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The Craigslist comparison comes from: 1) The fact that in SF and NYC, they charge directly per listing in certain categories. 2) The fact that they didn't tak

The Craigslist comparison comes from: 1) The fact that in SF and NYC, they charge directly per listing in certain categories. 2) The fact that they didn't take VC funding. 3) The fact that they stayed small. 4) The fact that they didn't sell the company. All of these would have been extremely easy to stray from, but instead they stuck to the core philosophy. What DHH was talking about was just that: a philosophy. Any company can stick by that philosophy, regardless of how it attracts customers or the specifics behind their product or service. Asking the question "what other web or software companies make a living the 37signals way?" is kind of a weird question. The 37signals way is actually the normal way to run a business. It just seems weird because the scale of the web has thus far screwed up everyone's minds to the point where everybody forgets the past.

davidw 18y ago
The problem with that line of reasoning, in my opinion, is that "normal" businesses sell "normal" products. As a simple example, how much would you pay for a clone of reddit? Not much. The value of the site is entirely in its large community. Same thing for eBay, for the most part. Also, normal products always cost something. There are a ton of information goods that are free: Linux, Apache, all kinds of languages, compilers, editors, browsers - everything you need to run a business, almost, can be had for free these days. In other words, things do work differently on line, in some cases. Understanding that, and understanding what happens why is crucial to being able to do a 'DHH style' company that doesn't get crushed by a big player, or undercut by a bit of open source software. I highly recommend the book 'Information Rules': http://www.amazon.com/dp/087584863X?tag=dedasys-20 http://www.amazon.com/dp/087584863X?tag=dedasys-20
pchristensen 18y ago
If 37s is the normal way to run a business, then no one should ever disparage marketing, open source contributions, or consulting as methods to start or bootstrap a business. 37s has ridiculously low customer acquisition costs (compared to competitors) because they 1) have 85K subscribers to their SvN blog 2) wrote a book that sold 75K copies 3) developed one of the most popular open source projects in the world 4) speak at conferences all the time If you're just writing code, you'd better hope to get bought, because you'll never catch up to 37s as a business.

davidw 18y ago

The problem with that line of reasoning, in my opinion, is that "normal" businesses sell "normal" products. As a simple example, how much would you pay for a clone of reddit? Not much. The value of the site is entirely in its large community. Same thing for eBay, for the most part. Also, normal products always cost something. There are a ton of information goods that are free: Linux, Apache, all kinds of languages, compilers, editors, browsers - everything you need to run a business, almost, can be had for free these days. In other words, things do work differently on line, in some cases. Understanding that, and understanding what happens why is crucial to being able to do a 'DHH style' company that doesn't get crushed by a big player, or undercut by a bit of open source software. I highly recommend the book 'Information Rules': http://www.amazon.com/dp/087584863X?tag=dedasys-20 http://www.amazon.com/dp/087584863X?tag=dedasys-20

pchristensen 18y ago

If 37s is the normal way to run a business, then no one should ever disparage marketing, open source contributions, or consulting as methods to start or bootstrap a business. 37s has ridiculously low customer acquisition costs (compared to competitors) because they 1) have 85K subscribers to their SvN blog 2) wrote a book that sold 75K copies 3) developed one of the most popular open source projects in the world 4) speak at conferences all the time If you're just writing code, you'd better hope to get bought, because you'll never catch up to 37s as a business.