Signal v. Noise

Market cap doesn't equal what people have purchased. See this classic from 2015: https://medium.com/signal-v-noise/press-release-basecamp-valuation-top…

Not least in part to DHH setting the tone years ago; but yeah naming is hard enough without "creative branding" [0] https://medium.com/signal-v-noise/hunting-for-great-names-in-programmi…

They’re such a unique company, but they’ve always fail to recognize just how unique their situation is and how most people can only dream of being so lucky. - First you have DHH who is one of the creators of Ruby on Rails. He has a large cult-like following - You have relatively simple projects that are profitable from day 1 - They have a series of “self-help” style books for running a business that are popular. Rework was their most popular by far. - And when you do take on money you get an extremely unique business arrangement. Bezos invested in them early on and only became a member in a LLC. All the VCs I know make you reform as a Corp. The only other places even remotely close to that might be Vercel and Netlify. And I only say that because of their widely popular open source projects. https://medium.com/signal-v-noise/the-deal-jeff-bezos-got-on-basecamp-…

As parodied some 5 years ago: https://medium.com/signal-v-noise/press-release-basecamp-valuation-top… Once you make money, it's much harder to come up with outlandish numbers. A dry cleaners has a well-established range for revenue and profit, so it's hard to justify why it would be worth $100 billion.

I love his book "Why we sleep" and I think most people today should read it. People take pride in sleeping less than they should which is pretty fucked up in my opinion. DHH also have a lot to say about it: https://m.signalvnoise.com/sleep-deprivation-is-not-a-badge-of-honor/ https://medium.com/signal-v-noise/microsoft-reboots-war-on-sleep-a90da…

> DHH would be platformed—and ironically at the very conference he was asked not to keynote in 2022 seemingly as a result of Basecamp’s politically-charged implosion which led to a third of the entire company resigning in protest. That's a funny way to say that he asked for people to refrain from politics when they're at work and a third of the company said no and left, I really struggle to see this in a bad light. I don't have beefs on this whole discussion and only sporadically follow DHH blog posts, I think the main conflict people are having with his views is that work is not just work anymore, people are expected to share a vision, to have the same cliques, to live the same live, work became for some people what family, church or the local community used to be for most before that. See for example https://medium.com/signal-v-noise/the-company-isnt-a-family-d24f26c3f3… or his book "It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work". I was talking to a friend who worked in the US and the UK about the culture differences, and he mentioned how the US leaned more towards a family culture where the UK was more of a pub culture. On a family you feel required to cope with whatever bs is thrown at you because you're supposed to stick together. On a pub the more off putting you are the more chances people are not gonna talk to you.

Across mobile messenger, messenger.com and the messenger desktop app, the website was the only place left where you could have multiple chats open at once. Now that moves to one at a time as well. That is a huge usability regression (unless its been fixed since last time I tried the prerelease. Edit: Just switched back, it does look like they maintained chat windows at the bottom instead of just chatheads on desktop, although I can still only have two chats open at once.) Friend lists also got left with the legacy interface, which cant bode well for them in the long run. They are still facebooks most squandered opportunity. The neverending quest to reduce information density is a usability disaster, despite the misheld belief that cleanliness = usable. Zooming out on the new fb interface, to restore some information density, leaves a comical amount of whitespace. Wells Fargo has turned its desktop interface into a giant stretched mobile app. Nothing is hyperlinks that support right click or new tab anymore. https://medium.com/signal-v-noise/why-i-love-ugly-messy-interfaces-and… The cluster f of the old old facebook interface was beautiful.

> Python's success is entirely due to entry-level programming courses. They all switched to Python, because you have to explain less. Nonsense. > I don't think I heard about web servers in Python before 2012. More nonsense. > I suppose a 2005 computer wouldn't be able to serve a Python backend smoothly. Extreme nonsense. https://medium.com/signal-v-noise/ruby-has-been-fast-enough-for-13-yea… And this is when Python was edging Ruby performance wise.

I've always liked Basecamp's view on whales vs minnows: https://basecamp.com/small https://www.inc.com/magazine/201606/jason-fried/saying-no-to-large-ent… https://medium.com/signal-v-noise/bigger-prices-bigger-problems-728202…

You're right, TIL. https://medium.com/signal-v-noise/the-deal-jeff-bezos-got-on-basecamp-…

This short post has always resonated with me: https://medium.com/signal-v-noise/ive-never-had-a-goal-c89219aedddf

DHH made a nice post about it a few years back (2015) https://medium.com/signal-v-noise/reconsider-41adf356857f

I'm making a living with just over 100 true fans building Simplescraper: https://simplescraper.io/. An extra zero would be nice but I'm very grateful for 100. In addition to the article above, these writings provided a lot of inspiration: - https://web.archive.org/web/20090321145348/https://plentyoffish.wordpr… - https://medium.com/signal-v-noise/reconsider-41adf356857f - https://blog.nugget.one/upstart/building-a-one-man-saas-app-offers-a-p…

You’d bootstrap, and then have future employees buy into a restricted share class (you could also take on debt to fund and personally guarantee until you can pay it back with future revenue, or find someone wealthy to write an investment check [1]). You're aligning incentives and sharing in the economic success, but using share restrictions to prevent, broadly speaking, shenanigans that are not aligned with your desired outcome. You wouldn't want shares transferred without board approval, for example. Craigslist was a cautionary tale about this [2], make sure your agreements are drafted to withstand potential adversaries. The culture should be clearly communicated about this when hiring and onboarding. Check out Certified EO [3] [4], they can help you. Maybe reach out to DHH or Jason Fried on this too, 37signals is a similar model of staying small and and profitable [5] [6]. [1] https://medium.com/signal-v-noise/the-deal-jeff-bezos-got-on-basecamp-… [2] https://www.delawarelitigation.com/2010/09/articles/chancery-court-upd… [3] https://www.certifiedeo.com/ [4] https://www.certifiedeo.com/why-employee-ownership [5] https://x.com/jasonfried/status/1887964677344489574 | https://archive.today/dZwKz [6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=171325