If you want to run a company that's light on full-time managers, you have to focus on managing processes before people. The traditional paradigm of a reporting manager that's constantly following up with their reports, conducting daily stand-up meetings, weekly 1-1s, and all other forms of intensive supervision, needs to be (mostly) re...

There are a million metrics you can use to track the health of a subscription software business like ours. Customer life-time value, cost of acquisition, cohort retention, revenue churn, net promoter score, funnel conversion rates, to name but a few. All useful calculations, but I can't tell you what bliss it's been to steer 37signals ...

They seemed so sure. First, that the pandemic couldn't possibly have come from a lab rather than a market. Then, that masks – any masks! – would materially retard the spread. Later, that the vaccine would prevent you from getting the virus. Finally, that if you were vaccinated, you couldn't spread the virus. All of that, and plenty mor...

There are many reasons to pick working for a bigger company in tech. The benefits, the pay, and, at least until recently, the job security. In many ways, it's hard to argue with the cold logic of taking a seat on a star destroyer, if you can land one. But odds are you'll be sitting on the bench if you do. That is, your talents won't ge...

Jason just penned a beautiful, succinct ode to the underdogs. Go read it. It's funny how finding just the right word unlocks the perfect mental image. We've often thought of ourselves as being in the corner of the small business, but that was never quite right. There are many kinds of small businesses, not all of them thinking of thems...

We're letting our yearly commitment to Datadog, a performance and monitoring tool, expire at the end of this month. Not because we don't like the service. It's actually really nice! But because the $88,000/year it was going to cost us to continue is just ridiculous. And it's emblematic of a larger issue: Enterprise SaaS pricing is gett...

Getting fired sucks. It doesn't matter how or when. It just sucks. And right now there are an awful lot of people in the tech industry feeling just how much. But what's bad for the individual isn't always bad for the group. Believe it or not, there's also collective upside to the massive tech layoffs happening at the moment. Like undoi...

You're never getting me back into an office. I credit much of my career to escaping that place in the early 2000s. It wasn't until I found the prolonged solitude of working from home that I could consistently make big leaps in my creative process. The pandemic taught millions the same lesson. And yet – AND YET! – I'm going to come to t...

One of the longest running schisms in programming is that of static vs dynamic typing. I've heard a million arguments from both sides throughout my entire career, but seen very few of them ever convinced anyone of anything. As rationalizations masquerading as reason rarely do in matters of faith. The rider will always justify the way o...

If I'm stuck in a creative downturn, there's usually only one remedy: keep going. That is, accept the downturn, but continue to stare at the computer, waiting for it to pass. While staring at the computer, there's room for menial and managerial tasks put aside during more inspired times. Checking up on things, getting back to people, a...

I won't deny there may well be cases where a microservices-first architecture makes sense, but I think they're few and far in between. The vast majority of systems are much better served by starting and staying with a majestic monolith. The Prime Video case study that blew up the internet yesterday is but the latest illustration. Maybe...

The Prime Video team at Amazon has published a rather remarkable case study on their decision to dump their serverless, microservices architecture and replace it with a monolith instead. This move saved them a staggering 90%(!!) on operating costs, and simplified the system too. What a win! But beyond celebrating their good sense, I th...

I've been talking about our departure from renting computers via AWS to owning them in a colocated datacenter as our "cloud exit". But I recognize this terminology can rub some people the wrong way. There's an entire generation of technologists who see themselves as "cloud native", and alienating them just because we want to own our ha...

Last week, we successfully pulled off our biggest cloud exit yet for Basecamp Classic. This is the original app that started it all for us from way back in 2004. And now, after a couple of years running on AWS, it's back on our own hardware, using Kamal, and holy smokes is it fast! Just look at these charts: The median request now runs...

One of the straightest paths to purpose in life is to take responsibility for something (or someone). Becoming a person whose presence and competence benefits others. For both your sake and theirs. Jordan Peterson calls this the "meaningful burden" in 12 Rules for Life, and downright posits it as an antidote to depression. Echoing Vict...

There is no end to accounts of America's current ailments. From deaths of despair, soaring crime in some cities, ballooning debts, dysfunctional politics, and a raging culture war. It's easy to be down on those United States. Too easy, in fact. Take gun deaths, for example. Americans own more guns per capita than any other country in t...

The recent and rapid advance of AI has rightfully given many in software real doubts about the future of their profession. I'd probably still wager that the fears are overstated – that we also got prematurely euphoric about the imminent prospects of self-driving cars – and that AI generating code is different from it evolving existing ...

Our 2023 marketing campaign for Basecamp kicked off on a ton of different channels at once. Web ads, search ads, podcast ads, and TV ads all blasted the message of JUST LET ME DO MY JOB. Our flagship commercial was a hit with the audience and the critics. But our attempt at out-of-home advertising, with billboards all over Boston, was ...

Amanda Perino had barely settled into the role as executive director of The Rails Foundation before she secured a venue, a date, and the full support of the board for Rails World. This 650-attendee conference will kick off the worldwide ambitions for The Rails Foundation to host a new series of ecosystem gatherings at incredibly afford...

It's been a long time since I last saw a physical piece of hardware used to run our services at 37signals. I vaguely remember doing a tour of our Chicago data center over a decade ago, but somewhere along the line, I just lost interest in the iron itself. Now the interest is back, because hardware is fun again, so let me share my excit...

Tim Urban's new book What's Our Problem? offers an excellent analysis of the current American political malaise. It breaks down the history of first how the Republican party got overrun by low-rung thinking from the mid-90s forward, then how equally low-rung thinking got the other side in the past decade or so. It's a light, humorous r...

One of the most important techniques I've embraced for managing my time is to direct related tasks to a bucket, let that bucket accumulate until full, then empty it all in one go. This in contrast to trying to catch every task the moment it lands from the myriad of interruption pipes that'll drip-drip-drip your day away if you let them...

It took moving back to Denmark to realize the folly of thinking America is ever going to "get there". Whether on guns or healthcare or taxes or any other major policy position that's so fiercely contested in the US. Despite growing up in this little Nordic country, I didn't fully appreciate the tremendous, underpinning power of a homog...

It'll soon cost $7/month to fully participate on Twitter. Musk has announced they'll start reserving presence in the For You tab solely for paying customers from April 15th, limit participation in polls to just those customers, and soon also give preferential showing in replies as well. Legacy blue-checks will not be spared, and will i...

Every week seems to offer fresh staff cuts at the big tech companies right now. Several of the giants are already on their second rounds, and few would probably bet against a third after those. But as hard as it is on an individual level – and it's always hard! – there's a silver lining for the economy as a whole: Releasing captive tal...

The majority of customers will never tell you why they stop buying on their own. In fact, even if pressed, most will just smile, nod, and give you some face-saving reason for how “now is just not the right time” or “we are just going in a different direction”. Because that’s what avoids conflict. Thus, the only time you’re truly allowe...

Last year, we hired a high-profile ad agency to work on our first-ever branding campaign for Basecamp. They were smart, funny... and entirely out of sync with our budget. So we ended up letting them go, hiring a new head of marketing, and doing it all ourselves. The problem was that our entire marketing budget for 2023 amounted to a "m...

You can't convince someone invested in their convictions to the contrary by arguments alone. Only actions can pry open a locked mind, and most minds remain locked most of the time. So if you wish to be persuasive, you ought to spend less time arguing and more time doing. This is as it should be. Talk is cheap, and others are right to k...

When the money flows freely, and there's a strong cachet to having tons of open positions, you can be forgiven to think that the individual productivity on a product team just doesn't matter. So much time is spent coordinating the work anyway. Who cares if the stack you're using takes twice the number of people to ship meaningful updat...

I'm a programming child of the agile software movement. Just as I was starting out, Kent Beck published Extreme Programming Explained in 2000. It was a revelation. I had just enough exposure to Big Upfront Design and waterfall methodologies to appreciate what a monumental shift this was. Beck's methodology x-rayed the ills of the tradi...