BigOmaha 2010: Jason Fried

Jason Fried (37 Signals) was one of my favorite speakers this year at BigOmaha. I dialogued with him a little bit about features in Basecamp and asked questions about consistency in user interface design. He suggested focusing more on the task at hand, being narrowly focused on making that task as easy and pleasant as possible, rather than focusing on consistency. He said a focus on consistency may force you to make poor UI decisions.

These were my notes from Jason’s presentation. There were 10 points, however for some reason I missed the 10th point. Hope you find this information useful.

Bootstrapping

1. Big difference between a bootstrap co. and a funded co. On day one a bootstrap co. has to make money. A funded co. has to spend money on day one.
2. Some people are just protégés at making money.
3. Some people are just protégés at spending money.
4. Get in the habit of making money
5. Buy time by creating your own schedule, and owning your own schedule.
6. Avoid taking money from others, then they own your schedule

Price

1. The idea that selling something is an anomaly is false. Avoid “free”!
2. Charging for something creates the pressure to be good. It creates an intimate relationship. People don’t care if they receive something for free.
3. When you charge for a product you get really honest feedback really, really quickly.

Useful > Innovative

1. Innovation is massively overrated.
2. Usefulness is massively underrated. If you’re not building something useful… who cares?!
3. You stay in business by building useful things. If a feature doesn’t change someone’s behavior it’s probably not useful.

Focus on what won’t change

1. Details take a while, quality takes a while. Quality is an iterative process. If we incrementally improve things today that won’t change tomorrow then it will pay-off in the long-term.

DIY

1. You can spend or learn your way out of a problem. You’re much better off if you learn your way out of a problem.
2. Only hire people for a position you know intimately, otherwise you won’t know what qualities to look for.
3. Growing slowly forces you to learn stuff.

I’m Sorry

1. Two kinds of apologies
   1. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you
   2. I’m sorry [specific issue]. This is what we did wrong. This is how we’re going to fix it.
2. You can tell you’re a good business if people believe in your apologies
3. If you’re a business owner, you make the apologies

Draw a line in the sand

1. You can tell what a company stands for by what they say “no” too
2. The things you practice early on are the things you’ll keep on doing
3. Drawing a line in the sand reduces the amount of time you spend making decisions.
   1. It will turn some people off, but know where you stand

Specs! Features! Technology! Yeah whatever…

1. These do not drive people.
2. What it looks like, how much it costs, and can I afford it.
3. People want solutions that solve their problems.
4. Customers don’t listen to technologist lingo. They just have a few problems that need to work really, really well. The basics. Target doing the basics well.

Less

1. Polish, fewer features, better features, easier to learn systems
2. You get more stuff done by doing less
3. You’ll always regret doing too much, you’ll seldom regret doing less but completing what you do.
4. If you try to do a lot of things well at the same time you’ll do a lot of things poorly.
5. Less is always an option.

I don’t know how I missed the 10th point, but I did! Either that or I combined a couple points. If anyone has notes on the 10th point Jason presented I would appreciate you sending them my way :-)