Work on your best idea | Hacker News Reader

Work on your best idea

37signals.com

28 pointsfogus21 comments

In recent months the quality of the posts on the SVN blog seems to have deteriorated quite dramatically.

I can remember times when I enjoyed almost every single blog post from the 37signals guys. This blog entry seems to have taken one of their mottos ('You can always do less') to new extremes.

Too much fluff for my taste recently.

Ponder the possibility that you might be the one who changed. Maybe you read too much blog advice and got tired of it. Too much of anything is bad.

We have over a hundred thousand readers at SvN. Some just joined, some has been with us for a decade, everyone is different in some sense.

I write about what I care about and what I think about without too much concern as to whether everyone will love it all.

It seems like the content on SVN is more earnest and perhaps less thoughtful. I loved the blog back in 2005/2006, and perhaps I did just get tired of reading variations on the same themes over and over. Maybe the content has the same degree of earnestness and thoughtfulness, and I'm just expecting more nuanced discussion on ideas after five years.

I'm thinking in particular of this post: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2233-not-for-sale . The language is over-the-top, especially in the first couple paragraphs. It feels appropriate for a pep rally, which I guess doesn't appeal to me any longer.

Beyond the tone, I found the content lacking. Can you really not understand why someone would want to sell their company? I mean, here you are denigrating serial entrepreneurs because they exhibit no understanding for why someone would want to hold onto his company. And then you proceed to spell out why serial entrepreneurs have no good reason whatsoever for wanting to flip.

You're using this hyped-up language to create this perception of a religious war - even using "worshipped", "non-believers", "holy grail". And for what? I just don't understand it. Why'd you write this article? If you have the time to respond, I really would like to know. I respect 37s immensely and you in particular, and I really do want to understand.

So you have different values than an archetypal serial entrepreneur. Well, so what? Why are your values so much better that they're "servants" and you're not?

I think the topic is interesting, but the way it comes across, it's like you're having a shouting match over whether blue or green is the best color in the world.

That particular post was born out of a frustration with the disbelief about not being for sale and what I consider an infatuation with flipping companies and serial entrepreneurs.

I don't think the language is any more colorful than it's always been. I prefer to put my writing in strong terms with clearly marked boundaries. I'm usually just writing a handful of paragraphs, not a dissertation. So the "ifs, buts, and maybes" have to be read between the lines.

Upvoted for giving insight into your process. I criticized that post for being over the top. A friend uses a similar technique where he overstates almost everything and it is effective. People listen to his opinions. The danger is in overstating too far or too often as it can turn into a boy who cried wolf kind of thing.

With that being said, I've thought a lot about my comment yesterday and have come to the conclusion that I need to work on finding the core spirit of posts and address that rather than the particulars. It's easy to pick apart blog posts because like you said, it isn't a dissertation and you can't address every edge case.

Thank you for your response!

This company is starting to sound like a broken record. They only have 4 or 5 main mantras that they constantly reiterate in 50 different ways. We get it. You're edgy. Keep working on your company instead of trying to convince the world how cool you are.

On the other hand, maybe I'm being too critical. They are probably just trying to do some cross-platform promotion of what's in their book. No shame in that.

Keep working on your company instead of trying to convince the world how cool you are.

That's part of how they work on their company. I've often used quotes from 37signals' blog posts and books when trying to get a concept across to a coworker, and that keeps them at the forefront of everyone's mind.

Yes, exactly. I heard DHH speak and asked him about the importance of the 37s blog and their books and he said "If you can't out-market, out-teach."

It's possible 37Signals is deliberately repeating its message to those who have just "discovered" their popular blog.

Writing original blog content is hard. I don't know how http://waxy.org did it. A lot of popular blogs (Jon Gruber et al.) have turned into aggregators of a sort (people send them items of interest). Dooce.com is an exception - that's her crazy life.

It's not their fault people autopost every blog post to Hacker News and upvote it.

Sharing over ideas is how we work on our company. That's how we've always worked on our company.

If you're not going to out-spend the competition on advertising, you damn well better have another strategy for getting people interested. For the past decade we've been sharing our ideas and opinions on Signal vs Noise and that has turned out quite alright.

Also, I'm curious to hear what our 4 or 5 mantras are? Maybe you're a better pattern-matcher than me, but if, for example, we could reduce the ~90 essays in REWORK to just 4-5 master ideas, that'd be quite the amazing compression. I thought we already kept it pretty tight at ~30K characters, but sounds like you have a better algorithm.

Funny how the geek party line changed from "37s is awesome" to "37s sounds like a broken record". You're no less cliché than that which you lament.

On-topic though, this post has absolutely free of content. I was actually expecting something that could inspire me to judge my ideas more realistically, and it certainly didn't do that.

Some ideas aren't feasible at one time or another. I would say never abandon your best idea, and always work towards it - but if you can't work on it presently - no need to just sit around and wait.

I agree. Focusing on trying to figure out what your “best idea” is because you want to optimize your time and only work on that is not always the best approach. Sometimes this can lead to procrastination and self doubt because you are not sure what your best idea is and you don’t want to waste your time working on anything else (which then causes you to waste time).

There is value in starting on any idea that you have and working hard on it because often you get inspired while working and a better idea will present itself. Then you can choose to integrate that idea into what you are working on or drop what you are doing switch to the better idea.

I love basecamp and use it daily. It is a beautiful software. However, I find it hard to believe that Jason F and DHH don't think they can come up with an idea that is more brilliant than a PM system.

FYI A lot of things that end up SvN are topics that they have talked about in their normal lives. I got to hang out with Jason Fried at Startup School and several of the things he talked about ended up on the blog in the following weeks, and several of the things posted recently came from dhh's appearance on This Week in Startups (can't plug this interview enough - it's really sharp: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2219-jason-calacanis-vs-david... )

the problem with this attitude is you build a list of ideas and then don't end up working on any because none of them feel like they're the best you can come up with. Or you switch from idea to idea without really finishing any of them to the standard required to make them successful because each idea seems better than the last, and there is a never ending stream of "good ideas".

Just pick something and work on it until it's successful or dead. Forget about "best".

The thinking is work on the best idea that you have right now. Not the best one you haven't even come up with yet. That's not going to be very helpful.

That's a good point. Even if you think you're only making license plates, someone will catch on to how good you are if you do it really well. And who knows, maybe your license plates are just what the world desperately wants right now.

right. The idea is to work, rather than not work because you are stuck in analysis paralysis.

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