37 Signals hates competition | Hacker News Reader

37 Signals hates competition

amemototheinternet.com

58 pointsdimitry62 comments

For what it's worth I think this is a weak argument. The posts at Signal v Noise never encourage you to "slow down" for the sake of slowing down... they just encourage you to think about starting up in a different light. If you can take life as a startup founder easier, yet be more productive or generally have a more fulfilling experience, so much the better.

Anyway it seems an unlikely strategy that to quell competition 37signals tries to injure everyone's productivity by way of deliberately poor advice. I just don't see how the author makes that logical step (or the point isn't defended well).

Only my take.

Yea, I was thinking the same thing. Discourage people in general from working hard in order to discourage potential competitors from competing with you? Too far fetched. Too funny.

If the author really thinks 37s doesn't like competition, he should address why they would open source the framework created from their flagship product. Seriously, why would a company that wants to prevent others from competing with them give away the tools they use for increasing productivity and making it easier to realize innovative ideas?

37signals is trying to spread what they think are good ideas - the techniques and models that have worked for them. If you've ever talked to them you'll find they do this because they're passionate ideas, not because they want to harm an entire industry. Jason Fried has been talking about "embracing constraints" for how long now? And he does it only out of malice? He speaks about these ideas at events and organizations to people who would never compete with 37signals because he's scared of competition? This idea is so stupid it's laughable.

The only point he might have (and I don't think he's even making it) is that 37signals is not what most people think of as a startup. Over the past few months it seems like 37signals has been trying to change part of the definition of "startup" - they're trying to change the class of companies to which the term "startup" applies but keep the connotations of independence, adventure, and creativity.

That would have been a better point to make, you're right.

As noted elsewhere, AMTTI is more of a personal rant board. I'll work on making the content a bit more cogent in the future as I'd like it to mature beyond that...

You should blog when you have something to say, not just because you want to critique someone.

Criticism is fine (and I think there is room for a good critique of 37signals). Just pretend that you're saying what you're writing directly to the person in question, and adjust your tone as a consequence.

Why, subterfuge! That way whenever anyone accuses them of having a disinformation blog campaign, they can point to their open source project to deflect blame. Wheels within wheels.

IMO this is just someone who's jealous because 37Signals has been successful while retaining a healthy work-life balance.

Too many people these days take pride in their ability and willingness to work ridiculously long hours for extended periods of time.

The only thing that 37Signals is doing is encouraging developers to write code and be healthy doing it, rather than killing themselves and wasting their youth away on technical debt.

The secret to doing what they do is to write code with fewer bugs, not put in extra hours writing in extra bugs because you're too tired to think straight.

I'd like to read some good, well thought out criticism of 37signals, but this isn't it. Unfortunate, as David U is a smart guy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Ulevitch

Being the founder of OpenDNS makes him a smart guy? Most of the 37Signals products were harder to build and more useful than OpenDNS.

So hard to build that google replicated one in a week? :/

It often takes much longer to design something simple than it does to implement it.

In some cases, yes I agree. But a chatroom is a pretty proven design. Scrolling output, user list on the right, input bar at the bottom.... and that's pretty much it. I doubt even 37signals would claim they designed that.

It's like IE complainging that firefox also has an address bar at the top, and back/forward/reload buttons.

If that was the case, why weren't there 100 other applications that looked just like Campfire prior to its release?

Yes, it does.

That's pretty reasonable. I'll try to make more salient arguments next time. A Memo To The Internet is more of a rant board... but I'll start cleaning it up.

By the way, I love the walking man. What gave you the idea to combine ASCII art and animated GIFs?

Have you listened to/talked to any of the 37signals guys? It's hard to believe you would make such silly arguments if you had.

(I'd respond on the post itself, but there's a lot more noise in those comments.)

This comes across as a rant from someone who doesn't understand how 37Signals became successful.

They seem to practice what they preach. It may not be the right approach for everyone, but it definitely works for them.

How does having only 10 employees after 9 years not count as growing slowly?

My biggest criticism of 37 Signals is how easy they make selling simple products out to be. It's hard to imagine their success without the onslaught of positive attention rails has given them.

That said, this protectionist deliberate misinformation theory is pretty absurd.

From the article, I doubt it is 37Signals plan to make others develop more slowly so 37Signals retains more customers.

Consider SalesForce and others that have the same and greater functionality.

There are hundreds of options in the same space, SurgarCRM, phpGroupWare, my own officezilla.com. There is plenty of choice and it is not like 37Signals dominates in any way. They are far from the dominate leader in there space (and they don't claim to be).

I don't believe they have a lifestyle business, they have a very good business that is profitable and growing. They might not claim to be out marketing & promoting, but it sure does seem like they have plenty of marketing and promotion through "submarine" tactics rather then overt (here is our ad) methods.

Since when is competition something a business should foster? They should, in fact, do everything within their power to make competition as hard as possible. This typically happens with things like patents, trademarks, copyrights, exclusive agreements, etc.

But it doesn't really matter because this blog post is a statement, not an argument. It is equally as persuasive as an entry which says the exacty opposite ("37 Signals loves competition") since the blogger gives no reason for his position.

I generally hate the meta-conversations about story quality and the necessity for a down-arrow - but this story was the most awful (and obvious flame-bait) story I've seen voted to #1.

PG! I want my downvote-story button!

me too... while david ulevitch is, I believe, a smart guy, this article is utter headline grabbing nonsense.

"And for my sixth blog post, following up such gems as 'Rickrolling has been retired. We get it. It was funny. It’s over now. You can stop.', quoted here in its entirety, I am going to perform the amazing feat of baiting Hacker News."

We get it. It was funny. Can you stop now?

37 Signals has sustained revenue. They are not a startup in the same sense as YC or Silicon Valley thinks of a startup but they have the linchpin of a healthy business -- and every healthy business dislikes competition.

That's actually not true. You can certainly be a startup and have sustained revenue. In fact, most investors/VCs won't even talk to you if you don't have any kind of revenue. Getting that first customer is a must if you want to even get a meeting with an investor. This was iterated by 12 big NYC investors/VC companies last week at NYC's Internet Week event 'Financing Your Startup'.

A startup can be a healthy business with revenue -- of course -- but 37 Signals is not a startup. 37 Signals is a business in the traditional sense; they're focused on generating revenue instead of an exit.

A "lifestyle business".

It doesn't matter what kind of adjective you put in front of the word "business", they're still making money.

Sure, but so does a guy with a lemonade stand. It's being able to grow and replicate that.

From wikipedia: "Lifestyle Businesses are businesses that are set up and run by their founders primarily with the aim of sustaining a particular level of income and no more."

And that's great if you want to create a business that sustains your lifestyle.

Orange Julius and Jamba Juice are both basically glorified lemonade stands. Starbucks is just an upscale version of your gas station's coffee dispenser.

Sure, but my original point was that they don't seem to want to grow. They don't seem to want to be a chain of lemonade stands, they just want to be their own profitable lemonade stand. Which is great and fine, but it's perhaps not aligned with many of our aims.

I see what you're saying and I agree that they're more of a "lifestyle business" as defined in this thread. They're not the traditional type of startup, but they do share startup values to an extent.

What I'm getting at is that 37 Signals, while they might complain about competition, probably isn't all that concerned because they have a healthy revenue stream. Their revenue may be taken away later, but they'll be able to deal with that the same way they dealt with no revenue when they were just starting: making something people want and straight-up selling it to customers. In the meantime they're making bank.

I would say this is true in NYC, but not Silicon Valley. Our company is based in NYC and you're right about VCs not talking to you if you don't already have a concrete business model that's already generating revenue. However, it seems from my experience that the west coast is a completely different world. I'm sure there are many good reasons for this, but I wouldn't say that most VC's/investors won't talk to you, I would say that most NYC investors won't talk to you.

> every business dislikes competition.

Not true. A struggling business dislikes competition. A healthy business likes competition. A competitor validates your market and frames a choice. With a competitor, a customer doesn't just have the choice of buying from A or not. A customer now has to consider buying from A or B (or buying nothing). When you've got dozens of competitors, you've got a market.

Competitors do validate your market. That doesn't mean you like them (e.g. http://www.apple.com/getamac/ads/).

You're doing it wrong if it becomes a grudge match. See http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/03/the_art_of_driv.html

(Yes, I am aware that Guy Kawasaki marketed the Apple MacIntosh at launch.)

Sometimes you can piggyback of your competitors. See "How Starbucks Actually Helps Mom & Pop Coffee Shops": http://www.slate.com/id/2180301/

The article doesn't have anything to say, except that they hate 37signals. Why does this get promoted here?!!

simple argument: huddlechat

37signals should be (and apparently is) afraid of simple integration with the Gmail/Google apps suite by Google.

They would eat 37signals lunch.

I don't know. Google is very good at making well-programmed apps, but they don't make them enjoyable to use. They're usually fairly cluttered visually if not in terms of features, and their stuff is minimal to a fault.

Campfire, I think, is still a much better app than Google Talk, partly because it gives the chat so much space to breathe.

And I don't think all PROGRAMMERS care about that, but a significant number of DESIGNERS do.

huddlechat=campfire and was made on Google App Engine in like a week or something.

37signals IS successful because their stuff is minimal, which, again, is why Google would eat their lunch.

37 signals keeps on cranking out new minimal apps though...

But copying something doesn't mean you can come up with the next thing.

See Gmail. Google will do it better. Moreover, the integration with Google Apps/Docs automatically increases its versatility for someone already using Google Apps

I disagree. Campfire is an ok-ish webapp, but it doesn't seem to be in development from what I've seen, or growing.

It sort of fills the minimum requirements for webchat.

I think if google decided to put some effort into chat they could create something pretty cool, hooked into all their other systems etc.

Huddlechat worked pretty well, and it was frankly amazing they took it down IMHO.

... 37 Signals is eating 37 Signals' lunch for now.

From talking with some of the AppEngine developers, my impression is that they are trying to get developers to write a bunch of free/cheap applications on Google AppEngine that they can then use to persuade people to sign up for Google Apps for Your Domain. Whatever others don't write (well enough) they will crank out themselves.

Besides that, they already have products that implement large parts of 37Signals's applications' functionality. It is just a matter of them packaging it all up into something more usable and then marketing it. A large part of 37Signals's success is due to marketing; Without Signal vs. Noise nobody would know about them.

Campfire is not 37Signals money application. You're thinking of Basecamp. I'm surprised if 37Signals gives a shit about Huddlechat.

"we're flattered Google thinks Campfire is a great product, we're just disappointed that they stooped so low to basically copy it feature for feature, layout for layout". He went on to say that "we thought that would be beneath Google, but maybe its time to reevaluate what they stand for."

jasonfried would be welcome to respond here. while they're busy writing marketing blogs, because of the simplicity, 37signals' software is defensible from a startup's point of view, but doesn't hold a candle to Google if they launched something, a la HuddleChat.

We've established that they were willing to be snide about it, but not that it was in any way threatening to them. Campfire is, by far, their simplest application.

amen.

wow, lots of 37signals fanbitches on here.

you weren't downmodded for agreeing with the story, it was because your comment was substance-less. nobody here wants to read "me too"-type things, it's just a waste of time.

if you've got something to add to the conversation, by all means, do so. if you've got nothing to say but "me too," just mod the story up and move on.

yea, great job on posting a comment that has nothing to do with this story.

The way this site's values are carried forward is the older hands show the newer ones how things are done around here. That sort of community maintenance might happen anywhere, on-topic for the current submission or not.

But heck, if you're really hellbent on not listening to advice, go right ahead doing what you're doing. It's possible your account's karma will wind up in negative numbers and then get deleted, but that's hardly the end of the world, I guess.

100% agree. The "advice" coming out of 37 signals is completely ridiculous. Don't hire overachievers. Only work 4 days a week. Take 6 weeks of vacation.

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