Following Jason Fried’s (and a couple others) advice on how to run my company for the next 14-days
Why am I doing this
Because everyone seems to think that guys like Jason Fried on the internet are spewing advice from an Ivory Tower. I’m about to test the advice out in a real company, with real customers, right now. We’re gonna mess up, but no one ever got 1st place for playing it safe.
Jason Fried runs Basecamp. Basecamp is software-as-a-service for Project Management. Basecamp is like the type of software that we at SoFetch.io build (Basecamp built their own, just to be clear!). Since we’re in the same industry, SoFetch should be able to execute what we read today from Basecamp’s blog and see an improvement tomorrow. I don’t know what will be improved just yet. We’ll see what happen at the end of the next 14-days.
The one-thing I’ve realized while building and growing SoFetch.io into the software agency that it is, is that you just execute on work. Make a decision to do something and then just do it. [JFDI; Alex Hillman’s favorite motto]
“To carry out, or put in effect”. — execute; definition.
Here’s how I’m going to implement the articles into SoFetch
I’ll do the following for each one of the articles:
- Read blog-post
- Write “My takeaways”
- Write “How we’ll implement the Take-aways”
Ok, lets get started!
How we structure our work and teams at Basecamp
What I took away:
- Standardized project timelines
- They work on projects for 6 weeks and then have a 2 week break before starting the next 6 week block of work
- Within their 6 weeks of work, they have Big and Small batch projects that they focus on.
- Running the company, not just their software, like a product
- Always looking for ways to improve and make the communication/process more efficient
- Who ever is pitching work, writes the pitch out entirely before presenting it
“Further, we believe writing things out makes you consider them at a deeper level.” — Jason Fried.
How we are going to attempt to implement at SoFetch.io:
- We’re going to steal from other companies before us and implement a standardized schedule to work on projects
- We’ll work on projects in 6-week blocks, leaving 1 week in-between to take a break from customer projects to carry-out retrospectives on those projects or take care of any internal SoFetch.io needs like improving processes etc…
- We may need to flex since some customers will have certain time needs, we’ll figure it out when we get there. (For those that say to themselves,”That’ll never work” or “SoFetch is going to find out quick that companies won’t work that way!” — we’re aware of the risks, thank you).
- We already “mostly” run SoFetch like a Product company while being a service-based company. Thats how we got to where we’re at currently: by constantly improving our processes. For the following 14-days though, we will attempt to start conditioning EVERYONE to adopt this Product-mindset in whatever they’re working on. (An example would be: If you’re a developer, you need to be looking little improvements daily to a make a codebase better whether thats through better Wiki documentation or perhaps writing a script or rake-task to do install the platform faster locally when a new developer sets up what they’re doing)
- On a personal level, I will take more time to write things out first. Jason mentioned they do this for Project pitches. I will write out my response first before responding to anyone. Even if it’s a phone call. I’ll say “I’ll get back to you on that” and write a response in a follow-up email. This will help me think of more options by giving myself a moment to think more.
Status meetings are the scourge
What I took away:
- Automatic check-ins in Basecamp
- Ask the whole team at the end of the day what they worked on
- Let the team respond to the question whenever they’re finished instead of needing them to stop what they’re doing and answer “right now”
How we are going to attempt to implement at SoFetch.io
- Automatic check-ins in Basecamp; we’ll use the Standup Bot application (http://standupbot.com) for Slack. The cool thing is, this is a platform we built and have grown. Apparently we are ahead of the game to have improved this internal process before Jason’s blog post, +1 for us.
Silicon Valley arrogance: “I can tell you which startups will succeed, without even knowing what they do”
Much of this article is picking-on the idea that if you want to be a success, you have to work 7-days a week, 18 hours a day (gross example).
What I took away:
- To be successful, you have to “crush it” and work constantly, with no work/life balance
- To be successful, you have to work in an office with other people so you can be apart of water-cooler discussions that will breed ideas that will change that day or week’s results for the better
How we are going to attempt to implement at SoFetch.io
- I wanted “office hours” along time ago, so this already done, but I’ll look at ways we can improve what we have already somehow?
Once we put our work hours in-writing on our site (http://sofetch.io/readme), things got way better for us. We did better work because we were setting the expectation to our customers that we had days off to relax and re-charge. Every one of our customers don’t mind our schedule since we deliver when we say we will.
I’ve never had a goal
What I took away:
- Setting financial goals of making $100,000,000 are not ideal
- What happens when you get to $100,000,000? You’ll want more
- Be happy with what you’re doing currently, keep doing it, improve yourself and your skills and follow what you want to be doing, the money will come
How we are going to attempt to implement at SoFetch.io
- We will put aside our financial goals (We had one for $1,000,000, you can guess what happened to that!) and just take on work that we can “get done”
- Focus purely on doing what we do
- Do a damn good job (almost the same as above)
Don’t let anyone overpay you
What I took away
- Set a standard pricing model
- Do not deviate from that pricing model if a someone/company wants us to give them special attention
How we are going to attempt to implement at SoFetch.io
- We’ll need to modify this, since we ARE a consulting company (even though we have a couple of SaaS platforms we get MRR off of)
- Currently, we have a one-size-fits-all price per-developer, per-week and a way to carry that out.
- We will no longer entertain using a contract other than the one we have paid a lawyer for already (Just happened, story below)
- We will refer out projects if theres push back on pricing, contracting or timing.
I’m excited to see how these work.
I fucking ❤ Mondays!
(Oh, DHH. How I dislike your use of “fuck” these days. You’re so much smarter than that but I digress.)
What I took away
- Make your days off more enjoyable
How we are going to attempt to implement at SoFetch.io
- This post seems aimed at the personal level. I will attempt to not do any work thinking or related stuff on the weekends, no matter what. That means not taking my laptop anywhere etc…, just enjoy sitting at the coffee shop with friends, or reading a book by the ocean, or taking a road-trip sans laptop etc…
Being tired isn’t a badge of honor
What I took away
- Sleep is extremely important
- Make sure your consistently getting enough hours of sleep every night
How we are going to attempt to implement at SoFetch.io
- This is another post to implement on a personal level
- Organizationally, we can offer bonuses like he mentions, but maybe we can start asking people how much sleep their getting? We’ll experiment with it.
- Personally, I will attempt to go to sleep at the same time every night in hopes of waking up at the same time (early as usual, since I run everyday except Sundays!)
I’m a boring programmer (and proud of it)
What I took away:
- Companies are using terms like “Hacker”, “Ninja”, “Rock star” in their job postings to find programmers that apparently fit the bill
- The labels of programmers mentioned above, are no better than you/me/others that don’t label themselves like that
How we are going to attempt to implement at SoFetch.io
- We don’t use this type of verbiage anyway since I know first-hand how damaging programmers that label themselves like this can poison a team with their arrogance. Fast.
- Look at the results of a programmer after a day or week of probationary coding before we hire them to see if they fit well with communication and how the way they work fits with how we work to deliver projects (We’ve been doing this already, so thats easy enough to stick to)
Is group chat making you sweat?
What I took away:
- Real-chat platforms like HipChat, Slack, etc.. are now becoming the defacto communication for companies and they are doing more harm than good because of the need to do real-time responses to real-time questions.
- Setting some expectations on when/how everyone will respond in the real-time chat rooms
How we are going to attempt to implement at SoFetch.io
- Add expectations around when we will respond when someone says something
- “Mute” the “general” chatroom where everyone is chatting about off-work-topics randomly, so those conversations don’t distract us while we’re working on something
- Mute all of a project’s channels so the notifications aren’t going off and create a schedule to check the messages so we can focus on the work and not always run back to the chat when someone says something. As much as we love emoji’s, a simple “happy-face” emoji sent in a chatroom full of people working could de-rail them for a bit.
- Create yet-another-channel for each project that is not muted and this channel is to only be used for “Red-Alert’s”, as Jason put it.
- Create some examples of how to use the Red Alert channel
Why I work remotely (hint: it has nothing to do with productivity).
What I took away:
- When working remotely, you’ll need to be OK with interruptions
- The benefits and productivity of working remotely far outweigh the interruptions you will have
How we are going to attempt to implement at SoFetch.io
- We’ve been working remotely for 9+ years, we understand most of this article
- If someone wants to work in a office-like setting, but not everyday, we will get them space from WeWork or something in their local area so they can have some bit of office-like feeling if they want that.
Conclusion
I’ve already learned a lot after reading the 10 articles and writing about them.
I’ve learned that Jason Fried writes actionable articles from the small sample set I’ve read today. Solutions on how to implement what I learned was really eye-opening on how to fit it into our company processes, too.
See you in 14-days!
If you want to reach out and ask me any questions on how to build a profitable SaaS product (since that’s what we do and help others do), or questions about remote working, or running a completely remote-based software company, you can email me at corey@sofetch.io or if you want, call me, 415–967–3732, I’ll attempt to answer it if i’m available! I live in EST, so keep that in mind.
