First let me preface this by saying that if you are involved in the interactive industry and haven’t read Getting Real, you should. The way 37signals approaches web development really is a breath of fresh air. Although Jason Fried (President and Founder of 37signals) didn’t really share any concepts that hadn’t been communicated in some way or another in Getting Real at SXSW, it was great to hear it directly from the man behind it all (note: Jason ended up sharing 14 lessons instead of 10).

Lesson 1: Ignore The Great Unknown
Often times when a company is starting out, they get stuck thinking about the scalability of their process or product. What happens when we get 1 000 000 000 users? What happens when we get over 100 employees? The reality is that those possibilities may never occur and if they do, a company will see them coming. A small company needs to in Jason’s words “optimize for now” because if they don’t, that future they are so worried about may never come.

Lesson 2: Watch Out for Red Flags
Red flags are words or phrases that end up causing problems in communications and having negative impact on interpersonal dynamics. At 37signals they identified the words need, can’t, easy, only, and fast. These words were singled out by 37signals because they often left no room for negotiation or compromise in a situation and frequently undervalued the contribution of other team members. Because the majority of 37signals communications occurred over chat, it was easier for them to go back through the records and identify these words than it would be for most companies. I cannot imagine how difficult identifying these red flags would be for a typical company, with all the scattered modes of communication, but there is probably considerable value in doing so. A great book could be written on this subject, analyzing and highlighting what words act as flags in different organizations and industries.

Lesson 3: Be Successful and Make Money by Helping Other People be Successful and Make Money
This is pretty intuitive. Basically, if your product or service enhances the process or output of your customer at a cost that is small relative to the gains that can be realized by your customer by using your producy or service, you will do well.

Lesson 4: Target Nonconsumers and Nonconsumption
This is a concept borrowed from the books The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Innovator’s Solution. The idea is that there exists an entire market of nonconsumers, or people who have a need, but existing players aren’t targeting these people. By targeting these consumers, a company is able to avoid competition from entrenched players. The example Jason provided for this was Basecamp. A lot of people could use a project management tool, but few people need or are willing to learn a tool as complex as Microsoft Project. 37signals created an accessible tool that meets most people’s needs rather than everyone’s needs.

Lesson 5: Question Your Work Regularly
Jason identified a series of questions that the 37signals team is encouraged to regularly ask themselves. While not all of these questions apply to everybody, I find regularly asking yourself questions like these can help individuals and companies to avoid the tunnel vision that often occurs once you get deep into a project by forcing you to pull back and better analyze what you are doing, giving yourself an opportunity to correct your course. The questions that 37signals uses are:

Why are we doing this?
What problem are we solving?
Is this actually useful?
Are we adding value?
Will this change behavior?
Is there an easier way?
What’s the opportunity cost?
Is it really worth it?

Lesson 6: Read Your Product
“The biggest sin on the Internet right now is bad copywriting… paying too much attention to pixels and not enough attention to words.” Often times the biggest problem with an interface is not the design or layout, but the words. Employing functional copy is often the easiest and most cost-effective way to refresh or fix a website or web application.

Lesson 7: Err on the Side of Simple
Jason advocated starting with the simplest solution first. Basically, if you fail, you will fail quickly and still have the opportunity to embark on the more ambitious solution. If you succeed, that is clearly the best-case scenario with the outcome you desired achieved at minimal cost. Whereas if you start with the more ambitious solution, even if you succeed, you may have missed the opportunity to succeed at a lower cost. If you fail with the more ambitious solution, you are in a position where you’ve made a considerable investment with little to show for it with your only remaining hope being to try the simpler solution or figure out a new one all together.

Lesson 8: Invest in What Doesn’t Change
In the technology industry, this seems counter intuitive as each company is trying to identify and capitalize on the latest trends. However, in doing that, a company may be forced to move away from what got them there in the first place.  This can be best characterized as focusing on the principles that create value for you, not the technologies. An example of this, would be Google. Who knows what the technological landscape will look like in 15 years, but chances are that if Google continues to invest in products that are simple, fast and efficient, they will still be doing well.

Lesson 9: Follow the Chefs
I thought this was a particularly clever analogy. Chefs become famous and by extensions, successful by giving away their knowledge in the form of cookbooks and cooking shows, but this doesn’t prevent their restaurants from doing well. In fact, their restaurants thrive because they have been willing to share. This is a key principle of the Internet age. Knowledge is capital that is difficult to realize unless it is shared. If your value is in being an expert, how can you show yourself to be an expert without sharing your expertise? A great example of this is SEOmoz, a company that has established themselves as experts and in their field  and by extensions grown their business considerably by sharing information rather than withholding it.

Lesson 10: Interruption is the Enemy of Productivity
At 37signals, they favour passive forms of communication like email and chat as it allows everybody to communicate with each other within their own workflow whereas meetings and phone calls create interruptions that can hamper productivity. 37signals came to this realization when they first collocated. They anticipate that their productivity would increase, but it declined instead. In order to repair the situation, they returned to the same communication models that they had employed when they were on different continents.

Lesson 11: Road Maps Send You in the Wrong Direction
Simply put, long-term plans lock you into the past and take away the agility that will allow you to react to the present. This is a philosophy that may work great for 37signals, but I could see being problematic for other companies that have more moving parts in play and need specifications to be at least partially locked down in order to continue.

Lesson 12: Be Clear in Crisis
This is all about transparency. Last year, 37signals was experiencing some server issues with one of their products and rather than attempting to pass it off as scheduled maintenance, they were honest with their customers and provided them with continual status updates on the home page. While people were upset with the downtime, they appreciated and applauded the transparency, which ended up receiving more coverage than the downtime itself. Honesty is often the best policy.

Lesson 13: Make Tiny Decisions
Instead of making big decisions try breaking things down into a series of small decisions. I am lukewarm on this philosophy. Sometimes increasing the granularity of a decision can be a great way to mitigate risk, but sometimes that results in a series of decisions that lack cohesion.

Lesson 14: Make it Matter
Jason ended his presentation by telling the audience that they should make everything they do matter. As much as I like the sound of this thought, I find it be a bit of a loaded gun because what matters is subjective. Does it have to matter on a personal level as well as a professional? Can it matter by association? I guess what it really comes down to is that if you can look at something you are doing and say it doesn’t matter, you probably shouldn’t be doing it.