New: Jason Fried of 37Signals on Business, Focus, and Avoiding Interruption

http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2008/10/jason-fried-of-37signals-on-bu.html

by swdesignguy • 18 years ago

6 2 18 years ago

broadcast.oreilly.com

Some interesting take-aways:

1) On paying attention to your competitors:

I think that you can't control the competition. The competition is ever-changing. If you can't control it and you can't really put your finger on it, then there's really no point worrying about it. You need to deliver the product that you think is good, that your customers want, not what their customers want.

2) How they do PR:

So we've just chosen to teach and to tell a story about who we are and what we believe in. And I think when you teach people, you get a lot of attention. And when you share things a lot of companies would share, you get a lot of attention, and the media seems to have liked that a lot.

3) Best advice he's ever gotten: The best advice I've ever gotten in business is actually Jeff Bezos who is one of our ‚ I our only investor in our company. He said, you should focus on the things that don't change in your business, which I think is a really interesting way of looking at it. Think about the things that people are going to want today and ten years from now. That's what you should be investing in.

4) On the benefits of laziness:

I mean I think laziness is a good thing in this sense. In that we don't really want to solve hard problems and do really hard work. We want to find out what the simple problems are and solve those, because I think most people's problems are pretty simple. So all this detailed integration work with other products and third-party stuff and Facebook and all this other stuff, that's actually kind of a hard thing to do. For us at least, because that's not really what we're focused on doing. So we don't get carried away by that.

swdesignguy• 18 years ago

Great summary!

New: Jason Fried of 37Signals on Business, Focus, and Avoiding Interruption

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