Jun
11
Memo #6 – 37 Signals hates competition
Filed Under Startups
37Signals is a company out of Chicago that has a popular blog where they encourage people to work less, grow slowly, etc, etc. Except that they don’t do that at all. They’ve raised money from Jeff Bezos, hired a team of “Internet All-Stars” and spend more time online than offline. They aren’t really a startup in the classical sense, more like a lifestyle company who wants to be treated as a startup.
But a startup is about one thing — Big risk == Big reward. That’s why we are creating businesses. That’s why we are changing industries. That’s why we work our butts off. If you don’t have health insurance (as they claim happens at a startup) you are working at the wrong company. If you are destroying your family (as they claim happens at a startup) then you are working at the wrong company.
Bottom line: 37 Signals is full of baloney, spreading misinformation and I can only guess it’s to try and stem competition. They don’t want to encourage innovation, they want you to stop innovating so they can take their time to innovate slowly. If you’ve ever used their apps, you know how weak-sauce they are. So weak is their sauce that the first demo of Google App Engine was a quickly-made clone of their Campfire application. 37 Signals whined about and resulted in it being taken down. What a bunch of jokers.
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22 Responses to “Memo #6 – 37 Signals hates competition”
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First!
amen.
hahaha totally!
I won’t lie I love their applications. What you call weak sauce is a quick lightweight app that integrates well with other things.
Their target market is freelancers and entrepreneurs like us, of course they don’t want us to work harder because we will sign up with more advanced tools.
Well for now I am sticking with what they got, its easy, cheap, and saves me time.
Sounds like you are a jealous douche.
@Ibod Catooga
I’m totally jealous of their hipster style.
As a side note, I’m sure they’ll be happy to know that they have fans who live in the Chicagoland area who post anonymously in their defense.
37 Signals is a bunch of dirty hippies.
I tend to agree about their products but I do have to give them credit as marketers as the manage to market the weak-saice very well.
I think their days on top are fading.
What do you think of the 37 signals talk at start-up school regarding starting normal size business companies vs. trying to start the next google? Think its BS?
Rubbish. So what would you do if Google cloned one of your apps. Say “Thanks very much chaps. Terribly nice of you”. I dont think so. This article blows.
spoken like a true whiner. just because they have a critique of the dominant and nearly impossible fantasies of little entrepreneurs everywhere doesn’t mean they’re trying to be anticompetitive. work smarter not harder.
37 Signals is also spreading a lot of baloney, misinformation, and FUD regarding “our look and feel is copyright us”, which is total BS. You can’t copyright and look and feel and they should stop trying to scare small companies or threaten legal action (their blog post says they do this if people ignore their e-mails).
I’ve blogged an entire series about this issue; the link below is just to my discussion of copyright itself and the specific parts of the law 37 Signals is trying to distort.
http://blog.pastie.org/2008/05/copyright—des.html
LOL! So what does that make SkinnyCorp?
(lifestyle startup, cover of Inc. magazine)
” Big risk == Big reward. That’s why we are creating businesses. That’s why we are changing industries. That’s why we work our butts off.”
Lifestyle _is_ big reward in the industry of being classy.
As a card carying ‘dirty hippie’ I take umbridge at Mike D’s remark that ‘37 Signals is a bunch of dirty hippies.’ The International Association of Dirty Hippies (IADH) has a very strict requirement that a member cannot have bathed in the previous 25 years. Personally I haven’t had a bath since Woodstock. I doubt that the employees at 37 Signals ‘is’ old enough to have gone the required 25 years without a bath not to mention a hair cut.
What a bunch of nonsense.
37Signals used to be a small design firm with only a couple people. Their first product Basecamp took a year to take off — this wasn’t an overnight success. Jeff Bezos didn’t give them a load of money to hire all the star developers, they had to work hard for years to get healthy profits, which only then resulted in the Amazon investment and expansion of their team.
The main developer of Basecamp, David Heinemeier Hansson has created the Ruby on Rails framework — are you saying this is weak sauce too?
And come on — they hate competition? Do you love your competition or something? What, they’re so crazy and stupid that they actually don’t like competition? Of course they hate competition… everybody does — but going so far as to say that all the stuff they blog about and even written books about is strategic disinformation is absolutely ridiculous.
37Signals isn’t trying to stifle competition by giving them bad advice, they’re describing how they achieved success.
Their main point is that rather than racking up technical debt (or in “classical” startup parlance, working 100-hour weeks), you should instead write better products.
A lot of people claim that they’re working the long hours to speed their time to market, but they’re ignoring the fact that the extra time they’re spending is in paying off technical debt rather than in developing software.
I realize that this isn’t a universal axiom, but it’s true far more often than not.
LOL This is a classical case of attack the big-dog to gain attention aka links.
37 Signals focuses on simple problems and offers simple, yet effective solutions.
And about their philosophy & advice… Are you telling me that you disagree with the two pieces of advice you cite:
* If you don’t have health insurance you are working at the wrong company.
* If you are destroying your family then you are working at the wrong company.
If you think having no health insurance & destroying your family is the way to live, more power to you.
If you think a startup doesn’t have to involve those things, than you and 37s folks have a lot in common. What are you making a big stink about? Let me guess… you want more links to your blog.
PS: If their approach or products don’t feel right to you, no one is holding a gun to your brain. Take your business elsewhere.
~ mel
PS2: I’m assuming you hate the ideas from Tim Ferriss’s Four Hour Work Week as well, don’t ya? Trashing that might get you a few more links as well.
Actually, 37signals products suck in my opinion, sad to see.
[...] [...]
[...] Ulevitch thinks that startups are about ‘one thing - Big risk = Big reward.’ He bashes the 37Signals guys for operating their business like ‘a lifestyle company [...]
David, I’m curious as to what you mean by “a lifestyle company”? Maybe I just don’t know the term but it seems a bit vague…