BiF-4 Insights – Jason Fried – 37Signals

Jason Fried of 37Signals.com told a story about his decision to learn how to cook. What he found is that he ended up buying his cooking gear from people who were teaching him things. The cookbooks and the cooking gear were from famous chefs.

“Why don’t companies have cooking shows?”

“Can you out-teach or out-share the competition?”

The 37signals hiring philosophy is not to hire people who don’t use Macs or who make spelling mistakes on their resumes.

37signals tries to create an audience by teaching and sharing rather than spending money trying to reach people in the traditional manner.

“People are coming to us”

You can even create and stream video at places like justin.tv.

“We’ve put up about 100 essays on how we do things” – for free, but at the same time:

• PDF -> $500k in income (packaged up free content)
• Book -> We sell a few thousand a month (same free content)
• Workshops -> about $1 million of income (same content – repackaged)

The importance of “saying no more than you say yes” in keeping products simple

For more information on the talk, go here.