In a saturated market, businesses often feel an irresistible pull towards innovation—the pursuit of the next big feature, the groundbreaking technology, the "moonshot" that will set them apart. Yet, as observed by industry veterans like Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson of 37signals (creators of Basecamp), this relentless chase for novelty can be a trap. Their philosophy, and indeed ours at Proscris, centers not on innovation for innovation's sake, but on **quality**. It’s more important to build something truly good than something merely novel; and, paradoxically, it's often much harder.
The Unsung Virtue of Quality Over Novelty
Quality takes time. Empirically, to build anything of lasting value requires longer hours and more intense, focused effort than it initially seems. This inherent truth is why Jason and David have learned to treat plans as mere guesses and to avoid tying themselves to colossal projects where projections will almost certainly be off the mark.
“We assume that more features make a better product, but Basecamp proves that the opposite is often true.”
— Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson
To grasp their definition of quality, consider Basecamp. This product achieved profitability within weeks of its launch, a testament to its initial excellence. For over 13 years, it has continuously evolved and improved. Each iteration, more refined than the previous, consistently pushes the quality bar higher. So much higher, in fact, that in 2014, the company boldly decided to discontinue all its other products—two of them highly successful—to focus exclusively on Basecamp, betting they could still refine it further after more than a decade of development.
Building Sustainably on Limited Resources: Think Small. And Then Smaller.
This commitment to quality doesn’t imply that the path to greatness is paved with infinite money, people, or time. In fact, more resources often don’t solve more problems but create new ones—complexity, bureaucracy, diluted focus. So, what's the alternative? How do you build a sustainable business on limited resources? The answers are both surprising and refreshingly sane.
Cut Your Ambition in Half: The Power of Underdoing
First off, to achieve big things, you need to think small. The "moonshot" goals often celebrated can actually be a recipe for failure. You bite off too much too soon and choke. The exacting nature of quality means you can either do one thing exceptionally well or many things badly—or at a merely passable level. Choose the former. Do just one thing at a time, but do it exceptionally well. Indeed, think even smaller than that. As Jason and David suggest, “Cut your ambition in half.”
“You are better off with an ass-kicking half than a half-assed whole.”
— Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson
This isn't to say ambition is bad, but small can be a more effective starting point on the way to big things. Small also possesses underestimated virtues of its own. Basecamp, for instance, is renowned for its minimal design. Even today, with ample resources, the company maintains a "think-small" approach to feature development. The product does less than most competitors, yet Basecamp’s popularity continues to rise. As Jason and David half-jokingly state, “if you want to beat your competitors, underdo them.”
The common assumption is that more features equate to a better product, but Basecamp demonstrates the opposite is often true. Added features introduce complexity, which creates clutter, increases confusion, and reduces ease of use. Consider the Flip camera: its basic design, stripped down to a single button, allowed users to do one thing—take a picture—in the simplest, most efficient way possible. That singular focus and ease of use is precisely why many people loved it.
Good Designers Kill The Inessential: Curating Experience
Adding more features often stems from an attempt to please as many people as possible. However, to truly delight one person, you sometimes have to risk alienating another. Any attempt to meet diverse needs all at once often dilutes the experience for everyone. In fact, according to Jason and David, if no one is ever upset about your product, it’s likely not because everyone loves it, but because it’s too boring to be worth genuine attention.
The way to build something users genuinely care about is to act as a curator of their experience. Curators—from those who arrange gallery collections to chefs in great restaurants—think just as much about what to **remove** from the design as what to add. Good design, like good taste, is largely defined by the omission of the unnecessary. Extraneous detail doesn’t enhance; it detracts from the desired effect. Basecamp is praised and criticized for its minimal design, but it’s more a matter of essentialism than minimalism. Its features are few not just for the sake of being few, but because they are as few as **necessary**. For Jason and David, the biggest challenge for the designer is to discern the essential from the secondary and to not let good ideas get in the way of great ones. The real question is not what you *can* do or even what you *would like* to do, but what you **have to do**.
It’s all too easy to get bogged down in details that are "nice to have" but not essential. While the power of the right detail is undeniable, quality demands sacrifices. To make room for their best work to emerge and shine, writers cross out good paragraphs, directors cut out good scenes. Businesses need to operate with the same ruthlessness and discipline.
Find Your Epicenter: The Anchor and Compass
One powerful way to determine what is necessary versus what isn’t is to start at what Jason and David call the **epicenter**. Then, build out from there while constantly circling back to it to avoid distractions. The epicenter is the core of what you are building, the thing without which your product wouldn’t work. A question you can ask yourself is: “If I took this away, will what I’m selling still exist?” Jason and David offer the example of a hamburger stand. A hamburger stand has many parts—from the cart to the various condiments—but only the hamburgers are essential. You can take everything else away and still have a hamburger stand as long as you have hamburgers. They are the epicenter.
When in doubt about what direction to take, use the epicenter as both an anchor and a compass. The first version of Basecamp shipped without a billing system. Instead of building one immediately, the team used that time before launch to fix key issues without which the product wouldn’t work. Taking payments wasn’t one of them. True, they needed a way to get paid, but that wasn’t the epicenter of their product’s core functionality. Basecamp functioned just as well without a billing system initially, so they set it aside, shipped, and then figured out how to get paid. Of course, it helped that billing occurred in monthly cycles, giving them 30 days to solve it before payments were due. But you get the point: focus on the core.
Constraints Enable Creativity: The Paradox of Limited Resources
This example also underscores another central part of the decision-making process at 37signals: **embracing constraints**. It sounds like a paradox, but Jason and David have learned that constrained decisions are often better decisions because the elimination of options fosters speed, creativity, and focus. Having limited time and resources before the launch of Basecamp forced them to be crystal clear about their priorities, selective about their features, and creative about the non-essential but still important details.
Consider the genesis of Basecamp: At the time of its initial development, Jason and his three co-founders were in Chicago working full-time on web design projects. David, the only one with programming skills, was in Denmark finishing his graduate degree. Between school commitments, he barely managed to squeeze in 10 hours a week over six months to work on Basecamp. These limitations, which on the surface seemed annoying, ultimately forced—indeed, enabled—the simple, lightweight, easy-to-use design that people love about Basecamp.
Beyond clarifying priorities, constraints compel creativity. They make you a better problem solver. We mistakenly believe that complex problems demand complex solutions, remaining oblivious to cheaper or easier ones that may be lying in plain sight. But because these simpler solutions often seem too simple and unimpressive, perhaps a little beneath us, we only become aware of them when other options are not available.
You don’t have to face real constraints to reap their benefits. Nowadays, Jason and David have almost unlimited resources, but despite this—or perhaps *because* of it—they are careful to impose constraints on their decisions by asking questions that limit the set of available options. One such question is: “Do you really need X?” For instance:
- Do you really need $500,000 or is $50,000 enough for now?
- Do you really need six months or can you make something in two?
- Do you really need a big office or can you share office space or work from home for a while?
- Do you really need to hire another person or can you do the job yourself?
For two years after Basecamp launched, Jason personally handled customer support. But this line of questioning can open up other options: Can you eliminate the job altogether? Can you somehow automate it with intelligent systems? Just asking yourself if you really need something forces you to consider a host of possibilities and creative solutions you may have overlooked otherwise.
Ask Better Questions: Eliminating Imaginary Problems
Often, it’s not that we are not creative enough with our solutions; it’s that we are solving imaginary problems or the wrong ones. Here, too, questioning your actions and decisions can jolt you out of default mode and surface unconscious biases and unhelpful assumptions. Some useful questions:
- Why am I working on this?
- What is it for?
- What is the problem I am solving?
- Who benefits from it being solved?
Here’s another one: **What could I be doing instead?** Everything you do has an opportunity cost, whether you are aware of it or not. When you factor in that cost, a seemingly productive activity can turn out to be a waste of time. Meetings, for example.
Kill Meetings: Embrace Uninterrupted Time
According to Jason and David, meetings are among the worst productivity killers in a company. A one-hour meeting with 10 people is actually a 10-hour meeting, because the true cost to your company is one hour summed across all 10 people. And if you account for task-switching time, which can be significant, the opportunity cost gets even higher. Nothing, they argue, destroys productivity like an interruption. The smallest distraction—a tap on the shoulder, a quick office joke—can cause a disproportionately large disruption in your focus. And once you are interrupted, you don’t just slip back into your zone; you have to start all over again.
That’s why Jason and David suggest you try your best to enforce large blocks of uninterrupted time for deep work. Some ways to do this are keeping meetings to a minimum, favoring passive asynchronous communication such as email over face-to-face time or instant messaging, or designating certain days or specific times every day as "no-talk times."
Don’t Throw Good Time After Bad Work: Know When to Quit
Besides opportunity costs, some activities are subject to sunk costs. In this scenario, you keep doing something even though it’s not working or no longer worth it because of all the time and effort you’ve already invested. And also because you don’t want to give up and look like a quitter. What you end up doing, though, as Jason and David put it, is throwing good time after bad work out of ego. So, they say, don’t be a hero. Next time something isn’t working or it’s taking longer than you thought, ask yourself: “Why not quit?”
It’s tempting to call these "productivity hacks." But that’s not how Jason and David see things. They don’t talk about productivity in terms of doing more in less time; they care about wasting less of the time they already have. It’s the same core message they’ve been advocating all along: it’s not about the many but the meaningful few, not about the biggest possible but the smallest essential. Cast in this light, their advice doesn’t seem so revolutionary after all. It seems like getting back to basics. But in a world obsessed with secrets, tricks, tactics, and hacks, perhaps the very things that actually make sense and truly matter have become the most revolutionary.
0 Comments