Built on Intuition

0:00Jason Fried:Welcome to Rework, a podcast by 37signals about the better way to work and run your business. I'm Kimberly Rhodes from the 37signals team, joined by the co-founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. If you've listened to this podcast at all, you have clearly heard us talk a lot about intuition. David, you used the words gut computer. Jason, you're often just like you have a feel for something. But I thought we would talk a little bit this week about how you develop that, how you learn to trust yourself in business to just be able to trust your gut. or even know that your gut is talking to you.

0:31Jason Fried:So I'm just going to open it up there. David, maybe you start. You talk a lot about your gut computer.

0:36David Heinemeier Hansson:Have you always heard your gut computer talking to you?

0:39Jason Fried:I think I have, but it was certainly not as well-fed as it is now because I've just lived longer. I've tried more things. I've experimented with more stuff. But do you know what? We started working together, Jason and I, when I was, what, 22, 23, something like that. I didn't know everything. I mean, I still didn't know everything, but I knew half or less than what I know now. And I think the approach hasn't changed that much in terms of letting intuition guide, letting the gut guide where we're going to go and what we're going to try. And I think some of that comes from just deciding to some degree to have some confidence in your own magic fingers and that the only way to really figure out what something is going to be like is to do it.

1:33Jason Fried:And accepting that while you can learn a lot of things from other people's experiences, and I mean, I was a ferocious reader of software methodology, writing, for example, when I thought I wanted to do things with software, but I didn't know that I was going to be a programmer quite yet. I thought like, well, maybe I'll sit at some other branch on this trunk here and therefore just try to absorb as much as possible. How can I read everything there is to read at least the main classics in my field? How can I find a handful of individuals who are doing really cool stuff that I really like that I'm simply just going to try to emulate?

2:13Jason Fried:I'm just going to try to copy. I'm just going to try to do their motions until they become natural and I can give it my own spin. I mean, there's a whole body of literature on the notion of the beginner's mindset. And it's basically an echo of that, that you start with a great humility over the fact that you don't know everything. You try to absorb everything in. But then the way you turn those absorptions into results is through action. I have seen, and I think Jason had a write-up at one point, about affliction, where you think like, no, I just need to read like seven more blog posts about how to start a business.

2:51Jason Fried:If I just read a little bit more about how to do this, if I read a little bit more about that, then I'll be ready. That is a fool's errand. You're not going to be able to convert any of that input into knowledge without passing through action. That's actually the magic bit here. The magic bit is that you try to apply some of these things and you'll quickly realize that a bunch of shit you read in blog posts or heard on a podcast wasn't actually something that worked for you. And that's not because the advice necessarily is wrong. It's just because, well, I work in a different industry. I work at a different time.

3:29Jason Fried:My constraints are different. I'm in a different place. I'm a different person than the people talking. And that's the filtering process, right? Like that's sort of the digestive to stay in the metaphor here, of what informs your gut and what turns your gut into this powerful computer that actually can analyze things and spit out good results that get you somewhere good.

3:54David Heinemeier Hansson:Practically, I think you just need to make a lot of decisions. I mean, decisions and then follow through, but you got to make some calls. And if you only make three big decisions a year, it's going to take you 30 years to train your intuition, your gut. If you make 30 or 300 decisions a year, you're going to get there faster. You're going to feel things out and you're going to know a quarter of them aren't going to make any sense. They aren't going to work. It doesn't matter. You want to make these things small enough that you can throw them away if they don't pan out. But you've got to practice.

4:21David Heinemeier Hansson:That's the practice is like making decisions and making things smaller and smaller and smaller so they don't feel like there's this huge gravity behind everything. And if you get it wrong, you're screwed. It's over. So I would just say make a lot of small decisions along the way. And the smaller, the better, actually, especially when you're getting started. You don't want to be paralyzed by this big decision that's going to make or break everything. And that's ultimately how you train it. You train it. It's like doing reps. It's no different, right? Intuition is a collection of decisions. You come from them, you find them somehow through you or whatever.

4:53David Heinemeier Hansson:You don't even know what influences you. But you've got to do the reps. You've got to get the reps in. I think that's the only way to really begin to train this thing that you don't really even totally understand, but you have, everyone has it. Everyone's got one of these things and you get to know it by making decisions.

5:07Jason Fried:And one of the things I see quite often is the hesitation of actually getting started on something real. This is why when we wrote our first book, it was literally called getting real. It was this concept, like start making something. Don't sit around just talking about it. Don't just write a bunch of things down, make grand plans. No, start moving, start implementing, start building. And again, it's not that the first thing you're going to build is going to be the most amazing thing ever. Or it is, by the way, when I look at the history of 37 Signals, like Basecamp was not exactly the first thing, but like the second or third thing, right?

5:47Jason Fried:Quite early, we actually hit upon the best idea this company has ever had. We encountered that not that long after we started working together, not that long after plowing into making things for ourselves, right? So the point is, you got to get real. You got to start making those decisions. And the way you start making those decisions is that you work on the, as we often refer to it, the epicenter of the idea, the epicenter of the app, the epicenter of the business, not the around stuff, not all the other things that you could set up or worry about. Do you know what? You're going to figure all that out if you get an epicenter correct enough that anyone gives a damn.

6:29Jason Fried:That is currently, I mean, probably always was, but in this moment, the short supply. There is an endless supply now of capabilities. Nothing costs anything to get started. You can sign up for a Stripe account in two seconds, connect that to some Vibe-coded app, And now you're in business doing SaaS, if you think that that's the thing you want to do, right? Like all of the hurdles and obstacles that Jason and I faced when we were walking uphill in both directions in our bare feet in the snow in 2003, those things don't exist anymore. But now you have the other challenge, right? How do you make anyone give a damn when everything is happening in maximum velocity all of the time, right?

7:17Jason Fried:Oughts are probably that it's not the first strike that's going to do it. And you just got to get to making more stuff, making more epicenters, making more things you put in front of people, finding out what resonates and then finding a way to put your spin on it, right? But making things, not thinking about things, not reading more things, not doing all the other stuff. You can do that on the sides, right? But you got to, in the center of things is you doing stuff. you making decisions, you implementing things, you building. Okay. So on that note of making decisions and getting better at making decisions because you're making a lot of decisions, I get the impression, just like an outsider perspective, the two of you decide pretty quickly.

7:59Jason Fried:Like you don't mull, again, outside perspective. It doesn't feel like you guys mull things over or debate about things for long, extended periods of time, which is how I imagine a lot of companies are about making decisions, whether they're big or small, like it involves a lot of back and forth and time and talking about it. I don't get the impression that you guys are like that. You're just like either yes, no, we're doing it, we're not doing it. It seems like a pretty quick process. Is that a true and accurate observation or am I totally off base?

8:31David Heinemeier Hansson:I think it's pretty accurate. I think there's occasionally something that's a really big deal. I think part of the reason why we don't take a long time is that most things aren't really a big deal. There are occasional really big deals that we need to like them all over and think through. And usually it's like, well, let's sleep on it over this weekend and let's talk about it next week. It's not like let's put something on the schedule for three months from now or something like that. It's still relatively quick, but it may require a few conversations, a few discussions, a few debates. And then we kind of find our way there.

9:00David Heinemeier Hansson:But most things just aren't those things. And blowing up something small into something big is a big problem for a lot of people, I think. It's a big problem for a lot of companies. They take too long to decide things that don't really matter anyway. So realizing that most things probably don't matter that much anyway is a good way to get going through things and to make quick calls and go, if we made the wrong call, we'll make a different call three days from now. It doesn't really matter that much. That's the idea of chunking things into smaller and smaller and smaller bits that are almost throwaway decisions in a sense.

9:29David Heinemeier Hansson:You still want to make them and they're important at some level and collectively the pile of them is important, but any one decision is not that big of a deal. You want to get to the place where you can do that. That's how you can make quick calls and move on. And then also you want to be able to move fast through the things that you do to see if they work. That's the other thing. You want to make a decision and then you want to build the thing so you can decide whether or not it works rather than debate it in the abstract for three months and then finally make a call and then find out it doesn't work in the real world.

9:58David Heinemeier Hansson:So this is all about getting to something real, like David was saying, as soon as you possibly can. And then you can really look at it for real and make a decision, was this worth doing or not? But before that, it's all abstract. So you want to kind of not spend a lot of time on the abstract. You want to spend more time on the real thing, and then you'll really know for sure.

10:15Jason Fried:And I think part of that is having the humility of accepting that nobody knows anything. Nobody knows anything. And very, very few people are able to successfully, repeatedly analyze themselves into a great decision. They sit down and they're all conscious about it. Either they write reports or they run a lot of statistical analysis. And sometimes that has a place to inform things somewhat in some ways, but it's just dwarfed by reality, dwarfed by the notion of seeing what happens and going, do you know what? We don't know. We're not going to know regardless of however long we talk about this, however much analysis we apply to the problem, however much data we pull, however many customers we may even talk to, the customer's going to basically give us a bunch of bullshit until we ask those customers, hey, all right, would you pay?

11:16Jason Fried:Where's the credit card, right? So there you get flawed information. The statistical analysis will only give you answers about the data you already have, which is a tiny percentage of all the data that exists in the world, your ability to debate your way through this may uncover some angles on some decisions. I think both Jason and I do enjoy a rigorous debate, but usually it's a debate of taste or opinions about something real, like how a feature is supposed to be screwed together, less so about what the market is going to do, what a customer is going to do, what's going to happen in two years, all of that stuff.

11:57Jason Fried:We have enough humility, which may sound strange when you're otherwise talking about quite arrogant about things, enough humility to accept that, you know what, we, like everyone else, just don't know very many things. And the only source of truth that can tell us things that are real is reality, is throwing things against that bouncy wall and seeing what comes back and what gets accelerated. and I've seen this time and again in all sorts of different domains. One of them, for example, is like what goes viral? What strikes sort of just the right chord with the audience? What blog post blows up?

12:38Jason Fried:What little clip from a podcast goes somewhere? What even kind of just projects that we write up about? I've used this example before, but when we originally wrote about the getting out of the cloud thing. It was a throwaway 12-minute post. I just quickly hammered into my hey world, hit send, barely proofread it, posted it on LinkedIn, and millions and millions and millions of people saw that, right? I didn't know I had had a similar experience going the other way. Many times in the past where I thought, oh my God, this is so good. I mean, I'm just typing here and I'm like, oh, these are just a pearl.

13:15Jason Fried:It's like the wisdom I'm putting into this. Piece of writing is incredible. And then I'll post it and like total crickets. No one gives a fuck. I've spent much longer than 12 minutes on a piece, on a video, on a project, and no one gives a damn, right? And then you just see things explode on stuff you didn't think was going to go anywhere. So the only way to kind of harness that is to keep batting, right? This is one of the things both with the writing and the podcast and everything else that we do is, you know what? if you want to occasionally break through and leave a mark somewhere, oh my God, you just got to keep throwing.

13:52Jason Fried:You do not know. You do not know what's going to resonate. You do not know what's going to work. Get better at throwing. And then you realize by the time you've thrown, for example, on Hey World, I've written 500 blog posts almost. I think I'd let 492 or something right now over less than five years. That's almost a post every three days, right? You actually get better at this stuff. It gets easier. Your arm gets stronger. You have a better eye for which way to throw and you improve your odds from maybe a 2 % chance of getting a viral thing that gathers people's attention to a 3.5 % chance of doing that.

14:30Jason Fried:Major progress. So it's the reps, right? Like all this boils down to that, but different ways of putting in different ways of getting that message across because I think it is very counter, well, I don't even know if it's counterintuitive. It's very difficult for people to internalize that. That's why we're having this discussion, right? We've been saying this for literally 20 years in 700 different ways. You got to make decisions. You got to get to the epicenter. You got to try things. And people go like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then they go back and do a three-month analysis on what their pricing model should be.

15:01David Heinemeier Hansson:Yeah. Yeah. Two more things on that. And after everything David said, you're still at the whim of the algorithm. Like if the algorithm decides to show it to the right people, then maybe you got lucky. So like there's so much substrate here that you don't control and you don't know what's going to happen. And this week it might be this way and they might be tuning it a different way. That one week you've got that banger thing and it doesn't matter anymore because they're testing something. Like who knows? You just don't know. That's why you got to keep making this stuff. And you can't just take that one big swing, really.

15:29David Heinemeier Hansson:The other thing is that everyone's typically in search of certainty, which is I think why people are afraid of trusting their gut. Because gut is by its very definition, uncertain. I mean, you might feel it, but you can't prove it. You can't justify it to anybody because there's no data or evidence or research, wherever. So people will spend weeks, months oftentimes asking, putting together surveys, putting together data, making the case, months and months of making the case, which is still abstract because it's still, you're asking people to imagine an answer that you're asking them if they don't actually have that answer naturally.

16:07David Heinemeier Hansson:So they weren't ready to just answer a survey. You just gave them one. Now they've got to like come up with answers. These are still abstractions. So you can spend three months looking for certainty, backing it up with abstract data that feels real, but still abstract. Or you can make the thing in six weeks, four weeks, three weeks, whatever, put it out there and find out for real if there's something there. And then you can maybe take three swings within those three months and you'll end up at a much better place because you'll have some real stuff, real feedback from the real market and real people than you will just imagining what the right things to do is going to be and then trying to do that thing then.

16:42David Heinemeier Hansson:Then having one swing at that one moment when a million other variables are at play where the ground is shifting and you don't even know it and then you just like the odds are so infinitesimally small to begin with and then you're laying it all on some other one certainty. It's just typically a pretty bad formula I think. So you're better off just making things as fast as you can, as often as you can, getting better at those things, putting them out there. And there's going to be a magic moment maybe when like enough things align that it works out, but you won't be able to predict that.

17:11Jason Fried:I also think that saying trust your gut or just like I have this feeling seems a little woo-woo to people. Like I'm into that, but I think there are some people who are like, that just doesn't feel real to your point or like doesn't seem measurable. Like that's not a real thing that we do in business.

17:29David Heinemeier Hansson:Well, it's funny. It's like, okay, yeah, you're right. And then you're like, well, if you really break it down, what is all this data and all these surveys and all these questions? Well, you're asking other people for their gut reaction. So you're building on a thousand other guts. Because again, most of these questions when they're asked or the research when it's done, it's still abstract. It's still someone having to dream up and spit out and regurgitate something in a moment when they weren't naturally going to do that. So they're still just reaching deep to find something to tell you, which is kind of their gut reaction.

18:01David Heinemeier Hansson:So what's more woo-woo, like a thousand guts that you don't know, or maybe your own perspective based on the experience that you've had and you're running the show and you're making the call. Like maybe they're both loose and they probably are. They both are loose, but I'd rather sort of trust something I maybe know a little bit more than to say that because it's someone else's and there's many of them, that those are the right ones. That's at least my quick take on that.

18:26Jason Fried:Okay. Let's talk about this decision-making, trusting yourself when it comes to product development. We're obviously working on a new version of Basecamp. We've talked about that a bit. I know you guys have recently been going through the entire product. David kind of showing you some of the things that have been designed. Tell me how your gut computers are aligning. Do you guys always think the same things about the design and how things are working? or are you sometimes like, my gut computer says this and yours says this and now we have to make a decision or a compromise together about it?

18:57David Heinemeier Hansson:We definitely have different computers, which is important. You want to have different computers. I just wrote about this recently, the only way to polish something is with friction. You can't polish something unless there's friction. That's exactly what polish is. It's grit. And it can be big grit, small grit, combinations of grit, different grit at different times. But you've got to have friction to polish something. And that's why you want different perspectives. And it can be frustrating at times and all the things, but this is all what it is. This is like how you kind of smooth this thing out.

19:26David Heinemeier Hansson:So I'll take a swing at something. I'll get to a place where I really feel good about it. I'll show David. Sometimes he'll feel good about it. Sometimes he won't. Sometimes he'll bring up points that I agree with. Sometimes he'll bring up points I disagree with. Sometimes he'll bring up points I initially disagree with and I sit with and I agree with. That's the process. And the process is like, here's the work. Here's what we've done. Here's the thing. Again, it's not abstract. Like when we're looking at something, we're looking at something that's been built. And we always try to make sure we're looking at something that's been built.

19:53David Heinemeier Hansson:Otherwise, you get what's called this illusion of agreement or illusion of disagreement, which is when someone's describing something and you have to imagine the other person's imagining what you're imagining. And they can see very clearly what you have in your head, you can see what they have in their head and you feel like you totally get it. That can happen sometimes. It depends what it is. But the more complicated thing it is, that the more room there is for there to be disagreement that you don't actually see, you assume you're both on the same page. So I'm always trying to get to something real to show.

20:21David Heinemeier Hansson:And you're always putting your like, delicate ego out there, you know, like, well, here's this thing I made. I'm proud of it. What do you think? Yeah, you know, it's like, that's the friction, like that's, it's important. So, you know, I think you need to have that. And you can't be afraid of the feedback. You may disagree, you may agree, you may agree later, you may disagree later, but it's all part of the polishing process. And I think it's incredibly important. I think designing something in pure isolation, you can do it, but it's actually quite hard to, it probably won't turn out quite as well.

20:50David Heinemeier Hansson:In some cases it can, certainly can, you know, this is all the variability in the world. Like there's always cases when it was perfectly done by some hermit on an Island somewhere. Like, but I think that I've found it to be very useful to get some friction involved and then, and then figure out like what the best way to do this actually is. Yeah.