A bestseller in which the famous 37signals revealed their unique philosophy of running a relatively small business with profits in an efficient way.

Though the deep-work-against-meetings-and-interruptions suggestions seems a little ordinary and old-fashioned in 2019, there are still many thought-provoking points in this pamphlet : create product that you want to use yourself, you can actually attract audience and customers by disclosing your recipe and behind-the-scenes stories, etc.

And of course, this booklet is a perfect example of promoting your company by teaching :)

The version I read: Published March 9th 2010 by Crown Business

My rating: 7/10

I believe, in order to get the necessary common sense in a particular field, you just need to finish one book which is good enough, because it will cover 60%-80% of that field, and if you want to know more, you don’t have to read other books thoroughly, just focus on a few chapters that interests you, or go through several book summaries on YouTube, that’s enough ~

So I plan to view some summaries of The Lean Startup, and the big-name course How to Start a Startup featuring Paul Graham and Peter Thiel, to get my bearings in internet startup.

1.Scratch your own itch

  • The easiest, most straightforward way to create a great product or service is to make something you want to use. That lets you design what you know–and you’ll figure out immediately whether or not what you’re making is any good.

  • As you get going, keep in mind why you’re doing what you’re doing.

2.If you give up an idea just because “it won’t work in the real world”, it is your excuse for not trying

  • “That would never work in the real world.” You hear it all the time when you tell people about a fresh idea.

  • Even worse, they want to drag others down into their tomb. If you’re hopeful and ambitious, they’ll try to convince you your ideas are impossible. They’ll say you’re wasting your time.

  • The real world isn’t a place, it’s an excuse. It’s a justification for not trying. It has nothing to do with you.

3.An idea is worthless until you put it into practice

  • We all have that one friend who says, “I had the idea for eBay. If only I had acted on it, I’d be a billionaire!” That logic is pathetic and delusional. Having the idea for eBay has nothing to do with actually creating eBay. What you do is what matters, not what you think or say or plan.

  • What doesn’t last forever is inspiration. Inspiration is like fresh fruit or milk: It has an expiration date. If you want to do something, you’ve got to do it now. You can’t put it on a shelf and wait two months to get around to it. You can’t just say you’ll do it later. Later, you won’t be pumped up about it anymore.

4.Forget about long-term planning

  • Unless you’re a fortune-teller, long-term business planning is a fantasy.

  • When you turn guesses into plans, you enter a danger zone. Plans let the past drive the future. They put blinders on you. “This is where we’re going because, well, that’s where we said we were going.” And that’s the problem: Plans are inconsistent with improvisation.

  • The timing of long-range plans is screwed up too. You have the most information when you’re doing something, not before you’ve done it.

5.Business without profit is ridiculous, even your magical “startup business”

  • The start up is a magical place. It’s a place where expenses are someone else’s problem. It’s a place where that pesky thing called revenue is never an issue. It’s a place where you can spend other people’s money until you figure out a way to make your own. It’s a place where the laws of business physics don’t apply.

  • Anyone who takes a “we’ll figure out how to profit in the future” attitude to business is being ridiculous. That’s like building a rocket ship but starting off by saying, “Let’s pretend gravity doesn’t exist.” A business without a path to profit isn’t a business, it’s a hobby.

6.Embrace the limitation of tools and resources

  • Writers use constraints to force creativity all the time. Shakespeare reveled in the limitations of sonnets (fourteen-line lyric poems in iambic pentameter with a specific rhyme scheme). Haiku and limericks also have strict rules that lead to creative results. Writers like Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver found that forcing themselves to use simple, clear language helped them deliver maximum impact.

  • You also see it in people who want to blog, podcast, or shoot videos for their business but get hung up on which tools to use. The content is what matters. You can spend tons on fancy equipment, but if you’ve got nothing to say … well, you’ve got nothing to say.

7.Do less

  • So sacrifice some of your darlings for the greater good. Cut your ambition in half. You’re better off with a kick-ass half than a half-assed whole.

  • For example, if you’re opening a hot dog stand, you could worry about the condiments, the cart, the name, the decoration. But the first thing you should worry about is the hot dog. The hot dogs are the epicenter. Everything else is secondary.

  • The way to find the epicenter is to ask yourself this question: “If I took this away, would what I’m selling still exist?” A hot dog stand isn’t a hot dog stand without the hot dogs. You can take away the onions, the relish, the mustard, etc. Some people may not like your toppings-less dogs, but you’d still have a hot dog stand. But you simply cannot have a hot dog stand without any hot dogs.

  • Architects don’t worry about which tiles go in the shower or which brand of dishwasher to install in the kitchen until after the floor plan is finalized. They know it’s better to decide these details later.

  • Think about it this way: If you had to launch your business in two weeks, what would you cut out? Funny how a question like that forces you to focus. You suddenly realize there’s a lot of stuff you don’t need.

  • When we launched Basecamp, we didn’t even have the ability to bill customers! Because the product billed in monthly cycles, we knew we had a thirty-day gap to figure it out. So we used the time before launch to solve more urgent problems that actually mattered on day one. Day 30 could wait.

  • You don’t make a great museum by putting all the art in the world into a single room. That’s a warehouse. What makes a museum great is the stuff that’s not on the walls.

  • It’s the stuff you leave out that matters. So constantly look for things to remove, simplify, and streamline.

  • Watch chef Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares and you’ll see a pattern. The menus at failing restaurants offer too many dishes. The owners think making every dish under the sun will broaden the appeal of the restaurant. Instead it makes for crappy food (and creates inventory headaches).

  • Southwest–unlike most other airlines, which fly multiple aircraft models–flies only Boeing 737s. As a result, every Southwest pilot, flight attendant, and ground-crew member can work any flight. Plus, all of Southwest’s parts fit all of its planes. All that means lower costs and a business that’s easier to run. They made it easy on themselves.

8.Make decisions, and change them

  • Whenever you can, swap “Let’s think about it” for “Let’s decide on it.” Commit to making decisions. Don’t wait for the perfect solution. Decide and move forward.

  • An example from our world: For a long time, we avoided creating an affiliate program for our products because the “perfect” solution seemed way too complicated: We’d have to automate payments, mail out checks, figure out foreign tax laws for overseas affiliates, etc. The breakthrough came when we asked, “What can we easily do right now that’s good enough?” The answer: Pay affiliates in credit instead of cash. So that’s what we did.

  • Besides, the decisions you make today don’t need to last forever. It’s easy to shoot down good ideas, interesting policies, or worthwhile experiments by assuming that whatever you decide now needs to work for years on end. It’s just not so, especially for a small business. If circumstances change, your decisions can change. Decisions are temporary.

9.Break big project into small tasks

  • Being in the trenches for nine months and not having anything to show for it is a real buzzkill. Eventually it just burns you out.

  • The longer something takes, the less likely it is that you’re going to finish it.

  • If you absolutely have to work on long-term projects, try to dedicate one day a week (or every two weeks) to small victories that generate enthusiasm.

  • We’ve experienced this problem firsthand. So we decided that if anything takes one of us longer than two weeks, we’ve got to bring other people in to take a look. They might not do any work on the task, but at least they can review it quickly and give their two cents. Sometimes an obvious solution is staring you right in the face, but you can’t even see it.

  • How often do you think a quick trip to the grocery store will take only a few minutes and then it winds up taking an hour? And remember when cleaning out the attic took you all day instead of just the couple of hours you thought it would? Or sometimes it’s the opposite, like that time you planned on spending four hours raking the yard only to have it take just thirty-five minutes. We humans are just plain bad at estimating.

  • Break the big thing into smaller things. The smaller it is, the easier it is to estimate.

  • Keep breaking your time frames down into smaller chunks. Instead of one twelve-week project, structure it as twelve one-week projects.

  • Whenever you can, divide problems into smaller and smaller pieces until you’re able to deal with them completely and quickly. Simply rearranging your tasks this way can have an amazing impact on your productivity and motivation.

  • Big decisions are hard to make and hard to change. And once you make one, the tendency is to continue believing you made the right decision, even if you didn’t. You stop being objective.

  • Polar explorer Ben Saunders said that during his solo North Pole expedition (thirty-one marathons back-to-back, seventy-two days alone) the “huge decision” was often so horrifically overwhelming to contemplate that his day-to-day decision making rarely extended beyond “getting to that bit of ice a few yards in front of me.”

10.Build your audience by revealing your recipe

  • Over the past ten years, we’ve built an audience of more than a hundred thousand daily readers for our Signal vs. Noise blog. Every day they come back to see what we have to say. We may talk about design or business or software or psychology or usability or our industry at large. Whatever it is, these people are interested enough to come back to hear more. And if they like what we have to say, they’ll probably also like what we have to sell.

  • Instead of trying to outspend, outsell, or outsponsor competitors, try to out-teach them.

  • Teach and you’ll form a bond you just don’t get from traditional marketing tactics. Buying people’s attention with a magazine or online banner ad is one thing. Earning their loyalty by teaching them forms a whole different connection. They’ll trust you more. They’ll respect you more. Even if they don’t use your product, they can still be your fans.

  • So emulate famous chefs. They cook, so they write cookbooks. What do you do? What are your “recipes”? What’s your “cookbook”? What can you tell the world about how you operate that’s informative, educational, and promotional?

11.Feed your customers with behind-the-scenes stories

  • Even seemingly boring jobs can be fascinating when presented right. What could be more boring than commercial fishing and trucking? Yet the Discovery Channel and History Channel have turned these professions into highly rated shows: Deadliest Catch and Ice Road Truckers.

  • People are curious about how things are made. It’s why they like factory tours or behind-the-scenes footage on DVDs.

  • Letting people behind the curtain changes your relationship with them. They’ll feel a bond with you and see you as human beings instead of a faceless company.

12.Write to your customers like talking to your friends

  • Talk to customers the way you would to friends. Explain things as if you were sitting next to them. Avoid jargon or any sort of corporate-speak. Stay away from buzzwords when normal words will do just fine. Don’t talk about “monetization” or being “transparent;” talk about making money and being honest. Don’t use seven words when four will do.

  • Who said writing needs to be formal? Who said you have to strip away your personality when putting words on paper? Forget rules. Communicate!

13.Hire those who can motivate and manage themselves

How can you spot these people? Look at their backgrounds. They have set the tone for how they’ve worked at other jobs. They’ve run something on their own or launched some kind of project.

14.Don’t treat your people like children

  • When you treat people like children, you get children’s work. Yet that’s exactly how a lot of companies and managers treat their employees. Employees need to ask permission before they can do anything. They need to get approval for every tiny expenditure. It’s surprising they don’t have to get a hall pass to go take a shit.

  • You shouldn’t expect the job to be someone’s entire life–at least not if you want to keep them around for a long time.

15.Pour your attitude into your product

Polyface sells the idea that it does things a bigger agribusiness can’t do. Even though it’s more expensive to do so, it feeds cows grass instead of corn and never gives them antibiotics. It never ships food. Anyone is welcome to visit the farm anytime and go anywhere (try that at a typical meat-processing plant). Polyface doesn’t just sell chickens, it sells a way of thinking.

16.A commander who does nothing but commands? Bullshit

With a small team, you need people who are going to do work, not delegate work. Everyone’s got to be producing. No one can be above the work.

17.You won’t get rich overnight, and enjoy the time when you are nobody

  • You will not be a big hit right away. You will not get rich quick. You are not so special that everyone else will instantly pay attention. No one cares about you. At least not yet. Get used to it.

  • Would you want the whole world to watch you the first time you do anything? If you’ve never given a speech before, do you want your first speech to be in front of ten thousand people or ten people? You don’t want everyone to watch you starting your business. It makes no sense to tell everyone to look at you if you’re not ready to be looked at yet.

18.Big ≠ Good

Do we look at Harvard or Oxford and say, “If they’d only expand and branch out and hire thousands more professors and go global and open other campuses all over the world … then they’d be great schools.” Of course not. That’s not how we measure the value of these institutions. So why is it the way we measure businesses?

19.Meeting is poisonous

  • They require thorough preparation that most people don’t have time for.

  • When you think about it, the true cost of meetings is staggering. Let’s say you’re going to schedule a meeting that lasts one hour, and you invite ten people to attend. That’s actually a ten-hour meeting, not a one-hour meeting. You’re trading ten hours of productivity for one hour of meeting time.

  • Invite as few people as possible.

  • End with a solution and make someone responsible for implementing it.

20.How to compete with your competitors

  • If you think a competitor sucks, say so. When you do that, you’ll find that others who agree with you will rally to your side. Being the anti-____ is a great way to differentiate yourself and attract followers.

  • Do less than your competitors to beat them. Solve the simple problems and leave the hairy, difficult, nasty problems to the competition.

  • If you’re planning to build “the iPod killer” or “the next Pokemon,” you’re already dead. You’re allowing the competition to set the parameters. You’re not going to out-Apple Apple. They’re defining the rules of the game. And you can’t beat someone who’s making the rules. You need to redefine the rules, not just build something slightly better.

21.You create a business to earn money, not to show off your intellectual muscles

A lot of people get off on solving problems with complicated solutions. Flexing your intellectual muscles can be intoxicating. Then you start looking for another big challenge that gives you that same rush, regardless of whether it’s a good idea or not.

22.Don’t be fooled by negative reactions from your customers

Also, remember that negative reactions are almost always louder and more passionate than positive ones. In fact, you may hear only negative voices even when the majority of your customers are happy about a change. Make sure you don’t foolishly backpedal on a necessary but controversial decision.

23.Don’t try to please everyone

We’re willing to lose some customers if it means that others love our products intensely. That’s our line in the sand.

24.Build a business to grow and get profit, not to quit

Would you go into a relationship planning the breakup? Would you write the prenup on a first date? Would you meet with a divorce lawyer the morning of your wedding? That would be ridiculous, right? You need a commitment strategy, not an exit strategy. You should be thinking about how to make your project grow and succeed, not how you’re going to jump ship. If your whole strategy is based on leaving, chances are you won’t get far in the first place.

25.Avoid abstraction while comminicating

If you need to explain something, try getting real with it. Instead of describing what something looks like, draw it. Instead of explaining what something sounds like, hum it. Do everything you can to remove layers of abstraction.

26.Workaholic = Wasting time, at least sometimes

  • In the end, workaholics don’t actually accomplish more than nonworkaholics. They may claim to be perfectionists, but that just means they’re wasting time fixating on inconsequential details instead of moving on to the next task.

  • It’s easy to put your head down and just work on what you think needs to be done. It’s a lot harder to pull your head up and ask why.

  • When you’re really tired, it always seems easier to plow down whatever bad path you happen to be on instead of reconsidering the route. The finish line is a constant mirage and you wind up walking in the desert way too long.

27.Interruption ruins productivity

  • If you’re constantly staying late and working weekends, it’s not because there’s too much work to be done. It’s because you’re not getting enough done at work. And the reason is interruptions.

  • Interruptions break your workday into a series of work moments. Forty-five minutes and then you have a call. Fifteen minutes and then you have lunch. An hour later, you have an afternoon meeting. Before you know it, it’s five o’clock, and you’ve only had a couple uninterrupted hours to get your work done. You can’t get meaningful things done when you’re constantly going start, stop, start, stop.

28.Dodododododododododododo it now, the perfect time never arrives

  • Stanley Kubrick gave this advice to aspiring filmmakers: “Get hold of a camera and some film and make a movie of any kind at all.”

  • Instead of watching TV or playing World of Warcraft, work on your idea. Instead of going to bed at ten, go to bed at eleven. We’re not talking about all-nighters or sixteen-hour days–we’re talking about squeezing out a few extra hours a week. That’s enough time to get something going.

  • When you want something bad enough, you make the time–regardless of your other obligations. The truth is most people just don’t want it bad enough. Then they protect their ego with the excuse of time.

  • Besides, the perfect time never arrives. You’re always too young or old or busy or broke or something else. If you constantly fret about timing things perfectly, they’ll never happen.

29.Learn to say no to your customers

  • You rarely regret saying no. But you often wind up regretting saying yes.

  • Making a few vocal customers happy isn’t worth it if it ruins the product for everyone else.

  • It’s better to have people be happy using someone else’s product than disgruntled using yours.

  • We said no. Here’s why: We’d rather our customers grow out of our products eventually than never be able to grow into them in the first place. Adding power-user features to satisfy some can intimidate those who aren’t on board yet. Scaring away new customers is worse than losing old customers.

  • And there are always more people who are not using your product than people who are. Make sure you make it easy for these people to get on board. That’s where your continued growth potential lies.

30.Stop spamming the journalists

  • What do you call a generic pitch sent out to hundreds of strangers hoping that one will bite? Spam. That’s what press releases are too: generic pitches for coverage sent out to hundreds of journalists you don’t know, hoping that one will write about you.

  • If you read a story about a similar company or product, contact the journalist who wrote it.

  • We’ve been written up in big mainstream publications like Wired and Time, but we’ve found that we actually get more hits when we’re profiled on sites like Daring Fireball, a site for Mac nerds, or Lifehacker, a productivity site.

  • These guys are actually hungry for fresh meat. They thrive on being tastemakers, finding the new thing, and getting the ball rolling.

31.Hire to kill pain

  • Never hire anyone to do a job until you’ve tried to do it yourself first.

  • Don’t hire for pleasure; hire to kill pain. Always ask yourself: What if we don’t hire anyone? Is that extra work that’s burdening us really necessary? Can we solve the problem with a slice of software or a change of practice instead? What if we just don’t do it?

  • You’ll be doing your company more harm than good if you bring in talented people who have nothing important to do.

  • Hire a ton of people rapidly and a “strangers at a cocktail party” problem is exactly what you end up with. There are always new faces around, so everyone is unfailingly polite. Everyone tries to avoid any conflict or drama. No one says, “This idea sucks.” People appease instead of challenge.

32.Choose the one who writes best

If you are trying to decide among a few people to fill a position, hire the best writer. It doesn’t matter if that person is a marketer, salesperson, designer, programmer, or whatever; their writing skills will pay off.

33.How to choose from the candidates

  • Check the cover letter. In a cover letter, you get actual communication instead of a list of skills, verbs, and years of irrelevance. There’s no way an applicant can churn out hundreds of personalized letters. That’s why the cover letter is a much better test than a resume.

  • It makes sense to go after candidates with six months to a year of experience. It takes that long to internalize the idioms, learn how things work, understand the relevant tools, etc. But after that, the curve flattens out. There’s surprisingly little difference between a candidate with six months of experience and one with six years.

  • The best way to do that is to actually see them work. Hire them for a miniproject, even if it’s for just twenty or forty hours. You’ll see how they make decisions. You’ll see if you get along. You’ll see what kind of questions they ask. You’ll get to judge them by their actions instead of just their words.

34.Don’t hide from your customers when something bad happens

  • When something bad happens, tell your customers (even if they never noticed in the first place). Don’t think you can just sweep it under the rug. You can’t hide anymore. These days, someone else will call you on it if you don’t do it yourself. They’ll post about it online and everyone will know. There are no more secrets.

  • The message should come from the top. The highest-ranking person available should take control in a forceful way.

  • Getting back to people quickly is probably the most important thing you can do when it comes to customer service. It’s amazing how much that can defuse a bad situation and turn it into a good one.

  • One of the worst ways is the non-apology apology, which sounds like an apology but doesn’t really accept any blame. For example, “We’re sorry if this upset you.” Or “I’m sorry that you don’t feel we lived up to your expectations.” Whatever.

  • A good apology accepts responsibility. It has no conditional if phrase attached.

  • The more people you have between your customers’ words and the people doing the work, the more likely it is that the message will get lost or distorted along the way.

35.Other insights and advices

  • Some people consider us an Internet company, but that makes us cringe. Internet companies are known for hiring compulsively, spending wildly, and failing spectacularly. That’s not us. We’re small (sixteen people as this book goes to press), frugal, and profitable.

  • Culture is the byproduct of consistent behavior. If you encourage people to share, then sharing will be built into your culture. If you reward trust, then trust will be built in. If you treat customers right, then treating customers right becomes your culture.

  • Failure is not a prerequisite for success. A Harvard Business School study found already-successful entrepreneurs are far more likely to succeed again (the success rate for their future companies is 34 percent). But entrepreneurs whose companies failed the first time had almost the same follow-on success rate as people starting a company for the first time: just 23 percent. People who failed before have the same amount of success as people who have never tried at all. Success is the experience that actually counts.

  • This doesn’t mean you need to find the cure for cancer. It’s just that your efforts need to feel valuable. You want your customers to say, “This makes my life better.” You want to feel that if you stopped doing what you do, people would notice.

  • There’s nothing wrong with being frugal.

  • Our last book, Getting Real, was a by-product. We wrote that book without even knowing it. The experience that came from building a company and building software was the waste from actually doing the work. We swept up that knowledge first into blog posts, then into a workshop series, then into a .pdf, and then into a paperback. That by-product has made 37signals more than $1 million directly and probably more than another $1 million indirectly. The book you’re reading right now is a by-product too.

  • There’s no need for a spreadsheet, database, or filing system. The requests that really matter are the ones you’ll hear over and over. After a while, you won’t be able to forget them. Your customers will be your memory. They’ll keep reminding you. They’ll show you which things you truly need to worry about.

  • Drug dealers are astute businesspeople. They know their product is so good they’re willing to give a little away for free upfront. They know you’ll be back for more–with money.