Refining before release

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 Jason Fried, co-founder and CEO. This week, we are talking a little bit about the refinements that we make before launching a product. We've mentioned several times that we're working on a new product called Fizzy. And as that product wraps up, there's all kinds of bug fixes and redesigns and lots of other details that we wrap up before we go live. So Jason, I thought we would talk a little bit about that, kind of where we are in the process. Tell me, I don't know what I want you to tell me.

0:38Kimberly Rhodes:I'll talk about like the 11th hour, as we would call it, right? Perfect. Which is we're not quite there, but we're also there, I would say. Like we're not quite there in that we don't have an exact launch date. So, you know, there's not really time that we're measuring here, but we're very close to being done with version 1.0. And as always tends to happen, and I always think it's a good sign, is that as we get close to getting very real, which is like launching the thing, we have all sorts of ideas that we want to try and change and tweak and adjust because nothing really makes you take things seriously like getting real with it.

1:09Kimberly Rhodes:It's very easy months and months ahead of launch to kind of explore and play and whatever, and you should do all those things. But there's a point where you're like, okay, we're about to get very real with this thing. It just clarifies your thinking and your perspective and your point of view like nothing else. It just compresses all the other stuff out. And what you're left with is like, what do we actually need to do here? Are we ready for this? We feel good about this, that whole thing. So we're kind of there now. And so things we're talking about like right now, for example, are, you know, things like we're beginning to look into a little bit more about onboarding because so far we've been using it internally and we haven't had to sign up new users.

1:44Kimberly Rhodes:And so you kind of get back into this onboarding side, which is like, what's the new user experience like? Sure. How should we do that? How should we finally solidify the business plan? Or if we've had an idea for this. Now we have to kind of integrate it with the billing system. Which one are we going to use? Our own internal one? Are we going to try something else? There's a lot of questions that sort of come up near the end that you must answer now. Like we probably should have answered some of these earlier, but in fact, in some ways we're glad that we haven't because what we're seeing is that we're actually changing our mind here in the 11th hour about a few different things.

2:12Kimberly Rhodes:Like one thing, for example, is authentication and sign-in. So we have an internal system called Launchpad. We don't use it in Hay, but we use it in Basecamp and some other tools that we built over the years, which has 2FA built in and all these other integrate, you know, of course, passwords and password reset. And there's all the stuff you need for all that stuff, setting up accounts, signing up, setting your password, forgetting your password, all that stuff. And we're just wondering, like, do we want to go down that road this time? And there's some reasons why we may not want to, which I can't really talk about right now, but we will at another podcast, I'm sure.

2:45Kimberly Rhodes:But what we're thinking about is actually just using something much simpler, which is more like a magic link kind of approach where you enter your email address, you get a link sent to you and you just click that link and you're in or you get a code that you can enter and you're in versus having passwords. And we've tried this in the past and it felt like it was too early. This was like years and years and years ago. People weren't used to it, but now more and more people are used to it. And it actually simplifies a lot of stuff for us and for them potentially. And we can also allow you to add pass keys, which is sort of a more advanced way of authenticating to some degree if you want to go down that road.

3:21Kimberly Rhodes:But for the most part, email, get the link, log in. And so this would be a very different approach for us than we've taken previously. And that's something we're discussing now. So this is sort of what happens in the last throes of it because like we don't have a lot of time left and we have just a few people working on this and how do we want to prioritize everyone's time, position, attention, effort, that sort of thing. And we know that there's certain things we absolutely must get done. So now you're like, what would be easier? What would be better? What makes sense? What's not worth doing?

3:47Kimberly Rhodes:It's just a really clarifying moment.

3:49Jason Fried:Okay, let me ask you this because you said we don't have much time left. But really, we are setting our own deadline. So you could say we have as much time as we want there to be. Kind of talk me through how you're thinking about deadlines and thinking about like, this is a deadline I'm setting for myself or internally for the company. Because really, it could go on as long as we wanted it to.

4:09Kimberly Rhodes:It could. And you might argue that maybe it has gone on too long. I don't know. Like to your point, you make these deadlines up. We want to get this done this year, first of all. and we're well ahead of getting it done by like December. So I'm not really worried about that necessarily. But things happen at the end of the year. Like there's more holidays and some of that stuff happens. People take more vacations. There's some of that. So you kind of don't want to wait too long to finish something up by the end of the year. And we're very close and it's time. It's time to draw the line for 1.0. How do you know it's time to draw the line?

4:37Kimberly Rhodes:You just know it is. We've been working on it long enough. We're really happy with where it's at. It's dialed in, it's tight. There's some stuff we need to finish up here and that's kind of what we're focused on. but the product itself is pretty much like it's set. The features are set for 1.0. If anything, we'll take some stuff out, but we're not really adding anything else at this point. And so things just sort of come to a natural point, which you're like 1.0 is ready. But in order to ship it to customers, we have to round a few things out, like onboarding, billing, passwords, or login authentication, that kind of stuff, which we have because we have it for our own account, but it's not rounded out in a way that we want to present it to customers in that way.

5:15Kimberly Rhodes:It's a little rougher on the edges. it works for us, but it's not market ready. So that's the kind of stuff where we're at now. And if we give another six weeks, eight weeks, it's not going to be better. It can only get worse at some point because then you start to do more stuff and you leave more ends untied and that becomes a mess and it becomes very difficult to deal with that sort of thing too. So that's sort of the approach. It's just, it's time. There's a feeling that it's time. And when there's not a feeling that it's time, you need to make that feeling happen because you're right. Things can just go on and on and on.

5:43Jason Fried:Okay. So you mentioned onboarding. kind of talk me through because you are in this product. You're like deep in it and understand everything there is to know about it. Now, as we think about someone who's never seen it before, you have to take a step back from that. Kind of talk us through your process for doing that. Are you just kind of pretending like you don't know how it works so that you can onboard a new customer? Are you bringing in other people to help you do that? How does that work?

6:09Kimberly Rhodes:Onboarding is, of course, the process of a new customer signs up or is curious about the product. What is that first experience like for them? And what's interesting is this first experience is a very, very, very important experience, but people only experience it once. You put a lot of time into this thing that people like blow through and then it's over. Right. And it's kind of an interesting thing to do, but you kind of have to nail that. And I think with Hay, for example, we absolutely nailed it. It's the best onboarding experience we've ever made in any product. And we kind of raised the bar pretty high there.

6:39Kimberly Rhodes:So we want to make sure that that experience is good and fizzy as well. Part of this is just the sign-up process, like how much stuff do we have to ask you up front? We're trying to ask you as little as possible. That's not always the case. Sometimes you want more friction depending on the kind of product that you're selling. In this case, we just want people to get in. We have to think about what's it like to onboard. There's kind of two onboarding in a sense. There's this one primary one, and then we're going to give a certain amount of the product away for free. And then at some point, there's going to be a moment where you're going to have to pay if you want to keep using it.

7:08Kimberly Rhodes:And so there's kind of a second onboarding step there, which is encouraging an upgrade, explaining the upgrade process, allowing someone to go through that process and then feel good about what they just did as well. So there's like a second stage, a step up beyond the initial sign up.

7:21Jason Fried:So similar to Basecamp that you can get in at a trial, get in for free. And then at some point, if you need more, you can upgrade.

7:28Kimberly Rhodes:Yes. And Basecamp has a free sort of forever account. Right. And Fizzy will sort of as well. There is some limitation at some far off distant point if you don't use it much. but many people might be able to get away with using it for free forever. It just depends on how much you use it. It's more of a usage-based thing. So what we do is we build this onboarding feel, which is like, okay, you land here, you sign up. What's that like? Then once you've done that, you're past that stage, which you'll never go through again unless you sign up for a second account. Now we want to explain, like we want to orient you.

8:00Kimberly Rhodes:Think about this more in terms of orientation. If someone goes to a new school or whatever, there's like an orientation process, Like here's where this is. Here's where that is. This is how this works. Here's where you'll find these sorts of things. This is where you might do this kind of thing and not do that kind of thing. So there's a few different ways to explain that. You can explain it by like arrows in the interface pointing things out. You can have someone step through a process.

8:22Jason Fried:Yeah, like a setup wizard kind of concept.

8:25Kimberly Rhodes:Setup wizard style approach. You can just like not explain anything but have a video and go, hey, if you want to watch this, like 60 seconds, the orientation video is what I would call it. not even getting started video, but like orientation video, you know, maybe do that. Maybe it's 30 seconds. It just depends. But we haven't decided, by the way, like what approach we're going to take will probably be a combination of a few things like we want to point some stuff out. So some things are very obvious. The part is actually quite obvious, but there's also just a single menu, a single unified menu.

8:54Kimberly Rhodes:We want to make sure you know where that is. So like, because that's where you do everything.

8:57Jason Fried:Right.

8:58Kimberly Rhodes:And there's some keyboard commands. We want to probably teach you some of that basic stuff. And then we'll probably have a video also for like a more in-depth walkthrough of some of the basics and maybe some more advanced stuff. We have yet to record these because one of the reasons why this is hard is because the interface is not fully baked until like the last minute. We're always sort of nipping and tucking at the end, towards the end. And some stuff doesn't matter, but other things are materially different. It's frustrating because you got to wait till the end.

9:24Jason Fried:You can't get started too early.

9:26Kimberly Rhodes:Yeah. Something material is going to change. Like the button is now, you're like, go to the top left and we moved to the top right. Like that's a thing you have to say differently in the video. So there's some of that stuff. So it's kind of a mad scramble at the end to get the videos done. But this is all just sort of the approach. And as far as like bringing beta users on, we're very close to probably bringing on, I don't know, a handful.

9:46Jason Fried:Oh, of people outside the company?

9:48Kimberly Rhodes:Outside the company. So there's a few, we're close. We need to get the basic onboarding in place so we can do that. I could also bring people on and just walk them through it, which I might also do with one or two people before the onboarding is there. Like they would just be dumped in and with no instruction, but I would say, here's basically the lay of the land. That also helps me learn about the kinds of things that someone might wonder about. And so when I make the video, I can reflect back on that experience and be like, oh yeah, you know what? I really need to explain this because this wasn't clear or everyone seemed to ask the same question about that.

10:22Kimberly Rhodes:I'm sure I hit on that. So it's nice to kind of do that too. And that's kind of how that goes. Also internally, we have different teams using Fizzy. We're using Fizzy to make Fizzy. The iOS team is using some Fizzy stuff. I know you're using it now to sort of plan the podcast production schedule. There's a few other teams. We want to get more and more teams internally on this, which can be hard to do sometimes because people are, of course, like all customers, already doing something else, somewhere else with something else. And in that case, it's Basecamp for us. So peeling people away from Basecamp is always a challenge because Basecamp is so thorough and sort of dialed in.

10:59Kimberly Rhodes:But we're encouraging more and more people internally to use Fizzy for a specific type of work that it's really tailored well for. Some teams take to it easier than others and we're sort of working all that through and then we're learning about what's hard about it, what the transition's like from some teams and making some changes based on that, that sort of thing. So it's a really good process.

11:17Jason Fried:Okay, so tell me a little bit about the marketing aspect of it, logo design, how and when we'll market it. Do you think about that in this final stage or have you been thinking about that this whole way as it's been built? Kind of talk me through that.

11:31Kimberly Rhodes:We've been playing with the marketing for a while. I mean, marketing, by the way, it's not marketing yet. We've been playing with the logo, which is not marketing. Let me just be super clear. But like we've messed around with the logo for a while and we've landed on something we really like, which kind of mimics the interface. It's sort of a secret little mimic the interface thing, which, you know, you probably won't necessarily pick up on, but it's exciting for us to make this thing that's like that.

11:54Jason Fried:When you pointed it out internally, it was like, oh, that's clever. Like I would not have noticed. But now that you pointed out, that is clever.

12:00Kimberly Rhodes:Yeah, it's like basically so the name is fizzy, which is like carbonated water, let's just say, or drink. And there's like a straw that goes into it. And the straw breaks it into kind of two columns, which is sort of the fundamental layout of fizzy. There's a third column down the middle, which is kind of also the straw, which we call the stream. and at the bottom there's sort of the liquid. And again, you don't have to know this. It's just sort of a fun little thing that's there. So it's always fun to like play with that stuff and get something in there that like maybe 1 % of the people know.

12:26Kimberly Rhodes:Maybe once people know about it, they think it's cool. Maybe they don't care. Maybe they think it's stupid. It doesn't matter. We enjoy it. We're having fun with it. So it's basically a glass with a straw in it. That's essentially what the logo is. We've been honing it. It's sort of essentially done. We may add a little bit of dimension to it, some finishing little bits. But that's been done for a while. We've been playing with that for a while. The marketing side of it, I mean, the way we typically market new products is just to like make a lot of noise about them initially, show people how we use them primarily on X and LinkedIn and do some videos, share some stuff out.

12:57Kimberly Rhodes:We typically don't buy any advertising for new products. It's a very organic expression initially. I mean, that's usually how we do all of our marketing for the most part. Occasionally we'll buy some stuff. We are experimenting with some things this year, some billboards and whatnot. But for a new product like this, we're excited about this thing. Let us show you what it can do. Let us show you how we've been using it. Here's some fun little details about it. Here's some ways we thought about building it. Here's maybe some early looks at some early designs of it and just sort of share that way and invite people, encourage people to come in.

13:26Kimberly Rhodes:And the way you're going to sign up is a very generous free version. And so hopefully a lot of people will just check it out because they're curious and then dig into it. And it's a novel interface. It's different than most things you'd expect to see. So, you know, we're expecting a lot of people to like wonder about what it is and like not maybe totally get it initially, which is sort of kind of cool. And then some people really get it and then some people figure it out. Some people won't like it at all. And I think that will also be good because there'll be an interesting discussion about it online and we'll be very active in talking to people and applying and discussing it and explaining it and the whole thing.

14:00Jason Fried:Well, I think also letting people just play around with it is so helpful. I've been going down this path of researching some webinar software for us. And just the amount of you have to either talk to a human to be able to get a trial or, oh, we'll give you your money back if you don't like it, but you do have to pay us for a trial. Like just that level of barrier makes it not very friendly.

14:23Kimberly Rhodes:Yeah. I just, you know, that's never been our approach. Actually, with one exception, we made a product way, way, way back when called Know Your Company. And Know Your company was something I would personally onboard every customer. So I'd have to give you a half hour tour. Wait, you? Me. Yeah. I'd give you a half hour tour. It was built for business owners specifically.

14:45Jason Fried:Okay.