Doing big things with small teams
Published June 13th, 2005 edit replace rm!
During the Reboot 7 conference one of the most interesting sessions was Jason Fried from 37Signals titled “Doing big things with small teams”.
It is the story how they have managed to roll out:
Using very few resources and quickly. It was basically a tale of bootstrapping successfull commercial web services.
Much of what he said runs along the same thread that I have been pushing here. In fact there was really very little I would be in disagreement with.
The main things that where enlightening for me was their tech support strategy. Jason does most of the techsupport for all of their sites himself. If someone has a suggestion he replies back to them thanking them for the idea and immediately deletes the mail. If enough people suggest a feature it will be memorable enough that it will make it on the todo list.
He also stressed the importance of leaving applications as simple as possible, allowing people to structure things their own way and not imposing structures upon them.
Several people asked him if they didn’t want to grow bigger. He replied that currently that would not be a priority for them as that would take the enjoyment out of it. I am absolutely in violent agreement with this.
