Know Your Company grows up and moves out

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3700-big-know-your-company-grows-up-and-moves-out

by stirno • 13 years ago

59 40 13 years ago

anon8084• 13 years ago

I always feel like 37signals shares just enough to make you think you're part of their community, but not enough if in fact you actually were.

tptacek• 13 years ago

What does that mean? 37signals is a business. Savvy businesses create superficial communities for marketing, and 37signals is especially adept at doing that; they've even created a genuine community (Rails) which bolsters their bona fides. But they are at the end of the day a business. What information do you feel that they owe you that they haven't shared?

larrys4• 13 years ago

"But they are at the end of the day a business"

I sometimes wish that some of the "newly hatched" were around back in the day when I started in business. The idea of "download netscape now" buttons and links outside your website would be as likely as a mall store putting in a door to let you escape from the maze of aisles meant to focus you on their product. Not to mention allowing your customers to share their opinions with your other customers.[1]

[1] In other words, unthinkable.

jasonfried7• 13 years ago

What did you want to know that we didn't share?

dannowatts2• 13 years ago

what your 3 favorite craft beers are!!

rushabh2• 13 years ago

The one time pricing is very interesting. How do you define the $100 one time pricing? What if you decide to cut the product in the middle, do you give a full refund? Is there a time limit (20 years) or is this for as long as the service is alive? Is there a limit on file uploads? Is there a small annual recurring fee for maintenance?

anon8084• 13 years ago

Why are you spinning off the business if it's profitable? Why isn't Claire joining 37S instead? What's happening to ClarityBox? What other operating scenarios did you guys consider? Who is going to run the business . . . will Claire be doing product development, programming, customer support herself? What exactly will she be doing? Is she hiring people? Who are these people?

Of course you don't owe anyone any of that info. However, if you crack the door open just a little bit, don't be offended/surprised etc. if my curiosity is piqued and I want to open it.

ihaveajob• 13 years ago

I like the pricing model. At first it reads like a one time sell ($100 per employee, once), but considering attrition, this is much more attractive for KYC since most companies have significant attrition. What's the typical tenure length at an American corporation? 2-3 years? 5 years? Also, the organizations that need this service the most might also have higher attrition to begin with. Clever.

mathhead• 13 years ago

Isn't the thread in breach of HN rules?

The title of the post is: "Big: Know Your Company grows up and moves out."

Shouldn't it be exactly the same?

jmduke• 13 years ago

I'm surprised by the decision to spin off KYC: from what I understand, it fits nicely in 37signal's toolshed and would help cross-marketing quite well -- especially with those great numbers.

If I were to guess (and this is with the caveat that I'm not too privy to what the actual product is -- from what I can guess from the marketing copy, it's a mixture of one-time consulting and internal SaaS), the growth rate of the project is increasing in a way such that scaling on the part of 37signals is infeasible.

(Edit:) Napkin math: if a company grows from 25 to 40 over the course of two years, that works out to be $1500 over 24 months, or effectively $62.5/mo for KYC. It also strongly incentivizes the product (er, company) to help with a company's HR attrition and growth, which is neat.

cjstott• 13 years ago

This will be interesting to watch. Given the sales page currently is simply a letter by Jason Fried, my assumption (and it is just an assumption) is that companies have gone with this offering because it's 37Signals. That said now momentum is built, that in turn should generate the referrals rather, perhaps more so than the initial buzz of working directly with 37signals people, so I guess this makes sense.

I've always seen 37signals as a very focused company, and this spin off enables them to focus back on their core business. I just finished reading Focus by Al Ries, hence this is top of mind, but 37signals seem the masters of relentless focus in the modern age.

Gaurav322• 13 years ago

It is really a good idea to know our employee's ideas and their work culture. It also provides a great things about our employee through this. We can know that what exactly our employee wants from us and are we giving or not??

And 100$ is not a big deal...

AndrewKemendo• 13 years ago

The issue of knowing your people is such a basic fundamental tenant of leadership that every year or two another tool is invented to solve it. 360 degree feedback was the previous hot company evaluation tool and 15Five had a pretty interesting approach to this as well. I haven't used know your company, but it seems to me that at its core it is an employee feedback tool - with the caveat that it is as minimally intrusive as possible (which is always the goal by the way).

I would love to see how it actually works compared to other management tools, but my company is not big enough to actually be able to implement it.

I do think this is an example of the way that startup/technologists/hackers do things when compared to the rest of the universe of management/leadership: reinventing the wheel that the business management community has been chiseling on for over a century. Hopefully this will do great things.

thesausageking• 13 years ago

The pricing model creates a strange incentive: it's in their best interest for their customers to have a high rate of employee turnover.

jenniferqq2• 13 years ago

So basically, 37signals sold this product just like they sold Sortfolio.

(They seem to be on a bad run lately given Breeze was shutdown after a few months. Sortfolio sale. etc)

erikpukinskis• 13 years ago

I don't think it's necessarily a bad run. It seems like Basecamp is pretty stable these days, and well staffed, so they're looking for the Next Big Thing for the company. In order do do that, you have to do a lot of little experiments with things that seem trivial but have some potential to become big. There are going to be a bunch of things that work OK but aren't that perfect fit for the next tent pole for 37signals. That's a normal, expected part of the experimentation process.

What's noteworthy is that most companies just shutter their failed experiments, and most startups fail. The fact that they've spun out two of their projects into sustainable businesses is kind of amazing really.

jasonfried7• 13 years ago

We didn't sell Know Your Company.

No one sold anything and no one bought anything. The piece of the company that Claire owns was a gift from us - and she can earn more as the company does better.

We moved it out into its own company, which Claire now runs.

Nothing at all like Sortfolio.

jenniferqq2• 13 years ago

Is 37signals still the majority owner in this new company?

swombat• 13 years ago

I read through part of the slightly scammy-looking long sales letter (complete with bullet points and money-back guarantee) at https://knowyourcompany.com/ and still don't have a clue what this product does.

Can anyone enlighten me?

PS: @jason - the comment about the sales letter is not a comment about 37S, of course, but I'm sure you're aware of the format you're using there...

mst• 13 years ago

I'm fairly sure there was a post a couple years back by 37s along the lines of "this style of sales letter is often used by somewhat scammy companies ... but that's because they don't have a real product at all so they have to be really good at marketing copy".

Which is a fair point - and, well, the last time I read one of those I started off thinking "this is weirdly high pressure" ... and then ended up reading the whole thing and signing up for a basecamp trial anyway (which I promptly failed to try properly, so I have no opinion on the product ...).

I think my point is "call it high pressure instead of scammy". If I actually have one. goes in search of another coffee

pixelmonkey• 13 years ago

Parse.ly has been using this product for the past several months. In fact, I think we are the "smallest customer" that Jason cited, with 16 employees. We're a fully distributed team (as I described in http://bit.ly/distributed-teams), so it was a particularly good fit for us.

Our team loves the product. They loved it from the first week it was in use. It sends a weekly email rounding up what everyone is working on every week. It also has team members sharing interesting social things like favorite recipes, childhood stories, books, and movies. And the "Company Question" (a weekly question picked by management) allows us to get regular feedback from employees, which we used to do sporadically using hacked-together Wufoo surveys, but this has much less friction and actually works. One of my favorite of these questions that we recently asked was, "Is there anyone at the company you wish you could apprentice under for a few weeks?"

I don't want to reveal too much about the product because I don't want to preempt their own marketing of it, but here's a quick glimpse of how the "Questions" view of the product looks -- this is where you can see the answers from employees of past questions. In general, it has a simple, sparse, and beautiful design that achieves the goal of the product with ease.

http://ubuntuone.com/3gYi3mg65rCM30dTSGsYB8

Know Your Company grows up and moves out

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