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When Google puts 4 paid ads ahead of the first organic result for your own brand name, you’re forced to pay up if you want to be found. It’s a shakedown. It’s ransom. But at least we can have fun with it. Search for Basecamp and you may see this attached ad.

If your company requires you to work nights and weekends, your company is broken. This is a managerial problem, not your problem. This is a process problem, not a personal problem. This is an ownership problem, not an individual problem.

This is such an elegant way to say “don’t call or email us about this package”.

THE BIG REGRESSION My folks are in town visiting us for a couple months so we rented them a house nearby. It’s new construction. No one has lived in it yet. It’s amped up with state of the art systems. The ones with touchscreens of various sizes, IoT appliances, and interfaces that try too hard. And it’s terrible. What a regression. The lights are powered by Control4. And require a demo to understand how to use the switches, understand which ones control what, and to be sure not to hit THAT ONE because it’ll turn off all the lights in the house when you didn’t mean to. Worse. The TV is the latest Samsung which has a baffling UI just to watch CNN. My parents aren’t idiots, but definitely feel like they’re missing something obvious. They aren’t — TVs have simply gotten worse. You don’t turn them on anymore, you boot them up. The Miele dishwasher is hidden flush with the counters. That part is fine, but here’s what isn’t: It wouldn’t even operate the first time without connecting it to an app. This meant another call to the house manager to have them install an app they didn’t know they needed either. An app to clean some peanut butter off a plate? For serious? Worse. Thermostats... Nest would have been an upgrade, but these other propriety ones from some other company trying to be nest-like are baffling. Round touchscreens that take you into a dark labyrinth of options just to be sure it’s set at 68. Or is it 68 now? Or is that what we want it at, but it’s at 72? Wait... What? Which number is this? Worse. The alarm system is essentially a 10” iPad bolted to the wall that has the fucking weather forecast on it. And it’s bright! I’m sure there’s a way to turn that off, but then the screen would be so barren that it would be filled with the news instead. Why can’t the alarm panel just be an alarm panel? Worse. And the lag. Lag everywhere. Everything feels a beat or two behind. Everything. Lag is the giveaway that the system is working too hard for too little. Real-time must be the hardest problem. Now look... I’m no luddite. But this experience is close to conversion therapy. Tech can make things better, but I simply can’t see in these cases. I’ve heard the pitches too — you can set up scenes and one button can change EVERYTHING. Not buying it. It actually feels primitive, like we haven’t figured out how to make things easy yet. That some breakthrough will eventually come when you can simply knock a switch up or down and it’ll all makes sense. But that's at least 20 years down the road. It’s really the contrast that makes it alarming. We just got back from a vacation in Montana. Rented a house there. They did have a fancy TV — seems those can’t be avoided these days — but everything else was old school and clear. Physical up/down light switches in the right places. Appliances without the internet. Buttons with depth and physically-confirmed state change rather than surfaces that don’t obviously register your choice. More traditional round rotating Honeywell thermostats that are just clear and obvious. No tours, no instructions, no questions, no fearing you’re going to do something wrong, no wondering how something works. Useful and universally clear. That’s human, that’s modern.

A passage from the Tao that’s frequently worth revisiting.

When I was starting my first business, I remember using a totally large random number as my first invoice number to make it seem like I’d sent *a lot* of invoices before. Hands up if you were as insecure as I was when you started your first business.

Pathetic… even Apple is promoting workaholism now. Check out this ad for their Planet Of The Apps show.

What do they got? A big team, lots of money, a strong brand, seemingly unlimited resources, panache, reputation, all that. They’re established. They’re your competitors. You want to look away, but you see them everywhere. Their ads on your social, their name in the media, your dream clients on their website. But you know what else they got? Bigger company bloat. Overflowing obligations. Narratives to uphold. Appearances to maintain. Entitlement. Too much overhead. They’re slow. They’re conservative. They talk too much. They’ve stopped taking risks. They’re resting on their laurels, gliding on their reputation. They’re on defense. What they’ve really got is a lot to lose. What do you got? Hunger. Drive. Grit. Scrappiness. Independence. You’re on offense. You don’t have enough, which is why you’re dangerous. You have no choice but to be clever and creative. To make up for what you don’t have with something they can’t have: The underdog spirit. You can move. You can adjust. You can adapt. You can get it done while they’re still stuck deciding what to do. Small is not a stepping stone. Small is not less than. It’s greater than. It’s faster than. It’s better than. Savor your position. You don’t get to be the underdog forever. The baton will be passed. But for now, it’s your magic wand. Use it. We stand with the underdogs.

Instead of a hackathon, try a sleepathon. You’ll be better off.

Company culture is not written down, it’s acted out. A company’s culture is a 50-day moving average of *how it is*, not how it thinks it is, wants to be, or was supposed to be.

Rename “cookies” to “trackers” and you’d see some progress. Who wouldn’t want to “accept cookies”?! Has anyone ever turned down a delicious cookie? But who would want to “accept trackers”?

Prediction: If Github ends up selling itself one day, Microsoft will be the buyer.

After 10 years, our office lease is up July 31. Our landlord just asked if we’d like to stay through the end of the year. WITH A ~30% INCREASE IN RENT. During a pandemic! Commercial landlords are about to face a new reality. This is an odd approach to keeping a tenant in place.

When Google puts 4 paid ads ahead of the first organic result for your own brand name, you’re forced to pay up if you want to be found. It’s a shakedown. It’s ransom. But at least we can have fun with it. Search for Basecamp and you may see this attached ad.

It's remarkable how unliked Jira is. Hard to come up with another piece of software that seems so universally panned by people who have to use it, yet has clearly proven popular. I guess there's Salesforce, but... So what is it about Jira that so many don't like?

THE BIG REGRESSION My folks are in town visiting us for a couple months so we rented them a house nearby. It’s new construction. No one has lived in it yet. It’s amped up with state of the art systems. The ones with touchscreens of various sizes, IoT appliances, and interfaces that try too hard. And it’s terrible. What a regression. The lights are powered by Control4. And require a demo to understand how to use the switches, understand which ones control what, and to be sure not to hit THAT ONE because it’ll turn off all the lights in the house when you didn’t mean to. Worse. The TV is the latest Samsung which has a baffling UI just to watch CNN. My parents aren’t idiots, but definitely feel like they’re missing something obvious. They aren’t — TVs have simply gotten worse. You don’t turn them on anymore, you boot them up. The Miele dishwasher is hidden flush with the counters. That part is fine, but here’s what isn’t: It wouldn’t even operate the first time without connecting it to an app. This meant another call to the house manager to have them install an app they didn’t know they needed either. An app to clean some peanut butter off a plate? For serious? Worse. Thermostats... Nest would have been an upgrade, but these other propriety ones from some other company trying to be nest-like are baffling. Round touchscreens that take you into a dark labyrinth of options just to be sure it’s set at 68. Or is it 68 now? Or is that what we want it at, but it’s at 72? Wait... What? Which number is this? Worse. The alarm system is essentially a 10” iPad bolted to the wall that has the fucking weather forecast on it. And it’s bright! I’m sure there’s a way to turn that off, but then the screen would be so barren that it would be filled with the news instead. Why can’t the alarm panel just be an alarm panel? Worse. And the lag. Lag everywhere. Everything feels a beat or two behind. Everything. Lag is the giveaway that the system is working too hard for too little. Real-time must be the hardest problem. Now look... I’m no luddite. But this experience is close to conversion therapy. Tech can make things better, but I simply can’t see in these cases. I’ve heard the pitches too — you can set up scenes and one button can change EVERYTHING. Not buying it. It actually feels primitive, like we haven’t figured out how to make things easy yet. That some breakthrough will eventually come when you can simply knock a switch up or down and it’ll all makes sense. But that's at least 20 years down the road. It’s really the contrast that makes it alarming. We just got back from a vacation in Montana. Rented a house there. They did have a fancy TV — seems those can’t be avoided these days — but everything else was old school and clear. Physical up/down light switches in the right places. Appliances without the internet. Buttons with depth and physically-confirmed state change rather than surfaces that don’t obviously register your choice. More traditional round rotating Honeywell thermostats that are just clear and obvious. No tours, no instructions, no questions, no fearing you’re going to do something wrong, no wondering how something works. Useful and universally clear. That’s human, that’s modern.

If your company requires you to work nights and weekends, your company is broken. This is a managerial problem, not your problem. This is a process problem, not a personal problem. This is an ownership problem, not an individual problem.

Pathetic… even Apple is promoting workaholism now. Check out this ad for their Planet Of The Apps show.

If I had to guess, whatever they make together will not have a screen. This would be the true divergence from devices today. Screens are obvious, breaking away would be the move. So the guess would be some sort of AirPod-style thing that is audio only. Audio feels future.

Giving out equity in startups benefits ownership way more than employees. It allows the owners to push employees harder and harder because “you’ve got skin in the game now… you’re an owner.” No you aren’t. Owning less than 1% of anything isn’t ownership.

When I was starting my first business, I remember using a totally large random number as my first invoice number to make it seem like I’d sent *a lot* of invoices before. Hands up if you were as insecure as I was when you started your first business.

After 10 years, our office lease is up July 31. Our landlord just asked if we’d like to stay through the end of the year. WITH A ~30% INCREASE IN RENT. During a pandemic! Commercial landlords are about to face a new reality. This is an odd approach to keeping a tenant in place.

Everything else on the home page remains the same, which of these three messaging variations leads to the most signups? Variation A "Wrestling" Variation B "Sets you free" Variation C "Get somewhere" We've run one test, and are running another to verify. What's your bet?

A young entrepreneur in his mid-20s just emailed me asking for some $$$ advice. He just sold a business and ended up with a couple million in liquid cash. He wanted to know if he should invest it, use it to build a new company, or do something else with it. My advice wasn't what he was expecting. I just said don't lose it. Do nothing with it. Put it in the bank. Something safe, earning a little, but not too much that it's at risk. Money doesn't need to work. It can rest. Leave it be. You're 26 — you can get back to work. A couple million liquid cash is a huge haul. Maintain! Don't lose. Always have that. And add more to that safe pile as you go. That's yours now. Keep it that way.

Good time to preview the next ONCE product. We're calling it Workbook. You know, it's really easy to publish short form content on a variety of social platforms. And individual blog posts on a number of other platforms. These are solved problems. But it's surprisingly challenging to publish books on the web in nice, cohesive, tight, easy-to-navigate HTML format. A collection of 20 essays can be a book. Or a company's handbook can be a book. Or an actual book like Shape Up can be a book. But usually you have to make a custom web site, or stretch to use a blog publishing tool to kinda-sorta squish separate posts together into a packaged whole. It's really not ideal. We know — we've published a variety of books online, and we've had to go the custom route each time. Having to go the custom route for something that should be fundamentally simple is a red flag. And an opportunity. It really shouldn't be this hard. So we're doing something about that. That's Workbook. It's a dead simple platform to publish web-based books. They have covers, they can have title pages, they can have picture pages, and they can have text pages. Each book gets its own URL, and navigating and keeping track of your progress is all built right in. I'll be sharing much more about this soon, but here's a screenshot on the editing end. This is how you put a book together. Make the pages (there are three styles of pages available), drag them around to put them in the order you want, and Workbook takes care of the rest. A page can be a literal page of text, or an entire chapter — you can set it up however you'd like. Text editing happens in Markdown. Once you're done, and ready to publish, you'd flip the toggle on the left under the cover, customize your URL (at your domain, of course), and the book is live on the web for the whole world to read. Workbook will be a ONCE product, so you get all the code too. And for the first time, it'll be entirely free. You don't even have to pay once! You pay zero! Workbook is our love letter to truly independent, zero-cost web publishing. We'll be republishing all our public books (Getting Real, Shape Up, The 37signals Employee Handbook, etc) using Workbook as well. That's it for now, more soon.

A bespoke software revolution? I don't buy it. It'll exist. It already exists. Small consultants and big consulting firms have made custom software for years. It almost always sucks. It’s bloated, confusing, and because the client pays, it’s built wrong in all the ways. Who’s excited about bespoke software? Software makers! Of course they're excited about building bespoke software — that's what they do. X is full of them. Your feed is full of people who love making software talking about making software. Of course they’re excited about the revolution. Echo, echo, echo... Most people don’t like computers. Nobody in tech wants to say that out loud. People tolerate computers. They use them because they have to. Given the choice, most would rather not think about them at all. So when someone suggests that AI means everyone will build their own custom tools, ask who "everyone" is. The three-person accounting firm drowning in client paperwork? They want the paperwork gone, not a new system to maintain. The regional logistics company with 40 trucks? They want the routes optimized, not Joe spouting off about this new system he’s been messing around with. The law firm billing 70-hour weeks? They want leverage on their time, not a software project to design. They don’t hate technology. But building and maintaining their own critical systems isn’t their wheelhouse, regardless of how much faster and easier it’s become. It's another job on top of the job. Will these people use AI? Absolutely, for all sorts of things. Will some outliers go deep and build real custom systems? Sure, but they're almost always people who already had some pull toward software. The curiosity was already there. They were dabblers before. Giving everyone access to software building tools doesn't mean everyone becomes a builder. A powerful excavator doesn't turn a homeowner into a contractor. Most people just want the hole dug by someone else. They don’t want the responsibility either.