It Started with a Blog

0:00David Heinemeier Hansson:Welcome to Rework, a podcast by 37 Signals about the better way to work and run your business. I'm Kimberly Rhodes, joined as always by the co-founders of 37 Signals, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. This week, I thought we would address a question that we get quite often, people writing in, sending in videos, asking how they can promote their product. They know that the 37 Signals story started with a blog, but they're curious what they should be doing. So So let's first, before we kind of dive into some of this advice, Jason, take us back to the early beginnings of the Signal vs. Noise blog.

0:34David Heinemeier Hansson:I assume that was just something you created because you wanted to communicate, not necessarily as like a marketing tool. Yeah, it was actually funny. We were sitting in our second office in Chicago. A few of us, it was me, Ernest, and I think Matt or something like that. And we've been like sharing links to things back and forth and like thoughts. Like I think we're using AOL instant messenger or whatever the hell was going on back then. Skype or something. I don't know what it was. And we're just like, we should just like put this down somewhere because it'd be easier to like publish it or something like that.

1:05David Heinemeier Hansson:And we're like, you know, we're sharing these things. There's probably other people who are interested in seeing these things or talking about the same things that we're talking about. We're just three guys who are doing this thing and like this stuff. And so we just kind of put together a very basic blog, which is a really early days, which is just, you know, a way to publish stuff. We used Gray Matter, I think was the first tool we used by this guy named Noah Gray, I think was his name, who made this great blogging thing. Put that together and put it out there. The idea was maybe other people might want to hear this music we're playing, you know, basically somewhere in the world, maybe.

1:35David Heinemeier Hansson:And it wasn't like, we're going to do this so we can do this. And this is going to be this. And this is going to be this. It's going to lead to this. And we can do that. We're just sharing stuff that we're sharing already. So we're kind of documenting what we're already doing. And it just sort of grew from there. We just started sharing as often as we could. As often as we had an idea internally, we just put it externally. And that's how it grew. And that's how all the early blogs kind of grew. The links and ideas and thoughts and whatever. Again, no anticipation of what this could turn into or what it's for.

2:02David Heinemeier Hansson:It was for nothing other than just sharing stuff we thought was interesting. And eventually you build up a small audience, you know, and some people pay attention. Then maybe you turn on comments and you start to build a community at that point. So there's like attention comes, then you can add community to that to some degree. then you have like regulars it's just like kind of a restaurant or a bar you know kind of thing and you start to develop that kind of thing where you oh no we have a hundred people like i know their handle and they're coming back every day and you build this thing and more people join and some people leave and then eventually like david finds us and that's sort of kind of how that kind of thing happened but the most important thing i want to say is there was there's not intention behind it beyond an interest in just putting stuff out there.

2:44David Heinemeier Hansson:I think if we would have attached or hooked too many things we hope it would be to it, it wouldn't have been any of those things. I think the fact is that people can smell inauthenticity a million miles away. And if you're setting up your writing, anything you're sharing online with the outcome in mind first, like the reason I do this is because I want to move this lever. I want to move this number. in so-and-so ways, it's gonna leak. Like, it's like these micro twitches that your face does when you're fucking lying. And that's what that is. It's a form of lying when you're writing for instrumentality, when you're writing to juice some numbers, when you're writing to move the score.

3:29No, no, no, you got it backwards. You got it right because you care. You got it right because you're excited about something. And you damn well better care and be excited about something if you're building something. Because if you don't care, if you're not excited, who the hell is going to be? So you have to tap into that authentic reasoning for why you're doing what you do. Why are you selling this thing? Why are you making this thing? There's damn well better be a purpose that isn't just like, well, I thought I saw an opportunity to make some money. Then you better have a bunch of money and you better blow it all on advertisement and have someone else dress up and tell people why they should care about your thing.

4:08because you won't be able to do it. To be able to do it, you have to have authenticity. And in authenticity, there's also this built-in patience. And I think that's really key. As Jason said, we've been writing online since 99. Jason was writing the blog before I even joined up for a few years. And it built slowly. It wasn't just like tap, tap, tap. And now we have 100 ,000 followers and you can blast out anything to them. That's just not how these things go. They do grow slowly. And then suddenly they grow quickly. I started writing on Hey World four years ago, I think it was. And I got to see what starting from scratch is like.

4:52Because I had to build that list, a mailing list, essentially, from zero to something. And I made the mistake in the early days of writing this. I was, I don't know, 20 essays in. I started looking at the numbers a little bit. I was like, Jesus, I have barely any followers. Like, no one cares. And I did that once and I did that twice. And I went like, you know what? I'm just not going to look at this again. In fact, we changed the product after I had that revelation. But now if you go into Hey World and you look at your writing interface, it doesn't tell you how many people are reading. You kind of have to dig for it because you don't want to see.

5:28Because in the beginning, it's always disappointing. You always have no one giving a damn. You're writing for yourself, for your love of sharing. and then eventually if you're good at it and you're excited about it people will start caring in most cases not at all but in most cases you don't know what that's going to happen now i've written i think i'm close to like 500 essays over the last four years on that damn blog and now there's a following and i could publish something and a fair number of people see it and that was essentially starting from scratch again and it happens every single time jason or i go onto a new platform of course there's a little bit of a flywheel effect and you have some followers from over here and some folks over there.

6:06And some of them jump over. But you know what? A lot of, no. A lot of it's just a grind again. You start from zero and then you got to build it back up. And the only way to get through that is this authentic yearning to just talk about what you're doing. And I think that's the other thing that I found makes it so much easier is if you stop setting the goalposts of like, I'm doing this because I got to promote the business because I got to grow it to, I'm just going to talk about what interests me. I'm going to write to me. I'm going to write to me as though I was a reader. And if I was watching someone else, this is kind of what I would want to know.

6:41Then it's a lot easier. It's kind of like a journal. You stop caring so much about those specific outcomes. And suddenly it starts feeling like there's a human on the other side. And that is probably the only way you're going to connect to anyone these days if you're not shoving it down their throat with ads.

6:57David Heinemeier Hansson:And I'm going to add too, because what David mentioned was great, this idea about starting with zero and looking at numbers. I actually wrote a bit about this, I don't know, a few years ago, I wrote, maybe it was like eight years ago, I don't even know how long things are anymore ago, but about how it was actually an advantage to us to not have counts in the early days. I didn't know how many people were reading our thing. I had no damn idea. There was some analytics thing, maybe sort of, we didn't have anything installed, it didn't even matter, and it was better that we didn't know. What we actually knew was a feeling of, oh, there's some people I've seen here before in the comments specifically.

7:32David Heinemeier Hansson:Oh, I know that person. Don Shank was a guy who used to like comment all the time and he would comment all the time and like, oh, there's Don again and there's this other person again. There's this other person again. And like there could have been six people, but there was like a little community going. And like it was cool to know that there were regulars. that was like an actually enough for me to like give me the hook and enthusiasm to some degree to like i was going to keep writing anyway but that was enough it wasn't like that there was 400 anonymous people or 16 000 anonymous it was like these six people keep coming back this is cool we got a little thing going here but it wasn't a count it was a noticing i just noticed that people were paying attention and that was that was enough and what's such a blessing about that setup is that audience capture becomes so much harder.

8:20I feel that shit every day I write something on X, that the stuff that does well, the algorithm is programming you. Oh, that one went well. Try it again. Try it with a slight twist. Try upping it a little bit. Try making it a little more antagonistic. Try making it a little more spicy. All of these things have this ability to kind of suck that authenticity out of you and turn it into something bizarre. And I think eggs in particular And these kinds of social medias Where you get the instant I was about to say gratification But I think that's too positive of a word It's not actually gratification It's instant sort of sucking your soul out Because you see right now Is this hitting with someone else Who will read it literally seconds later It is just hacking into our dopamine systems And just go like constantly This is how people get addicted to this stuff And when they get addicted it, they start changing themselves to what the algorithm is asking of them.

9:18And it does not take long before, I'm just going to speak for me, you can't recognize yourself. Like I've certainly been in these loops where there's a vein here. There's gold in this mountain right here. Let's go digging. Let's go find another take on it. And by the time you've gone back to that mountain for like the eighth time, you go like, what am I doing? Why do I have a pickaxe in my hand? And why am I just like going at this attention thing all the time it's not a very pleasurable way of doing it which is actually why for me i enjoyed the long form stuff the old school stuff the mailing list stuff the if i'm gonna hear from someone if it resonates or not it's because i'm gonna get a goddamn reply someone's gonna hit ctrl r on that email and start typing and you know what out of whatever thousands of readers only a small number of people will hit control r and they will like to think forgot that minute about what they're posting back and i will think about what they're saying and it's a conversation i just yesterday i had a conversation with seven readers seven right i posted something to x thousands of people see it and we have all these fast cheap kind of empty exchanges, but the seven exchanges I had with someone over email.

10:36Oh man, I remember that. I remember now the Don Shanks. I have a couple of Don Shanks in my list, right? I have regulars who will write me, if not on everything I post, then on every third thing I post. And it's kind of a daring that you develop these very human relationships versus the X stuff, the social media, instant graphic. It's very inhuman. Anyway, I mean, we're not really selling that realize like, how do you grow your business with your marketing stuff? But I think the truth is still the same, that what works the best is the human stuff. That's even what pulls on X. There's a lot of corrupting forces and you've got to be careful with those things, but it's still what you have to put out there for it to resonate.

11:20And I also think what's actually interesting is that the strategy, if you even want to call it that, I don't want to call it that because as Jason mentioned, that was not why these things started. They didn't start as a strategy. It gets even worse when you start adding other words to that. By the way, content strategy, engagement strategy. Actually, any word you put strategy behind instantly becomes bullshit. So that's just a good kind of feedback loop for you to like. If you say strategy next to another word, you are deep into MBA bullshit and you should just take two steps back. No, we're not doing content strategy.

11:52I'm going to share what I learned. I'm going to share what I'm excited about. And we're going to see where that goes. Let's just do that. Right. But I think the energy behind the question, it has a hard time to allow for that, right? Because for a lot of people, maybe it doesn't come as natural. Like they have to force themselves to do this a little bit. And do you know what? Okay, then force yourself a little bit. I write stuff all the time where I'm like, I'm not forcing myself to do it. But do you know what? I like to exercise the muscles of the writing. And not everything's going to be a viral hit.

12:25Sometimes you've got to put into bass hits. and also got to just think that those base hits got to sustain and you can't just do it for three months it's funny because jason and i very often talk about marketing and how hard it is to sustain the stamina to do something like let's put a lot of money behind these ads or buy more billboards and then we get queasy pretty quick when we don't see the results and somehow this stuff exists in another category where like we'll spend lots of time writing or sharing or engaging and not seeing the immediate feedback, but still going like, well, do you know what?

12:58The net sum of whatever it is, 25 years in business, we are where we are today because we get that.

13:04David Heinemeier Hansson:Okay. So David, you mentioned the word patience. So I'm curious from both of you guys, do you think this is all just an exercise in patience? I think when people are writing in asking like, what are your tips? How do I get attention? Our answer is like, well, we did it over 20 years. Is there an element of patience that people are missing as they're trying to get things out into the world. Do you know what? It's one of those things where it's both at the same time. You both have to have the patience that the results may take a while to show up, but you actually have to be desperately impatient to share what it is you want to share.

13:42Because that's the only way to tap into sort of that inspiration is perishable theme we have from Rework. I think it's the last chapter of the book. That that inspiration, you have to make a point to share something lives in that moment. This is why I started writing so much more after we switched to Hey World Writing, where writing is just an email. I can literally go from like, oh, I have this idea floating around in my head to it is published to thousands of people in no time at all. Now, long form, it's very easy to send out a tweet, right? Like they're very empty. But can you string together 10 paragraphs and get that out there?

14:20A lot of folks treat that as like, well, That's a project. That's something we put on our, here's another bullshit word, content publishing schedule. Right? Like, oh, this is something that goes out on. And I understand why people do it. I'm not fully poo-pooing on it just a little bit, but I don't do it that way. And I think that you have to have that at the same time. You have to be impatient to share your ideas when they arrive in your head because that's when you're going to capture the purest form of them. I remember reading this anecdote about musicians going into a studio to record a new thing.

14:54And they would walk into the studio and they'd do like the first take. And then they'd do another 37 takes only to realize that the first take was the right one. That energy, that originality that arise when it's fresh and there, you can't capture it any other way. So if you try to put it back on the shelf, like I'm going to write on about this like two weeks from now, It's probably going to be stale. You're going to pull some stale bread, some stale ideas off the shelf. Better be super impatient just going like, you know what, this is what I'm going to do. I'm going to follow up with another objection I often hear.

15:28It's like, I don't have time for that. You don't have time for what? You don't have time for sharing your ideas, showing enthusiasm to the market, getting potential customers excited for what it is that you have to do. What else do you have time for? If you don't have time for that, you have time to go to a bunch of fucking meetings. You have time to plan the Q3 reporting. You have time to talk about the roadmap for the next 18 months. You're an idiot. You have total time for this. And you should take time for this right now when it's there, not something else. It's literally the most important thing you could probably do if you're at the head.

16:04Your job is awareness, attention, inspiration, all of these things, right? Someone else can do the goddamn Q3 quarterly budget planning.

16:16David Heinemeier Hansson:Okay, something I had in my notes. David, there's a very lovely transition, which is building enthusiasm. I feel like, especially with this Omarji things, Fizzy, Jason on your end, you guys are excited about the things that we're putting together, and it seems like you're excited to talk about them. Do you think that's an element of it as well, just building enthusiasm? I think it has to be. I mean, David's particularly good at this, obviously. Basically, marketing is a transfer of enthusiasm. Really what it is. That's a great way to say that. I think that's the only thing that it is, actually.

16:50David Heinemeier Hansson:I mean, you could say, well, it's a brand value. It's a transfer of enthusiasm. It could be negative enthusiasm, like I'm against this or I'm for whatever it is. But it's a transfer of that. And it is infectious. And you're seeing it now with what David's doing with Omachi. I mean, it's Omachi. Is that how you pronounce it, by the way? Omachi? Omachi? Yeah. I don't know which way you like it. Yeah. and you can see the upswell of enthusiasm and people are pumped about it and it's because David's pumped about it yeah and when David's pumped about you're like well what the fuck is going on over here this must be interesting and so so people are open to checking it out and to trying it out and suffering through it and finding that they like it or they don't like it but they're like something's happening over here that's worth checking out yeah that's purely enthusiasm and storytelling and stuff but there's the enthusiasm behind it they're like this is interesting this guy finds it interesting enough to be this interested about it, I'm at least going to give it a shot.

17:44David Heinemeier Hansson:And that's all you can ever ask for is someone to go, yeah, I'll try that. Like that's a victory right there. Not whether or not they're going to buy it or whatever, like, yeah, whatever. But like, just to get someone to try something that you're putting your energy and time into is huge. So I don't think there's any other way to do it. And by the way, you can do it. There are other ways to build enthusiasm. You can tell a great story through ads, all that stuff. But I think at the root of it, it is the enthusiasm that shows through. And I think it's turning more in that direction too. I think the traditional way of selling sort of a manufactured enthusiasm through very polished ads have never worked worse than they do today.

18:24Now, again, the top, top shelf stuff, that's always going to hit, right? Like that's always going to go through. If you just have just a banger of an ad and everyone is talking about it, Great. Wonderful. It's funny. Whenever I say that, I think about these two Volvo ads. I think we've talked about them before. Where the storytelling is just so uniquely awesome that I sat through a four and a half minute ad for a car I normally would not be all that interested in. I'm not the target audience for that kind of car. But suddenly I became. That's marketing. That is top shelf marketing. You're making me the target audience for something I didn't think I was interested in.

19:01But that's the rarity. I think there's a great big middle layer where kind of the run-of-the-mill advertising stuff that used to work no longer does. And it's been supplanted by people have direct connection to individuals that they trust. And I hate this fucking word with a thousand suns, but influencer culture or energy, that is what that is. like that is what's supplanting it now that you can have these when mr b says like he's gonna do this thing and then suddenly it's like a marketing campaign of 50 million descended upon it that's something new that's something different we didn't use to have that right now the exciting thing about that is like that exists at all level like you have the mr beasts of the world that are at the very top but it it also works much lower down we've talked about this guy before who makes the the bags jason remember what's his name again dave from saddleback leather he's my other favorite example of this dave munson yeah you know what i don't thought i had any enthusiasm for was fucking saddlebags like what like why would i care about this thing and you sit down you listen to a guy who is not only knowledgeable this is the other thing that's important you can manufacture fake enthusiasm and that's i think everyone's sort of negative stereotype of an influencer that's just like all over the place and flying back and forth into the camera right and not saying anything just trying to do this transfer of enthusiasm but there's a fake way of doing that right where like the enthusiasm just 100 manufactured you listen to this saddlebag guy and you go this enthusiasm is based on knowledge and competence the dude knows leather and he knows how to turn leather into a bag and that conveyance is just magnetic i have this other guy on youtube i've been following hippie o tech who has like one and a half million followers on youtube and all he does is review mechanical keyboards first of all when i realized that what do you mean there's 1.5 million people want to know about mechanical keyboards isn't that the most nerdy possible thing in the world and you sit down you listen to this guy and you're like oh my god i didn't know what thock was i didn't know what clacky was you're actually teaching me the terms of this thing you're excited about it and it's a little bit fun and you clearly know something and you have opinions there's things you like and there's things you don't like and i ended up wearing goddamn five keyboards just based on this dude's recommendation and i go like you know what i actually like this better again i'm not someone who dislikes advertisement just sort of instinctively when it's sort of good and it's not targeted and all the other bullshit that we've talked about before.

21:44But this kind of stuff, whatever it is, the advertising effect is extremely more powerful on me than it is with the other stuff. And it's just fun. I feel like I'm learning something. I'm leveling up my skills. Now I know a lot of things about leather bags I didn't know before, but mechanical keyboards. And I think that's what we've been doing for 20 years without having the categories to talk about in that way.

22:07David Heinemeier Hansson:And I'm going to read you guys something that you wrote in Rework that's very similar to this. I I think it goes to the personal aspect of it. In a chapter called Go Behind the Scenes, you guys write, letting people behind the curtain changes your relationship with them. They'll feel a bond with you and see you as human beings instead of a faceless company. They'll see the sweat and effort that goes into what you sell. They'll develop a deeper level of understanding and appreciation for what you do. I think that kind of summarizes this as well. what you guys have done with your blog posts and on X and all of these things is like really putting a personal face to a name, not just a generic message.

22:45It's not just a face. It's also a willingness to share things that people didn't think could be shared. Jason and I both shared our earnings from the rework book. Actually, we just got our whatever$27 ,000 check for the quarter, whatever the interval is from writer's house on this book. And normally that feels like proprietary data. This is like, this is real numbers and it's showing accumulated earnings and like you're not supposed to share that stuff. And it's funny because I noticed Jason that shared it afterwards. I think you might've shared it first. And we just, we have the same instinct.

23:22This is interesting. I would love to see what an earning slip looks like on another book. Therefore, some people might be interested in seeing what an earnings slip looks like on our book. Therefore, we should share it. And I think this is why the category, sometimes when it works the best, is called founder-led marketing. Because as founders, you don't have to ask anyone for permission. So you see something that's interesting and the path from, ooh, a slip here showing explicit earnings, that's interesting. And then sharing it is literally, I took a screenshot when that email arrived in my hate box.

23:59and 22 seconds later, it was on LinkedIn and it was on X. I was like, this is just interesting. I should just share it. You do that 200 times a year, that accumulates. And now you're a person who shares interesting things and you're a person who shares interesting things that perhaps is something that folks aren't going to find somewhere else. Boom, folks pay attention.

24:21David Heinemeier Hansson:Okay, let's not dive too much into that because our next episode, we're going to talk all about the transparency you guys have had, sharing some things that people would think are a little bit private. So with that, we're going to wrap up this episode. Rework is a production of 37signals. You can find show notes and transcripts on our website at 37signals.com slash podcast. Full video episodes are on YouTube. And if you have a question for Jason or David about a better way to work and run your business, leave us a video question. You can do that at 37signals.com slash podcast question.