *not* apply to an early stage startup. You need to build (&fail) faster to actually check if the product makes any sense for users. The 5-day / 8-hrs work would mean slower build times and longer time to fail – which might eventually result in loss of fizz to do stuff.

Working remote:
The best way to move faster is everyone being at the same place. Even though many tools (skype, basecamp, etc.) exist, it’s easier and faster to sit together, discuss mockups, code & push rather than trying to work your way out in skype, etc.
The time spent in unnecessary discussions is very minimal since your whiteboard is always full (at least it should be like that).

I used to be an evangelist earlier of this whole work-life balance, etc, but realized it really makes little sense at the early stage of a startup. Building fast is a big criteria and I don’t know how work-life-balance (or) remote teams would fit into the picture

I was at Starbucks waiting for a demo when I bumped onto a random magazine
that was lying on the table. I was flipping through it when a page that said ‘Psychological behavior of humans‘ caught my attention.

I started reading and subsequently had a meeting with Garry on UX designing. The resulting discussions & learning was a surprise. I wrote a post earlier on the 2 things a startup should focus and going to map them here.

Getting people to use the product is more a mind game rather than anything else – they have just coined different terms like A/B testing, etc. for the same.

Usability

Human behavior:

If you’re asked to do something and you do it all by your own (without any external help), your self-confidence and love towards it shoots up so much that you want
to keep doing it.

If you get your Hello world program right at your very first attempt, you would want to continue to code another program – your love towards it grows. You might be a great writer / singer / cricketer, etc. but you would still love programming because you tasted “success” at the 1st attempt.

After the UX discussion, I mapped it to building websites. Have a 1-liner for your website, can be anything. For eg: “My website allows people to upload a video“. If it’s going to require the user to signup, read a bunch of FAQ’s, etc. before being able to upload the video, it’s a bad experience. Checkout hellofax to understand it better.
But, if it’s just plain obvious and he does it all on his own, he just loves your product and even going to share with his network.

Adding features (vs) simplicity:
It’s a common problem, each customer requests a feature and you would want to build them, making the product bulky. Do you want to build it ? is a different discussion altogether, but overtime your product would have a lot many features which might actually be good.

However, irrespective of however bulky your product is, design it in such a way that the 1st time user should be able to achieve at least the 1-liner all by himself! Hook the 1st time user, half the problem gets solved.

Customer support:

This is another aspect that attracts people to signup with startups if done right. That’s exactly why I hate customer support products that has the feature ‘Canned responses‘

When 10 guys are going to mail you asking ‘Can I do this in your product?‘ – it’s very easy to just send them the same mail and “solve” the problem.

But, in reality you aren’t solving the problem, you’re actually forcing them to think in your way instead of understanding what made them think that way. If you were to reply individually and understand their thought process, it’s going to help you build a much more intuitive experience for future customers and really solve the problem.

It’s all about tuning the website to aligning to what your users might think.. Sounds simple, but definitely takes time