Talk directly to your customers

0:00David Heinemeier Hansson:Welcome to Rework, a podcast by 37signals about the better way to work and run your business. I'm your host, Kimberly Rhodes, joined by co-founders of 37signals, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. This week, I thought we'd talk a little bit about the importance of talking directly to your customers with the approaching release of Basecamp 5. Jason recently sent a message to all of our Basecamp 3 and 4 customers and got some great responses. So I thought we'd start there. Jason, tell us a little bit first why you decided to reach out to customers directly. Normally, when we're sending announcements, it's kind of on behalf of the company.

0:35David Heinemeier Hansson:But this time, you wrote it directly coming directly from you. Tell us a little bit about why you decided to do that. Yeah, I try to really pay attention to like, the feeling of things these days. Like, I just feeling that like, our customers have not heard from us for a while, which is not just like a feeling. There's some truth in that. But there's also like, there's this feeling of like, there's a lot going on in the world right now in the software world things are changing very rapidly we have an updated base camp in a bit because we've been heads down working on this brand new version of base camp which is a massive new version of base camp so we've been working like crazy but no one can see it and i just had this sense like people should hear from us and should probably hear from me they're like everything's okay we're making something great for you and like stay tuned it's coming soon we're working on it right now so i wanted to do that and i also wanted to wait till we had enough that i could share that i knew we were going to release like the worst thing is to like share all these new things that we're not going to give them.

1:24David Heinemeier Hansson:Like, so there's a combination of a lot of things going on here. Timing in the market, timing in our work, where we actually think we are in terms of releasing this thing in a few months, whatever it might be. And anyway, I want to reach out to everybody and say, we're still here. We're doing great work for you. There's a lot that's coming. Most of this is what you've been asking for. Stay tuned. Right. And I also put my email address in. I said, just like, I would love to hear what you want to say, whatever you think or whatever. And wait, I'm going to stop you right there because you would very specifically, I'm going to read it because it says, as always, you can reach me directly and you put your email address.

1:55David Heinemeier Hansson:I read all my emails and get back to everyone personally. No assistant, no AI. Emailing me is emailing me, which I thought that was great. That was another just feeling, you know, again, like, I mean, if you pay, well, at least my timeline on X is like, it's actually kind of gross. It's just everyone's bragging about how much AI stuff they're doing and using. And I'm actually kind of tired of it. And everyone's talking about all this stuff, right? So I'm just like, okay, look, I'm just a person writing this email or writing this announcement. Like if you write me, you'll get me and just seemed like a nice thing to say.

2:28David Heinemeier Hansson:And I meant it, you know, and actually a lot of people who responded appreciated that. They said, Hey, I appreciate that I can reach you directly. And that, you know, my email is not going to be lost or replied to by a bot or whatever. Like it was an appreciation moment. And I wanted to appreciate them that I'm taking the time to write you and you can write me back. And if you write me, I'll write you back and that whole thing. Now, it also created like a few hundred emails of work for me last week. And a lot of the emails that come in from customers are quite long, actually, which is very interesting.

2:56David Heinemeier Hansson:Some are very, there's actually very short ones or very long ones. There's nothing in the middle. And the long ones are also like, love all the stuff you guys are going to do. And here's, you know, nine other ideas. And it's actually really nice to hear these ideas because what you realize is that a lot of the things that people want are really specific and pretty small, actually. Like, I just want to be able to see this thing across all my projects. You're like, yeah, that makes sense. We actually don't have that view. I don't know why we don't have that view. And in fact, we had that view in Basecamp 2, but we don't have it in 3 or 4.

3:26David Heinemeier Hansson:Like, what happened there? And you kind of remember that some things you did before were really good. Other things you did before weren't good enough. That's why you did new things. And it's just a really good, healthy reminder that some of the requests are quite big. Some of them are quite surprising. Like I'll give you an example. The most common requests we got, this is not scientific. This is just me going through them and remembering voice notes. Like so many people want to leave voice notes in base camp, which kind of caught me a bit off guard. I use them occasionally for my own like dictation.

3:55David Heinemeier Hansson:If I have a thought and I just want to like get it down really quick, I'll leave myself a voice note or something. People are talking about it a lot. And I was really surprised by how much it came up. And And actually just yesterday we built it, which is, I mean, it's early prototype, but we built us. I don't want to promise, but we built it. We're prototyping it internally. It's pretty cool. And that's not something I probably would have heard or even thought about had I not just reached out to people and invited them to write back to me. So there's some of that. There's some stuff that like, there's some complaints.

4:24David Heinemeier Hansson:So like totally valid. There's some other complaints that are things that like we're just not going to do. And I can like talk to people about why we're not going to do them and share like our point of view. And people tend to appreciate that. Even if they're getting a no, they just want to appreciate that someone heard them and there's a reason why. Other stuff's like, that's a really good idea. We're actually doing that. I didn't put it in the long list that I put in the announcement, but we are going to do that. And we have actually done it. And you're going to like this too. And anyway, it was just a feel good thing.

4:49David Heinemeier Hansson:It felt really nice to do. It felt like the right thing to do at the right time. It's also really nice to hear customers use their own language to describe things because it reminds you like the things you call things are what they call things. And like, why is that? Why are these things different? What's a more natural way to say this versus like how I'm saying it? It's just a super healthy, good thing to do occasionally, for sure. It was worthwhile. And I plan on doing more of these as we get closer. I'll share some videos. I'll share some screenshots next time and like kind of get a little bit closer as we're a little bit closer to feeling like this is probably what we're going to deliver.

5:21Jason Fried:I think what's so special about this kind of outreach is the default mode for early stage startups. So it was when we started with Basecamp, Jason, for the first three years would answer simply every single customer support request. And I find that sometimes when I talk to founders, they're in a real rush to get out of this. That early phase where they have to do all of this stuff feels like it's a bit of an imposition. It's just a phase that hopefully they can get through real quick, and then they can have a full customer support department, and then they can get aggregate reports of what people want, and maybe they can use AI to summarize all these things.

5:59Jason Fried:That's all great, but it's not the same thing. You're not touching the nerve as you are when you talk directly to a customer as someone who has full power to make this happen. And I think this is why Jason would get this kind of response. And I don't know, some product manager inside the depths and belly of some huge corporate beast just wouldn't wouldn't get that kind of honesty or would not be able to create that kind of connection. because we all know that if you are somewhere in the middle layer of a huge pyramid, you just don't have the amount of power to make the pyramid turn. But a single customer can convince Jason of a good idea, and then that idea just happens, right?

6:43Jason Fried:Jason can simply just say, this is going to happen, and it will happen. That is that magic when you have direct connection from customer to founder, from customer to person who calls the shots on which direction this company and this product is going to go. And that's a bit of a superpower that I find is often underused by other founders that I look at. And I always hear the appreciation from customers when they have an experience like that. And I think we often have these opportunities to deliver that kind of experience and then we just squander it. Now, that's not just in software. There's all sorts of domains, right?

7:21Jason Fried:You have sometimes a bad experience somewhere and you go to complain about it. And half the time you have this defeated notion that already the person you're talking to about this can't actually do something about it. But do you know what? That one out of 10 times where they literally can and do, you're just blown away, right? This is what creates these word of mouth magic moments where you deliver a direct connection. not even always that you immediately do what they're asking you to do, but just that you authentically and genuinely listen, you respond, you engage, and now you've created a bond, right?

8:02Jason Fried:Again, someone sitting at the top of a very large pyramid can go like, yeah, well, what am I going to do with one bond? I need a million bonds. Like, that's not going to scale. Well, first of all, Gary Vee will tell you, yeah, fuck it, Will. Gary will respond to 2 ,000 people in a single day. Sometimes God, yup, yup, yes, all right. Like maybe not super thick strings of bonds here, but still they're being created. And you can certainly do more of it. That Jason could process 200 emails in a week and something over this topic is a great example of how much you can move the needle. Just for math here, and you don't even fucking need the math because you do it for yourself in your own education and the improvement of the product for everyone.

8:41Jason Fried:But even if you do the math and you just think like, here's 200 people who get a good experience, direct connection to company leadership. Are they going to tell like five people, eight people? Now you've talked to a thousand people already in this way in a week. Actually, that scales pretty well. You don't need to do that that many times before you've talked to 10 ,000. And you do all the math on how that accumulates. And it really actually does work. I also think this is going to be more and more important. Because we're going to get more and more of these AI impersonations. We're going to get not even impersonations, but just like AI interactions.

9:19Jason Fried:And many of them are going to be perfectly fine because you just want a piece of information. And AI is really going to get that information. But there's also something as excited as I am about AI where I'm like, yeah, I just want to talk to humans. I value the connection itself, not just the information, not just that I've delivered my request inside the big belly of something. I want to look someone in the eye digitally as it is through an email and feel like, yeah, there's someone who actually heard me. I think this is where that pivot in marketing we've talked about a few times. Founder led marketing is really influential and really important that if you can do this, if you can structure your company in such a way that even at our size with a product that's biggest base camp with as many customers that we have that Jason can take the time to do this.

10:06Jason Fried:It's almost like a cheat code. Like you found a shortcut both to the highest fidelity information about what people want and also to create these connections. And on that first point, the fidelity of the information, I think is really important because I remember being on the other side of Jason getting these feature requests in the early days all the time. And I could just like sometimes I get some aggregate sense of like, oh, there's a lot of people who've been requesting this. And then Jason would just show up with this determination that we had to do this thing because he had talked to three or five or seven customers who had echoed just that notion, but just in the right way that fit his understanding of why this was an urgent problem.

10:46Jason Fried:That when you package it inside of a pipeline of feedback that goes, maybe you're talking to a customer agent. In many cases, for a lot of companies now, you're talking to an AI customer agent. Okay, well, that's one layer. That's one filtering. And then that goes into an aggregate system. And then that goes into a report. Then that gets reviewed like a quarter later. It's not the same. It's like comparing a strawberry to like strawberry gum. Like that piece of gum has never fucking seen a strawberry. It has seen a simulacra of a strawberry condensed into sort of an R35 color taste code. And then that's strawberry.

11:23Jason Fried:Do you know what? You want to bite into that real strawberry. It's just a different experience entirely. Even if the word strawberry is applied to both of those objects, they don't have a lot in common.

11:35David Heinemeier Hansson:Something else I want to add really quick, Kimberly, actually, this is another thing that came up that it's just a good reminder. And this is actually one of the only ways to get at this information is customers will write back, you know, it's my thing and ask for features. And I'll be like, oh, we already have that feature. Like, you can already do this. Here's how you do it. And so in some ways, I wouldn't have known that they wanted that. and then they wouldn't have known that we had that. There's almost no way for those two ends to meet, really. It just happened to be a conversation between two humans who like, hey, I wish you had this.

12:07David Heinemeier Hansson:I go, oh gosh, you know what? We do have this. Go over here and hit that and then hit that. Now it's also a reminder that in a big system like Basecamp, there are things people will not run into. Even if we do it, like now I told them that they can do it, but are there a thousand other people who have the same request that don't know that they could do that? That said, just tying a few of these knots up feels really good. and then someone asks for something and they have it already is also really good to know that they already have it already. That feels really nice. So the other thing I'll say, and this is a total side effect, but when it comes to, and this is not why we do this, but it does make sense.

12:39David Heinemeier Hansson:When it comes to things like retention, if somebody is using a product and they're at the point of like a little bit of frustration and maybe I should look at something else, I think it's a lot easier to leave a piece of software than it is to leave a personal connection with someone who makes the software. Now, again, that's not a trick. We're not trying to tie people into this. There's no tricks here, but it is something still. And they will remember, well, you know, I could actually just reach back out to this person who wrote me before and I can air my frustrations versus like just yelling into the void at a company.

13:11David Heinemeier Hansson:Companies don't have ears. They can't hear you. I can hear you. And if we've talked before, write me again, you know, and maybe I can fix that. Maybe I can't, but at least I'm here for you. And I think people are more willing to give that kind of experience a second try or to go, you know what? hey, nothing's perfect out there. The grass isn't always greener. What these people have is really good. It's not quite exactly what I want, but I like who they are. I trust them. They're accessible, which is something we've always tried to be for 25 years is accessible. David's email is public. My email is public.

13:39David Heinemeier Hansson:We're both on X. We're both on LinkedIn. We talk to people all the time. You can reach out to us. You can talk directly to us and get an answer. That's rare too. And I think that that's a feature also of a product is can I at least like reach the people who make the damn thing and give them a piece of my mind, even if they're not going to do what I say, at least I can give them a piece of my mind. I know it's been received. That's an important detail as well. Yeah. One of the benefits of staying small, as we've talked about many times. That too. I also think it's interesting or not interesting, but smart that it was an email, like email me, because I think there is this sense like, yes, you can always reach someone on X or LinkedIn or whatever.

14:17David Heinemeier Hansson:For me, that doesn't feel as guaranteed that it's going to actually land, you know, the way social media just scrolls, it's like, yeah, you can easily miss something and I'm not going to hold it against them that they missed it because everything's going so fast. Email just feels more permanent, like it's really going to get to you. Well, emails is very personal because most people don't share their email addresses because spam and all the other things. So like, of course, your social handles are public. That's the whole point, essentially, of them. Email is not that way. So I do think it's a little bit of a like a secret key.

14:48David Heinemeier Hansson:Like, hey, you can write me at this address whatever you want. And like, you know it and I know it and we know it now. Like, you can get ahold of me. And it's going to come directly to me, I think is a really important thing as well. So yeah, I do think that's key and critical and important and something we've done for a long time. It's in the back of our books. You read Rework, you read, it doesn't have to be crazy at work. Our email address is on the last page or something like that. And we get hundreds and hundreds, probably thousands of emails now from people who've read our books. And then when they write us, some of them are shocked that we respond.

15:20David Heinemeier Hansson:Especially like Rework, which has been out for what, 16 years now or something like that. They just figure like that person's dead or I don't know what they figure. Like the email address doesn't work anymore or something or whatever. But then you respond and they're just, they're floored. And it's like, it's great. It's a wonderful way to connect with people. And usually those Rework ones are quite short and some of them are quite long. And the longer ones sit around in my inbox a little bit longer. But I do tend to get back to everybody I can who writes in.

15:46Jason Fried:I think what's fascinating about email too is that it now, as crazy as it sounds, requires a bit of extra effort. Most people are doing the bulk of their communication on instant messaging platforms or on social platforms where it's all sort of quick sentences. There's a weight now to email, which is crazy because when email first came out, they were like, oh, this is going to replace letter writing. There was a lot of weight in letter writing when you're literally relying on your penmanship and stuffing shit in an envelope and putting a stamp on and going to the post office. So it seems incredible that email has now taken that role of being sort of the high effort bar that only few people will actually take advantage of, which is why this works to some degree, right?

16:34Jason Fried:Like out of all the hundreds of thousands of people we have using our systems all the time, they don't all write emails, right? Like then it wouldn't scale. But for the folks who take the effort to write a personal email to Jason or to me or to anyone else in the company, they're going to get an answer. Because that signal in and of itself that they just took the time to literally put an email together, as crazy as it sounds, is a really strong signal and a growing signal. It is even more effortful now, given all the alternatives that we have than it was 10 years ago and certainly than it was 20 years ago.

17:11Jason Fried:So I also use that the other direction. I very often think, you know what? If I've had a bad experience, I actually just did that. I was staying at a hotel in Seattle and I had a bit of a bad experience. And we almost missed our flight because the ballet lost our car. And it was just a mess, right? And I found out who was the manager on duty that day. And I sat down and wrote an email. This was like five paragraphs of, hey, do you know what? Here's what happened. I would care if it was my damn hotel. So I'm kind of doing me a favor through you of reminding me that like, you know what, I would like this feedback.

17:49Jason Fried:So I get a very long personal response back of not what they were going to do to make the situation better, because I mean, whatever. But what I really appreciated was, here's what we're going to do internally. Here's like, this was a real failure. Just an authentic apology, first of all, also quite rare in this modern day, right? Like an apology actually signed by a human who took responsibility for something that were wrong. Already like that imaginary review went from a two star to a three and a half star. And then there was just, here's what we're going to do to change things such that this doesn't happen again.

18:24Jason Fried:These moments, these exchanges are just incredibly satisfying on both ends. I've been on both ends of it. I've been on the end where an irate customer had a very clear point and I needed to apologize for something that we had done wrong. And I'd been that customer who'd been wronged and gotten an apology. And you're like, when I accumulate all the interactions that I've had with strangers over my lifetime, these are some of the real highlights. Like that sense of give and take of seeing eye to eye, often because something didn't go quite right, it's really meaningful. And I think the more we can do that, the more we can humanize this very cold software computer world that we're in increasingly cold in some ways, like as we've talked about with all this AI taking even more of that human touch out of it, the more special those moments are going to be, the more special that short interaction over email is going to be, the more it's going to be worth your time if you're a founder or you're someone in charge of a product who engages with the customers or audience or whatever you have in this way.

19:29David Heinemeier Hansson:This just happened to me a few days ago, which is why I want to mention it. So if you're a founder or whoever listening to this, you're like, well, no one's writing me, so I can't write them. You can also look through your customer list and see who's been buying your stuff lately. Maybe you might recognize a name or something, and you can just reach out. So for example, I just bought some, I'm kind of on this decaf coffee kick. Decaf coffee has been neglected forever. There's a few people now doing good decaf. So I posted this thing on X, like, wish someone was doing good decaf. Someone reached out, like, hey, you should try this product from this company called Wimp, which is a great name for decaf coffee.

20:03David Heinemeier Hansson:So I bought some and the guy who runs it happened to recognize my email address and my name because he's actually a tech guy who is also doing this coffee thing. And so he emailed me saying, hey, I just going through the orders and I just saw your name. I'm so glad you ordered my stuff and been a big fan of Basecamp for years and all that kind of thing. And we struck up a nice conversation. Now we're going to have a phone call like next week. I'd love to hear how his business is going. And I'll tell you what, I haven't gotten the coffee yet, but I promise you the coffee will taste better. The coffee will taste better because we had this conversation before the coffee arrived because he reached out to me, said something nice.

20:39David Heinemeier Hansson:I'd said something nice back. We have a little relationship now as tiny and infinitesimal as it is at the beginning here, but there's something there. And, um, I'm going to order more. Of course I am like, how could I not at this point? You know? And again, that's not why he did it, but these are side effects and they're all good. It's okay. It's okay that like, you don't want to feel bad that you like hook someone into something. If I don't really hate it, I won't buy more, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to like it and like it more than I normally would have. So you can go through your list. I remember we did this in the early days of base camp.

21:09David Heinemeier Hansson:I would go because we would actually get like, I think in the early, early days, like a cha-ching sound or something when we had like an order that came in. David, I think you made some system like this. That sounds quite right. Or maybe it was for like the getting real book for the PDF, something like a cha-ching. And like, oh my God, I know who that is. Like I admire that person. So let me write them and thank them for buying this book or Basecamp or whatever. And it was a wonderful way to build some rapport early on when people were not used to this and still are not used to this. You buy something at whatever, you're going to almost certainly not hear from anybody.

21:41David Heinemeier Hansson:Unless maybe you buy something at Etsy. Etsy is a good example of this where you're like buying directly from one person. Sometimes they'll write you a nice little note back. Maybe it's automated. Maybe it's not. I don't know. But there's still that one-to-one connection, which is nice. And it'd be nice, I think, to have that in more places.

21:54Jason Fried:Now, let me zoom out for just one second. and make a broader point here. I think this is one of the key reasons for why we have this loneliness epidemic, why we have this despondency about the modern world is because we've lost all those natural loose connections. And I'm reminded about this in one specific case, like where I live in California, there's a little kiosk at the bottom of the hill. And I will not offend him because I've known him now for years. It's not the world's greatest kiosk. It's actually kind of messy. And very often I'd be like. Like what kind of kiosk? It's like beverages, right?

22:33Jason Fried:Like so mostly drinks and snacks and whatever. In New York, it probably would be a bodega. And I go down there and I've known this guy now for I think seven years. And we've started talking cars and just sharing some of this stuff. And he asked about my family and I asked about his. And he still will manage to not stock the fucking Mexican Coke that I'm there for, right? And literally, we've had this relationship for seven years. And the number of times I get down there and he doesn't have what I want, it's just incredible. But, you know, it brings real joy to the week to have a number of those kinds of loose connections where I know the person behind the counter.