Fizzy Q's and A's

0:00Welcome to Rework, a podcast by 37signals about the better way to work and run your business. I'm Kimberly Rhodes from the 37 Signals team, joined by our co-founders, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier-Hansen. We've been talking a lot about a future product we have coming out called Fizzy. And we've gotten a couple of questions either from our YouTube videos. Jason's been doing some posting on X. Thought I'd pull some of those out and let you guys answer those directly. So the first one is from YouTube. Someone wrote, something that just passed through my mind. Isn't Fizzy a potential Basecamp competitor?

0:34What are your guys' thoughts about that? Sure. Maybe, maybe not. I don't really care because they're both ours in a sense. But really, they're quite different in scope and scale. I mean, Basecamp is something you can run your entire business on. It has all the different tools you might need. Fizzy is not that kind of thing. You can run a lot of stuff with it. But hey, choose whichever one you want. And we're happy to have you as a customer is the way I look at it. So I think that something and someone and somewhere is always competing with you. and might as well be yourself if that's kind of one of the outcomes.

1:04So yeah, that's how I kind of see that sort of thing. And I guess we could say Basecamp project management software. Fizzy, you're not considering project management software. It's more of a bug. You could. I mean, you could, you know, there's different scales of projects. And like people, for example, manage entire projects on Trello, which is a Kanban board or with to-do lists or with paper and pencil or no software whatsoever, you know, in their heads. So you can do all sorts of things with all sorts of tools. And this is just another take on a way to organize information, to track issues, to track ideas, to track bugs, to track a project, in fact.

1:35And I think people will use it for that. And again, if they want to use that, that's a better fit for them. I'm glad that we can provide that option. So that's my take on it. I think the greatest illustration of this is that we've been competing against email with Basecamp for literally 20 plus years. People still using email. They're also still using Basecamp. and the two things coexist even within a single organization. So almost anything can do almost everything. If you look at these information tools, you can do everything in notes, as Jason says. You can do everything on pen and paper. You can do everything noodling in your little head.

2:11But what has the right grip for the particular project and for the particular group of people, that's quite different. Like when you find something that really feels like, yes, this is it. This is what I've been looking for. That shape fits perfectly with this problem. You'll know. And the only way to really know is to pick it up, to try it out. Like, does this feel right? It's funny, I mentioned the knives because we've been actually shopping for some new knives. I mean, just like cutlery. And I am always amazed by how quickly I can look at a piece of cutlery and go like, eh, no, I don't like that.

2:49Eh, no, I don't like that. I didn't know. I had all these opinions about cutlery and their design, but I clearly do because in about 2.7 seconds, I can look at a picture and go like, no, no, no, absolutely not. Or like, ooh, I don't know, maybe. And I think the same thing is even more true when it comes to software, right? You look at something and you think like, oh, I have this thing we want to work on. This would be perfect for it. Or you don't know. You simply just like, well, I'm going to spelunk about. I'm going to have a look. I'm going to kick the tires. I'm going to see if this is something that I actually like to do.

3:23This is something I think Jason and I used to do both more. When I was living in Chicago, I loved going to the dealership lots. Literally to kick the tires. Now, I don't know if I actually kicked the tires, but to take a test drive in a car that I thought, like, you know what? Maybe there's a 7 % chance I'm actually going to buy this. I was always trying to rationalize in my head that I was not going to waste someone's time. Like, if there was literally no chance I was ever going to buy that car, I wouldn't go. I wouldn't ask for a test drive. But if there was like a 7 % chance that I might like it, I'd go test drive it.

3:54And you know what? Lo and behold, you realize all sorts of things. I would build up this idea in my head that, oh, this car, this is exactly what I want. I'm almost, I have the checkbook in my fucking pocket. And I show up. I just want to do the confirmation drive. I give it a drive and like, absolutely not. How did I get into my little head that this was going to be a good fit for me? I hate it. I hate everything about it. And then I'll try something else. And it's like, ooh, I had no idea. I had no idea. I like just the way this feels. I like the buttons. I like the clicks. I like the rattle.

4:27I like the, ooh, Mercedes, right? Like the whole game there where you realize that just those tactile elements, that's actually what sells you on it. And software has so many of those, so many of the microtransactions that you can't even capture in a screenshot. Like the flows. What does it feel like to put in seven issues to track that, assign it to a few people, move it around, keep up to date with it? Do you know what? You're not going to know until you take it for a test drive. Now, the great thing about almost all Internet software is you can literally just take all of it for a test drive.

5:03This is why whenever folks ask me, it's like, so what should I pick? Should I pick Basecamp or like ClickUp or whatever, one of the competitors? I'm like, you tell me, go for a test drive. They're both free. You can literally figure it out in 10 minutes. 10 minutes is actually enough to get a 60 % indication on whether this is something you're going to enjoy or not. Because as I am with my cutlery, as I was with the test drives, humans are really good at honing in on what do they like, what do they don't like. And you will realize quite quickly, you sign up for one of these competitors and you give it a go and maybe it's just right.

5:41Wonderful. I'm so happy for you. or maybe you realize, ah, this is a little clunky. This is hard to figure out. I had to look up the manual three times. And then you try Basecamp and it just goes like click. That's exactly how I think about problems, actually. Projects and problems. And now it all flows in. So busy is essentially another way of giving you another car in the lot and you want a new model. It doesn't do all of it. It's not an SUV, right? It can't fit everything. It can't go to fucking Lake Tahoe in the middle of winter. That's full of tires. So you got to stuff things in a little more neatly, maybe.

6:16But also, maybe that's just the feel you like. Maybe that's all you need. Maybe you just drive to the fucking grocery stores a few times and one time around a little hill. And like that's your transportation needs. Great. Fizzy, man. That's the slogan. Fizzy, man. So I think the knives metaphor is actually quite interesting because you can think of Base Camp almost as a set of knives. Like you can buy a set of knives together and then you can buy specialty knives. And a good chef would tell you all you need is one chef's knife. There's all sorts of different ways to use these things. And like I'm thinking about like we have a set of knives.

6:50I actually have a couple really, really nice individual knives. We've got some separate paring knives from a different brand just because we want to try them. And I happen to like the handle. The blades are fucking fine on all of them. It's the handle I like on one of them. And that's the one I reach for. And you just don't necessarily know what it's going to be until you try these things, which is why, you know, like David said, people should try all sorts of things. Now, one thing you don't want to get into, I don't think, is like this habitual dissatisfaction with everything and feel like you need to keep jumping around forever until you find something.

7:20You should find something that works, use that, and then have curiosity about other things. But the feel of something, it really does click in. You're like, this just feels like the handle of a knife. I could describe it, but when I feel it, I'm not describing it. I'm feeling it. I just know why I like this somehow, right? It's a preference. And it's very hard to describe your preferences. Ultimately, it's just something about maybe it's the weight or the feel or the material or the texture or the thickness or the thinness or whatever, however it hits your particular fingers. That's what products are like, too.

7:50And I think when people try Fizzy, they might go, oh, like I've used Kanban-esque things before, but I just like this feels right to me. This feels like a good handle on a good knife. I want to use this instead. So they reach for that. And you can reach for both. We use Basecamp. Basecamp has card tables, which is like a Kanban-esque tool, which Fizzy in some ways is based on conceptually, but visually is very, very different. And we use both. Some of our teams use card tables in Basecamp. Some of our teams use Fizzy. We're having more people use Fizzy for certain kinds of things. You can use both.

8:20It's okay too. You don't have to wonder like, which one do I have to use? Use the one that feels right for the job. Companies have different jobs. So I think it's kind of a nice thing to offer two possibilities. And this is why the feature comparison chart is such a bane on this industry, that it reduces all products down to checkboxes. Does it have this thing? Now, put aside for a moment that they're all bullshit, right? Like all of them are like, let's just come up with some feature and we'll frame it in such a way that there's an X next to the competitor and next to us there's a nice little checkbox.

8:54But you know what? Even if we're comparing our own products, if you are just going to compare Fizzy to Basecamp, Basecamp is going to destroy Fizzy on the checkbox comparison chart because Basecamp just does a whole lot more. It can run your entire company. Fizzy is less. And what a moronic way of comparing those two products and figuring out which one you're going to go with, right? The feature chart comparison is the worst possible way to pick a piece of software. This is how you end up with the enterprise bullshit that no one wants to use, right? Like, oh, I checked all these boxes. Yeah, but did you like it?

9:33Did you want to use it? Could you figure out how it was? Did you onboard someone new? Could they figure it out? Or are you just pulling your hair out? It's actually remarkable to me just how much software in our industry alone people truly hate with an absolute passion of a thousand suns. Now, I haven't actually ever used Jira. So I feel, okay, just reciting the amount of hate that Jira gets online. It's unbelievable. Maybe it's one of those classic things where the people who talk shit about Jira outnumber the people who say nice things about it simply because that's what the internet does, right?

10:14Like it attracts all the shit that someone wants to say about something, and it's not the full picture. But holy shit, man. The amount of dislike that exists in this world for some of these products should give you some indication that the feature chart is not the be-all end-all. If you look at the feature chart of a Slack or of a Jira, you're going to find about 2 billion checkboxes, right? It does this, this, this, this, this, and about a trillion other things. And none of it matters because for a ton of people, the grip is not just wrong, it's backwards. It's like, holy shit, this is a knife.

10:50And then I've sat myself in the goddamn chest. Yeah, okay. No, don't like that knife. Don't like the one that tries to murder me. Don't like the one that wants me to jump out of a window, Jira style, when I've been frustrated for the 15th time. Now, some of this is, of course, also people just projecting their miserable lives onto inanimate pieces of software. And that's also a thing that happens. But you know what? It also falls the other way. And it could be quite positive. Sometimes an inanimate piece of software can give you all sorts of nice, fuzzy vibes. You like the people who make it. You like how it looks, the frivolous color choices.

11:28You like some of the little flows. You like some Easter egg and stuff. And like it gives you a little smile in your otherwise dreary day. And isn't that a service? So let's talk a little bit about that since, David, you brought in aesthetics. Jason, I've seen you posting things on X about fizzy and the visual aspect of it and how that is what makes it different. Talk to me about that. Like, what have you guys put into this product that people are going to see soon that has made it different from other Kanban tools? I think it is interesting because in our industry, most software actually looks the same.

12:04Really, almost everything looks the same. In most industries, though, like things stand out because of the way they look. Clothing, cars, art. Obviously, there's a lot of things that have kind of come a little bit closer together. Like in the car world, BMW and Audi kind of look similar now. And there's things like that. And of course, the brand kind of goes back and forth. And there's sort of some consolidation around things that are forced because of safety regulations or whatever. But generally, each brand has its own distinct look and feel and vibe and taste and flavor. In the software world, it's not typically that way.

12:33For a long time, it was like everything looked like slack. Actually, a lot of things still do look this way. You have a thin sidebar on the left, a darker sidebar. The rest is white. And, you know, it's like that's how it looks. Or things are always in perpetual dark mode. And it's just like text and boxes in dark mode, right? And in some cases, that's cool. But it's rare to actually find software in the business world specifically that has its own distinct flavor. And we try to bring that to our products. Nothing else looks like Basecamp. A lot of things look like Monday. A lot of things look like ClickUp.

13:04A lot of things look like Asana. Nothing else looks like Basecamp unless someone's like distinctly copying Basecamp. And nothing else looks like Fizzy. Nothing else looks like, hey, there's no other email tool that looks like, hey, there's a lot of email tools that look like Gmail. and it just is like people tend to follow the leader in that respect and they forget that they're not making a name for themselves and so we've always tried to do stuff that doesn't look the same as everyone else not only for the sake of being different but sometimes simply for the sake of being different there's value in that too it's okay to be different for the sake of being different we happen to think though that there's actually just a feel these things have a feel and a mood to them and i feel like it's incumbent upon us since a lot of other companies don't seem to do this is to think about the mood of the product that you're making.

13:45How does it make people feel when they use it? Do they feel like they want to smile? Does it make them feel kind of good about themselves? Or is it like this dour, sad, depressing, everything looks the same situation? And so with Fizzy, we're trying to bring some color, partially inspired by what Dave has been doing on the Linux side of things, themes and colorful things and colorful backgrounds. It's nice to see some color again. It's nice to see some saturation again in the colors as well. like pastel colors have been something that some people have been using in software for a while we're going like full-on saturated colors and some gradients and bringing some texture back and having some texture behind things i just think it's nice to see texture and color and shape and vibrance and so we're bringing that to fizzy and some people are going to go i don't like this is too much you know that i get it fine that's cool i think a lot of other people are going to go this actually feels pretty nice i feel good when i use this i want to actually turn to this i like i like when I hold this knife.

14:38I like when I hold this product. And so that's sort of what we're aiming to do here. I think what's so interesting with the car metaphor, as Jason puts it, is that very few people feel any need at all to excuse that the reason they bought a certain car was because they liked the way it looked. In some cases, it's literally just, I like the color. I like that it was red. I wanted a red car, so I bought this car. And they don't mind that like, That's a very prime objective for how they pick things. Somehow, when it comes to software, that's almost unprofessional. I just need to be functional. This is what I met, especially in the Linux world, when Omachi was first bursting on.

15:19I put a lot of emphasis on the aesthetics, on the saturated color, on color coordinating everything so it looks really nice. And people were like, why are you wasting your time? As though somehow aesthetics were beneath us. As somehow aesthetics weren't important. This is extremely important. Surrounding yourself with beautiful things that give you joy and pleasure in life is right up there. All right. Bread, water, aesthetics. That's about the Maslow's pyramid of needs here, right? You need beautiful things to sustain yourself. And we feel perfectly fine doing it in all these other facets and aspects of life.

16:00when it comes to software suddenly we have to be mr and mrs rational all the time like can i get that in cornflower blue that's about the degree to flourish that you can have right and i do actually think i want to blame apple for some of this and not because i don't like apple i think apple does exceptionally well of what they do and their aesthetic it's so uniquely apple but it's also as jason says incredibly muted in a lot of cases it's all about just piece of aluminum that's just been just right here okay it's gray dude and it's been gray for 20 years could we get that iMac back that had all the funny flourishing colors that'd be great i'd love to see a goddamn macbook that didn't just look like the same gray it has for 20 years so when a company like apple has had such a dominant position in our industry and has influenced so many designers i think that sort of just seeps into the water and they feel like they all have to be monochrome and monotone in the same way and all this gray and no no they don't let apple be apple continue with the great bullshit for another 40 years great you do it really well everyone else likes a fucking color reintroduce it the world is going gray already we're talking about cars for a second i remember this chart i saw about the color palette of cars you go back to the 80s and 90s great variety and then you see the whole thing just compress and now the majority of cars are white gray or black yeah no get a fucking green car get a red car get a blue car get any color that isn't white gray or black and i also like white gray or black so i'm talking as much to myself as anyone else.

17:49But I did just buy a red car recently. And it's sitting in the garage right here in Copenhagen next to two gray cars. And I was actually thinking like, do you know what? It has to be a color. It has to be a screaming color. I cannot be a contributor to this monochrome world. It's too depressing. Look at us. Black and white. You're wearing black and white. I'm wearing gray and gray. Damn it! I'm always wearing gray. Anyway, when there are two choices, I'm going to pick the more colorful choice is what I've decided to do most recently. And it's enhanced my life a little bit. actually, in the smallest little way, but in a meaningful one.

18:20It's just fun. There's different degrees of fun, but I think it's a little bit more fun to use a product that's a little bit more colorful and has a little bit of texture and the transitions are kind of delightful, but not so ridiculous and not in your face. And speed is fun. And feeling like you're able to enjoy things when you look at them is fun. It's fun. Fun should be part of it. Now, of course, it's not as fun as a lot of other things, but it's a little bit of fun. It goes a long way, I think especially in software. Okay, I'm going to go to this one last comment for you guys to noodle on.

18:49Let me know what you think about this. I know we've talked a little bit about introducing some AI into Fizzy, maybe not right at first, but eventually someone wrote, for what it's worth, anytime a company adds AI to their product, I cringe. As a customer, AI no longer feels valuable as a feature to me. I use AI. I like it, but I want to choose when and how I use it. I want to get your thoughts on that. I generally agree, which is why we actually had some AI baked into Fizzy early and we pulled it out. And there's one more thing sitting around. I'm not sure we're going to ship it. It was an experiment.

19:22I think it's good to experiment. And I also think AI can be very valuable in a variety of different applications and different kinds of things. I'm sure David can speak to some stuff at Shopify. He's talked to Toby about whatnot. AI can be incredibly valuable. I think when it's actually just pulled for the lowest hanging fruit and like, well, it can just summarize this. So let's have it summarize that. or it can help you write this, so let's have it write that. That's kind of sloppy, actually, and I don't think it's really very handy at all. In fact, it's probably worse. I think that there's a cringe factor, but I don't think it's a smart thing to cringe any time you see something like that used anywhere.

19:54It can be used well in some places. It can add a lot of utility in some cases. But a healthy skepticism, I think, is healthy. But you also don't want to close yourself off because certainly there are places where it is valuable. I don't think a lot of products have actually figured that out yet, though, to be honest, is sort of my take. I feel like this is such a polarizing issue. Like we have people ask anytime I do like a live office hour session, like someone asks about AI in Basecamp in particular. And people feel very strongly one way or another, like, don't touch my product. I like it how it is.

20:23Or everyone else is doing it. Why aren't you guys? Well, I think one thing I'll add, I know David's chomping the bit to get in here, but the beauty of it is natural language. The fact that I can tell the computer what I want it to do for me is an incredible lever. And typically, historically, we've all had to use interfaces, which are translation layers, essentially. And like, I hope this thing has a button that lets me do the thing I want to do versus just being able to tell it what you want to do. So I think there's a ton of wonderful things that are going to come from just natural language interfaces.

20:52and the AI part there is primarily translation. And like you tell it what you want it to do and it'll figure out what it can do. I like that a lot. But the general low-hanging fruit summarization stuff, I'm not finding very useful at all. I think the term healthy skepticism is one of those encapsulations that we throw around all the time. I'd like to see some healthy optimism. That's what I try to embrace because I totally have the same reaction to a lot of the AI sludge and slob that's just filling out like, no, I don't want this. Where do I turn it off? But I constantly try to pair that with some of that healthy optimism.

21:34Do you know what? I've seen AI do the most incredible things where I just had to lean back in my chair and go, hot diggity damn, what a time to be alive. I didn't actually say hot diggity damn, but like that's what I'm thinking in my head. that AI truly is incredible. And when you see the glimmers of its majestic abilities, it's hard not to be taken aback. What we have right now, though, is mostly glimmers. Mostly this shimmering of, do you know what? At some point, it's going to do most of everything really well. We're not there right now. We have these glimmers. I use it all day long. Just as a developer, it's incredible.

22:14Just the amount of information it's able to distill for you, APIs and the rest of it, even when it keeps hallucinating and it makes up stuff that doesn't exist, it's still hugely valuable. But you take that, something that has a relatively high error factor, and then you put it into a real product that someone actually has to use, and suddenly your tolerance for error really drops. The great example we've had for quite a long time is self-driving cars. Elon famously went out in 2017 and said that at the end of the year, all the cars are going to drive by themselves. We don't even need to manufacture more steering wheels.

22:52Now, that didn't pan out. Firstly, because, well, it wasn't even really AI at the point. But then even after it became AI, I drove my Tesla for a while with the self-driving version. I was like, you're insane if you're trusting your life to this. Absolutely goddamn insane. And then suddenly, seemingly overnight, you were no longer insane. You were almost like, why aren't you using this? It was so incredible. It's been working so well. The journeys I've had just taking me from where we are in Malibu to LAX, the airport in Los Angeles. Truly magic, right? So you have this that like somewhere, some people are figuring it out.

23:32You should be trying to figure it out. But you don't have to ship all the in-between. I think that's what people don't like right now. Is there all these experiments and then there's all this pressure that you've got to stamp AI on freaking everything, right? Because that basically means new. It means modern. It means with it. But a lot of times it just means failed experiment. I mean, we have a long list at this point of experiments that we've done internally. Features we've created. Features we've injected AI into. and then benchmarked and run with and ended up deciding, do you know what? Either this isn't better or it's not better often enough.

24:13Like it fails too often. It's wrong too often. Busy had several really interesting interface ideas built around this natural language recognition that were really nice until they weren't. It's actually the age-old Clippy problem. Like Microsoft was one of the first companies trying to go with this, hey, it looks like you're writing a letter to your lawyer. Do you want me to help it format for you? And you're like, what? No, I'm writing the PTA. What are you talking about? I don't want this reformatted in some formal way. Comic Sans will do just fine. Thank you very much. That when you're wrong, when AI is wrong, in a context where you don't feel like it's appropriate to be wrong, like the context I have for self-development, I know it's going to be wrong all the time.