We’ve recently stumbled onto a book by 37signals (the people behind Ruby on Rails) that has gotten us fired up all over again about the advantages of being a small web-based software company. Sure, we’ve been using many of the concepts they talked about over the past several years, but we were surprised to find several ways of thinking about things that were different than the ways we had approached them in the past.
One concept in particular that I loved was the idea of development debt. They stress that it’s ok to not get everything perfect the first time, and if you try to wait until everything is, you’ll never release a product. It’s important, however, to consider this imperfect software as a debt that you have to repay. On a regular basis you need to go back in and repay your loans. For us, this includes reducing clutter and eliminating areas in the app that aren’t intuitive.
We’ll continue adding new functionality like reporting and meetings over the next few months, but a major push for us will be identifying the areas of the app that aren’t quite working and clean them up. We want someone who has never used the app before to be able to sit down and start using it without a manual.
The book is called Getting Real and has an online version that’s free. If you’re at all interested in software development, I highly recommend taking a look. It’s a very quick read and is packed with all kinds of good stuff.
“Getting Real” is not just about development. The book also covers a specific approach to starting a software company, pricing the product and marketing it in the ‘Web 2.0″ decade. As such, it is the second publication I’ve read that embodies the attitude and philosophy of the founders of Spider Strategies. The first publication was an essay by Paul Graham, “How to Start a Start-Up”, http://www.paulgraham.com/start.html.
Scott mentioned that we stumbled on the book. He doesn’t mention that we stumbled on the book at exactly the right time in our companies life. When we started the company, we followed a lot of the principles laid out in the book.
We offered a free online unlimited trial of our product (http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch12_Free_Samples.php).
We had no “sign-up” forms to access a demo, we simply gave direct access (http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch12_Easy_On_Easy_Off.php).
We used online forums for our help desk and to solicit product enhancement requests (http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch14_In_Fine_Forum.php)
We published our prices on our website….
Then, we got off track. We started partnering with companies whose heads were stuck in the 80s and 90s and listening to “old school” advice. The result was a terrible narrowing of product focus, “tricks are for kids” (http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch12_Silly_Rabbit_Tricks_are_for_Kids.php) marketing, secret pricing and a closed website. Fortunately, we freed ourselves from those “bad head day” partnerships before stumbling on “Getting Real” and rediscovering our foundation!
Now we are in the process of putting a demo link directly into our application, offering a free hosted use of the app for a limited number of users, putting our base pricing up on the web and blogging with the user, marketing and development communities!
My point is that you don’t have to be interested in just software development to find “Getting Real” a valuable read. If you are interested in doing business on the web in a Web 2.0 decade, the book is essential reading!