37signals Job Board is closing down

Honestly, did this comment add anything constructive to the conversation or were you more interested in spitting bile?

Our current thesis is that job boards are painful to wade through, especially for experienced devs looking to freelance.

Our current model involves connecting devs to good clients (i.e. people who've done this sort of thing before), who we screen ourselves (and because we've done freelance development ourselves, we know what to look for).

Check out http://getlambda.com if you're interested.

I haven't tried WeWorkRemotely, but I can attest that StackOverflow ads were abysmal for us. Our final candidate ended up coming to us organically for the position I just hired for, but we also had some good candidates find us from Indeed.com

May have just been the nature of the position though (Salesforce work)

Monthly Recurring Revenue? Only if the jobs never get filled (and the advertisers list them indefinately), in which case WWR isn't doing it's job.

Easy to program, but how do you get it off the ground? It has the same chicken and egg problem every two-sided marketplace does. 37Signals can do this because they've built an audience.

Job boards start easily, but you'd be surprised at how much they can spiral into some of the most convoluted code you've ever seen. They're almost the exact definition of a scope creeping CRUD app. This is compounded by the fast that an MVP job board is so low hanging that corners are often cut into oblivion, causing inescapable technical debt :)

I expect "We work remotely" was rooted partially in an attempt to burn down the old job board codebase and start over with more defined and scalable scope.

>> Value created !== programming complexity

I don't see why that's so funny. Isn't that the hallmark of all successful software businesses?

Your looking for:

   valueCreated > programmingComplexity

They are also funny because they don't work...

The number of positions filled through job boards has dropped by more than half in the last decade.

Last year, only 1.3 percent of hires came from Monster.com and 1.2 percent from CareerBuilder... yet Monster.com alone sucked up nearly $1 Billion in revenue from ad postings that are largely ineffective.

For more, see: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/businessdesk/2013/08/ask-the-hea...

Yes, I admire their resolve in staying truly lean as a company with focus on making a great product rather than making a great profit. After more than 10 years, it's still a compact team of 36 people. I wonder what happens when they hit 37 - maybe it's the limit :)

Is Campfire shutting down, too? I think that was the last 37s service I stopped using, about 6 months ago.

Some clarification on a few of these...

Writeboard, Tada, and Backpack were not shut down, they were sunsetted. That's a fundamentally different thing. What it means is that anyone who used Tada, Writeboard, or Backpack can continue to use these products just as they always have. No one was kicked off, no one has to stop using them. We just aren't selling them anymore to new customers.

Answers... we've tried a variety of customer forums over the years, but we just didn't find them effective. We're no longer trying these.

The Product Blog was basically consolidated into Signal vs. Noise, our blog. We'll be making more changes to how, what, and where we publish next year. I imagine we'll continue to tweak the mix over time.

Breeze we did close down completely. We refunded every customer who paid (which was about 1000 customers) and sent them their subscriber lists.

The podcast wasn't "shut down", we just haven't had time to do another one. I'd like to do more of these when we have some spare time. Some of what was in the podcast has been absorbed by other channels (Twitter, more interviews on other people's podcasts and sites, etc).

Sortfolio was sold and is alive and well at http://sortfolio.com. No one was left hanging here. From what we hear, revenue is up since the sale.

Basecamp Classic was absolutely not shut down. It remains a huge product for us - a significant number of our Basecamp customers happily remain on Classic and we'll support those customers forever. However, we don't sell it anymore - the flavor of Basecamp we sell today is the all new generation of Basecamp at basecamp.com.

Hope that helps clear a few things up.

I feel for jasonfried. If you build a business and stick to it, being careful not to open a new business that might disappoint your customers if you close it, you become fodder for "disruption."

But if you have the courage to try new things in a lean way, you become fodder for criticism that you don't keep your services running.

In the end, that's the price of trying new things. You have to have the iron pants to shrug and keep going even when people are telling you to do what everyone else is doing.

Their business, their experiment. Besides "...we're all in a perpetual state of figuring shit out."

You could make such a list for Volkswagen, Boeing, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, or any successful company. Business evolves, and product lines are a part of that.

This list is a sign of a viable business if anything else. Any company needs to stay forever young by keeping its offerings in line with the demand. Companies that fail are the ones that choose to ignore the reality.

I was wondering if it was just deja-vu on my part.

wouldn't you? very little overhead, nice cash flow that is effectively gravy on top of their regular operations.