The Ledger
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Fried: 37signals tracks no OKRs, KPIs, revenue, or customer growth targets
“We don't have financial goals. We don't have OKRs or KPIs. I don't have revenue targets. I don't have growth targets in terms of the number of customers we need to pick up this year versus last year. I don't look at any of those things.”
Fried: 37signals employs zero salespeople and ignores enterprise customers
“We don't have any salespeople. You know, we don't have 15 different versions of Basecamp. You know, we're not after enterprise.”
Fried: 37signals builds every feature with two people within six weeks
“We build products with two people at a time. So every feature we work on in Basecamp or Hay or whatever we're building is two people, one programmer, one designer, and they have a maximum of six weeks to deliver the feature that they're working on. Most of the…”
Fried: 37signals never asks employees to justify product decisions with data
“We almost never, sometimes we look at numbers to sort of Be an input, but it's never like, prove that. I'll never say like, justify that. That's just not terminology or lingo that we ever bring up.”
Fried: 37signals avoids tracking individual product P&Ls
“I don't have different P and L's for each product in a way where we're looking at them very carefully. It's like in total, collectively, are we making more money than we spend? And that's the only thing we ultimately look at.”
Fried: 37signals assigns no specs or tickets to product teams
“We don't have, like, a spec. We don't create to-dos or tasks or tickets for people. They create the work that needs to get done to fulfill the idea that we've written up and designed, essentially, and they figure out how to do it.”
Fried: 37signals operates by never promising delivery deadlines
“So I just, we've learned to not promise anything. We can share what we're working on. If we want to, we can tell people we're doing something.”
Fried: 37signals operates exclusively on six-week planning cycles without long-term plans
“Like we don't have a multi-year plan. I don't even have a one-year plan. I don't even have a six month plan or a court. Like we think about everything we're going to do every six weeks, we rethink what we're going to do next.”
Fried: 37signals launches ONCE, a line of self-hosted, buy-once business software
“We were going to launch this thing called once, which is essentially a brand, an umbrella, a line, a product line of non-SaaS products, of products, not services. Things people will download, software, business software products, people will download, pay for …”
Fried: 37signals generated double-digit millions in annual profit for a decade
“We've been profitable every year for 24 years. But let's say over the last 10 years, we've been doing a double-digit million dollar profits on an annual basis”
Fried: 37signals builds ONCE products in 3 months with 2 people
“We can build these in typically three months each with two people. And the maintenance cost is zero to us. Essentially it's, there's no marginal cost here because we make the software and we sell it and we don't have to maintain it in terms of hosting and the …”
Fried: ONCE software includes full source code for buyers to modify
“The other thing we're doing with once products is that you get the code... So you'll get all the code and you can look at it and you can modify it and you can play with it and you can tweak it. You can't resell it. There's a certain licensing, but it's yours.”
Fried: 37signals will price ONCE Campfire under $1,000
“It's going to be under a thousand bucks. I won't tell you exactly where, but we're trying to find a price point where it's kind of becomes a no brainer.”
Fried: 37signals has over 100,000 paying customers with about 75 employees
“We have about a 100,000 plus paying customers, so that's a rough number. And we have about currently like 75 or so employees.”
Fried: 37signals plans to launch three products under ONCE line in 2024
“Launching this new thing called Once. Which hopefully we're going to build three or so products next year under that category.”
Fried: 37signals uses six-week cycles followed by two-week cool-downs
“So what we do is after our six week cycles, we typically take what we call a two week cool down. So we call these cycles, not sprints.”
Fried: 37signals pays top five design finalists for one-week trial projects
“One of the things that we do during the interview process for designers specifically and product people, which is the same thing in my mind, is they do a project for us at the end. So the last, like, five finalists will do a project for them, for us. We'll pay…”