magazine
Flickr photo by Silicon Prairie News
You can love people and you can love business. And if you are in love with two things it is hard to sort of figure out what gets what...
MS: I actually read Rework several times. I started with the audio version. Then I bought one to make notes on and now I have one with your autograph so it’s even better. The thing is I’ve talked to many people about this book and the reaction was “this is so great, it is so small, so short I’ve read it in one shot” everyone was like it was 3 hours and I was done… people just loved this concept of it being short, because the messages are straight and to the point… JF: Yes, there is no filler... directly to the point, each essay is a page or two long and that’s it. And you don’t need much more than that. You really don’t. This is not a book about very specific solutions, it’s a book about ideas, ways to approach problems, to think about your
business and it is up to you to fill in the blanks, not up to us.
MS: The book is a bestseller (New York Times, Amazon, etc... the whole nine yards). Congratulations. So now what? You have the web apps, you have to book, you’ve got the business running very well. So what is next for you? JF: Well, we want to improve our products. That is sort of an obsession of ours to constantly improve our products. We’ve got two new product ideas we want to experiment with this year. Maybe start on one of them. We want to work on integrating our products better, we launched a suite of products so you can buy all of them at once, but they don’t really talk to each other so much yet.
We want to work on that this year. I want to build the team a little bit more, I want to continue to learn, I want the team to get better. For me it’s really great to see everyone getting better all the time. That’s a real treat when I can see how people mature and take on more responsibilities. We’ll still have most of our focus on improving the products and making them integrate better and hopefully if we get the chance we’ll get these two other products done. I’m really excited about those, so we’ll see what happens.
MS: Cool. I wish you all the best and thanks for being a part of our Productive! Magazine, Jason.
! Jason Fried Jason Fried is the co– founder and President of 37signals. Jason believes there’s real
When people become enamored with the system itself (like GTD) they actually create more work for themselves...
value and beauty in the basics. Jason co– wrote all of 37signals books, and is invited to speak around the world on entrepreneurship, design, management, and software.
! Links: Jason on Twitter | Jason and David’s book: Rework
Jason’s company: 37signals | 37signals’ blog: Signal vs. Noise