entrepreneurship

What, are you still unsuccessful? Still getting by despite the avalanche of advice circling in the online realm? Read this...

The best time to stop a distraction is before it starts. The second best time is now.

As a part of Patreon's H2 2019 planning cycle, I shared this presentation as the team was coming off a big price restructuring initiative, considering upcoming investments, and looking towards going public.

Yes, there are tons of resources but I'll try to offer some simple tips. 1. Sales is a lot like golf. You can make it so complicated as to be impossible or you can simply walk up and hit the ball. I've been leading and building sales orgs for almost 20 years and my advice is to walk up and hit the ball. 2. Sales is about people and it's about problem solving. It is not about solutions or technology or chemicals or lines of code or artichokes. It's about people and it's about solving problems. 3. People buy 4 things and 4 things only. Ever. Those 4 things are time, money, sex, and approval/peace of mind. If you try selling something other than those 4 things you will fail. 4. People buy aspirin always. They buy vitamins only occassionally and at unpredictable times. Sell aspirin. 5. I say in every talk I give: "all things being equal people buy from their friends. So make everything else equal then go make a lot of friends." 6. Being valuable and useful is all you ever need to do to sell things. Help people out. Send interesting posts. Write birthday cards. Record videos sharing your ideas for growing their business. Introduce people who would benefit from knowing each other then get out of the way, expecting nothing in return. Do this consistently and authentically and people will find ways to give you money. I promise. 7. No one cares about your quota, your payroll, your opex, your burn rate, etc. No one. They care about the problem you are solving for them. There is more than 100 trillion dollars in the global economy just waiting for you to breathe it in. Good luck.

The wise man thinks about his troubles only when there is some purpose in doing so; at other times he thinks about other things, or, if it is night, about nothing at all.

If you're a startup founder in your 20's, read these 28 rules I learned the hard way: 1. Validate idea first. I wasted a decade building stuff nobody needed. I thought Incubators and VCs served as a validation, but I was so wrong. 2. Kill your EGO. It’s not… — John Rush (@johnrushx)

The how, where, why, and when we communicate. Long form asynchronous? Real-time chat? In-person? Video? Verbal? Written? Via email? In Basecamp? How do we keep everyone in the loop without everyone getting tangled in everyone else’s business? It’s all in here.

Most businesses are not fucking Coca-Cola. They don't have this secret recipe that's the foundation of their success. The vast majority of businesses succeed or fail on the basis of their execution and their timing. There just aren't that many profound secrets that completely alter the trajectory of wherever some company's going. But I...

What ever happened to details? The red sole of a Louboutin shoe, or the elegant tag on a pair of Tom’s? The sweeping fenders of a Porsche 911 or the needless complications of a fancy watch… Today, …

Since the beginning of Basecamp, we’ve been loath to make promises about future product improvements. We’ve always wanted customers to judge the product they could buy and use today, not some imaginary version that might exist in the future. It’s why we’ve never committed to a product road map. It’s not because we have a secret one in ...

Some of the most rewarding features to add to products are ones that don’t increase surface area, but increase depth. This is how you continue to make a product a whole lot better without it feeling like it got a whole lot bigger. Basecamp’s new References feature is a great example of this. Video + write-up: https://updates.37signals....

An unusually simple spin-off story.It was 2014, and we decided to spin one of our products off into its own company. The product was Know Your Company and knew the perfect person to run it. Her name was @clairejlew.There are a million ways to spin-off a company. And most of… pic.twitter.com/ahgRlT8Ixs— Jason Fried (@jasonfried) April 11, 2024

Building a product is like running a marathon with a backpack.Adding features adds weight to your backpack.Some product features will add a lot of weight to your backpack. They make you go slower by a small percentage for the rest of your run. They make it harder to change…— Marc Köhlbrugge (@marckohlbrugge) February 21, 2024

liberating structures, social invention.net, microstructures, disruptive innovation, behavior change, collaboration, social invention, diffusion of innovation, strategy, transformation, heuristics, complexity science, emergence

And how I hire for 2-3x cheaper than most

The current talent market is full of contradictions. Candidates getting multiple offers while companies conduct sweeping layoffs. People “quiet quitting” in droves while there’s more opportunity than ever for flexibility. Yet one thing hasn’t changed: the mistaken belief that hiring “A-players” will solve everything. Steve Jobs famously insisted on hiring A-players. This philosophy had enormous […]

We know, "no idea is a bad idea," but brainstorming is often unsuccessful. These prompts actually work. They could even lead to a unique business model.

Lessons on identifying and solving ambitious problems

If you’re a founder you’ve probably heard someone say “oh, I’ve seen this idea before - it didn’t work” or “isn’t this just like that other thing that person/company X tried?” As a founder, I heard this dozens of times. It’s likely to come from investors, but you hear it from other founders, potent

Implementing an Andon Cord in an organization takes a continuous improvement roadmap and behavior reinforcement built into the process.