Business Lessons from 37 Signals $1000 Master Class | Hacker News Reader

Business Lessons from 37 Signals $1000 Master Class

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65 pointsnoahkagan39 comments

Holy Crap! Jason and DHH got 40 people to pay $1000 to hear them talk for a day about starting a company.

Wow... Just... Wow...

Dudes, really. Save your money for ramen noodles and start hanging out at other Hacker News meetups[1].

Or, better yet, move to Silicon Valley, start attending meetups[2] and startup events[3]. Make a point of handing out business cards and asking people out for coffee. I can guarantee that within a year you'll become friends with any number of entrepreneurs who will give you similar or better advice for the price of a beer.

Hell, if you move out here, come to a Hackers and Founders event, I'll buy you a beer.

By the way, we're probably going to be turning Hackers and Founders into a non profit, because I feel like it's wrong to try make a quick buck off of hackers who are eating ramen noodles and trying to get a startup off the ground. YMMV

</rant>

ref:

[1] https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AmQExXr67OcTdDBZZl9...

[2] http://www.hackersandfounders.com

[3] http://startupdigest.com/

Meetups are great if you are lucky enough to live near one of them. Moving to Silicon Valley is not really a cheaper option.

FYI the startup community is far more than poor hackers starting a website. $1000 is CHEAP for valuable business knowledge. I'm paying a shit load more for my MBA, and would probably learn just as much in their class ;)

the startup community is far more than poor hackers starting a website

I'm speaking from my personal of running Hackers and Founders Silicon Valley. We have 2000 members, and we get together for beer/networking every 2 weeks. It started with me and a few other hackers getting together in a bar every couple of weeks to talk about startups and give each other advice.

The startup culture and community that I'm around is that of freely sharing business knowledge and helping each other succeed. That's what I'm referring to.

I have made a conscious choice to network, be helpful and ask for advice when it's available an appropriate. Because of that, I've gotten advice over coffe/beer from Joel Spolsky, pg, any number of YC founders, Andy Bechtolsheim, Ben Horowitz, the former CEO of Alta Vista, etc...

Business knowledge, connections and advice _are_ cheap if you put in the time and make the effort. Paying $1000 for 8 hours of business advice seem like a poor business decision to me.

But, then I have a profoundly different belief about how startups can, do and should help each other out.

They aren't mutually exclusive :)

Well, most of the advice was in their (free) book Getting Real and in its ($11.89) book Rework. From the tweets I see nothing new except that 37s logo is a guy saying hi.

I found the day a lot deeper than can be summarized into some twitter posts. If you want the text/ramen edition of their advice most of it is in their books. What you get from attending the master class is the same advice but demonstrated through examples of their own projects in the morning and attendees projects in the afternoon. It all adds up to a much richer experience. There is nothing like getting ideas and advice in person. But of course you may not agree with everything and it may not all apply to you. It's up to you to apply it as you see fit.

would you mind sharing one valuable insight that came from the "master" class, that you will be applying to your current/next project, please.

Sounds like your mind is already made up. I'm not here to convince you or anyone else to go. Just sharing that I had a more positive take on the day.

My question was sincere. Please share.

These need fleshing out. By shortening them to fit in tweets you've made some of them ambiguous, and others lack any context to apply them. For example, We judge a lot about how good a design is by how long it takes to implement. could go either way, on KISS principle, or persistent A/B testing.

By the way, may I ask which way people think the above quote was intended?

Given the way the 37Signals blog tends to lean, I'd wager they're going for: quicker to implement --> simpler design --> good design.

25) Use a thick marker during design since you can only focus on the key things.

More info: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/466-sketching-with-a-sharpie

I hope I'm wrong, but it sounds like you paid $1000 to have DHH read rework to you.

I literally knew almost, if not every item on the list from reading their books/blogs. I'm sure the experience was more beneficial then just reading the books, but was it worth $1000?

I'm generally a very big fan of the 37signals gang and their products and philosophy, but lately it really seems more and more that they are getting a bit greedy. Starting from publishing blog content as books to the $10 paint app, it's uncomfortably reminiscent of the tony robbins shtik.

Maybe these bits are "out of context" or "need fleshing out" because you can't always summarize learning in a series of tweets or a blog post. Maybe that's why the event is $1,000 - you're paying for a learning experience, not just content.

38) The 37signals logo is a guy saying hi.!!!!!

i still don't quite see it, but that was one of the biggest takeaways!

Half of these are just wrong. The other half are just irritating.

Would you be more specific?

For example:

"Never go with your first instincts."

  Google "Always go with your first instincts" = About 50,800 results.
  Google "Never go with your first instincts" = About 7 results.

Both of those are clearly stupid advice to give. But if I had to choose one, I'd go with "Always go with your first instincts" based on my own anecdotal evidence.

It's just 37signals being contrarian, pretty much their MO.

Out of context that one can be misleading.

The context was that our first instinct in a specific situation was to solve a much bigger problem than we needed to. Had we followed that instinct we'd have gone down the wrong road. What was better was to challenge that initial instinct and ask "What's the real problem here? How can we solve the most important part of that real problem as quickly and simply as possible? Maybe that'll be all we need to do." It turned out that was exactly what we needed to do.

First instincts often see big huge pictures. We've found that challenging that initial instinct helps us find the little piece of the big pie that is really in need of a solution.

I think TBH that's my main problem with these. They're all out of context, and so fairly useless without the back story.

They built a solid business on these principles...

No, they built a solid business on the experience and deep understanding that eventually led to these one-liners.

The one-liners are useless. The experience that led to them (which was, no doubt, shared at the "masterclass") is priceless.

Exactly, thus my comment above about attendees paying $1,000 for a learning experience: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959654

I suspect it's the opposite. They built a solid, not spectacular business on clever marketing and craftsmanship. Then they extracted witty aphorisms from it, and became heroes.

It's a bunch of platitudes. Nothing straightforwardly false, but in such high doses? Smug and vacuous.

It's less about them being right or wrong and more about the way they choose to run their business. It works for them, may not work for everyone.

For me the most valuable thing was really writing out the story of the site & simple mocks before you start building.

Trying to do more of that now.

Please oh please tell us which is which!! (And be sure that your answer is just as obtuse as your reply above! THX!)

I speak my mind shrug. I think it's better to say what you think than say nothing at all.

Either you love 'nuggets' of "wisdom" like this, or you hate them.

It might have also been the [tweet] spam buttons that got on my nerves (Makes you tweet out the 'nugget' with a bitly link back to the page).

Opinions are fantastic. The problem here is that your opinions are meaningless unless you support them. And whether you choose to back up your opinion or not in a meaningful way is the difference between reading/commenting on news _here_ versus reading/commenting on news _most_ other places.

The problem here is that your opinions are meaningless unless you support them.

I think that was axod's main problem with the article.

I think 37Signals has done enough to support their particular opinions though, whereas I'm not sure you can say the same for axod, but I will stand corrected.

I'm not the one charging $1000 per seat for my wisdom ;)

Sales Lesson #1 - Value is determined by the purchaser.

See: $300 purses, $250 running shoes, $1500 Business class tickets.

That may be, but how should I know that? Until the singularity occurs, the best of intentions aren't an appropriate substitution for even the weakest attempt.

How so?

For example, how are these wrong or irritating?

"Ask a person to draw the screen from memory and only the most important things will be remembered"

"Users always come with feedback in the form of solutions, not problems. Try to understand root issues."

"Try it and look at the data for decisions. Don't be attached to your decision"

Is it irritating because you find these obvious? I could see that. But the same way I know I should exercise more, eat better and sleep more, while still not doing it, it's always good to hear/read good advice again and again.

If you asked someone to draw the screen of say http://godaddy.com from memory, they'd likely mainly remember the lovely lady wearing a 'godaddy' t-shirt. Is that the most important thing?

What we remember is different to what we want if we need it. "important" isn't specific enough. Who is it important to? In what context?

Should we also ask a hacker to write down the keyboard short cuts from emacs they remember and get rid of the rest of them?

I'm not going to get into an argument, but hopefully you can see why I made the comment.

> If you asked someone to draw the screen of say http://godaddy.com from memory, they'd likely mainly remember the lovely lady wearing a 'godaddy' t-shirt. Is that the most important thing?

That's exactly the point. Isn't that something the GoDaddy designer(s) should know and take into account? They want people buying domain names, not drooling.

Again with GoDaddy, do you want a sexy brand image, a lead gen wet dream, people to quickly buy domain names in bulk, etc.? I completely agree that "important" isn't specific enough but it's up to you, as the designer, to figure out the balance.

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