Scratching Their Own Itch

VITALITY

MY APRICOT HILL

Scratching
Their Own Itch

June 01, 2012

Go to the Zoo

Sustainable Style: Pearls

Innumerable successful ideas are often directly tied to a specific void or need. Necessity and functionality are the primary reasons and driving forces behind many of the latest and greatest products and gadgets.

Mary Kay Wagner, the founder of Mary Kay Cosmetics, knew her products were great because she used them herself. She didn’t require elaborate surveys or a sampling of key target markets. She needed only to look at her skin to see the results – and the success. In solving her specific problems, she has created an empire and a legacy. Had her focus been on solving someone else’s problems, she could still be searching for the answer.

In 1999, Jason Fried, Carols Segura and Ernest Kim founded 37signals as a Web design firm in Chicago. Two years later they launched the Signal vs. Noise blog as a medium to talk about design, business, experience, simplicity, the web and culture.

Taking their own advice at 37signals, they scratch their own itch. They build products to run their business. Focusing on their own needs first, they’ve produced an exceptional suite of web-based solutions. Introduced in 2004, Basecamp is used by millions of people in more than 180 countries to manage and collaborate on a combined eight million projects. Its straightforward approach provides users with a short but effective learning curve so that their time is spent getting the job done rather than sitting through new software training sessions. Understanding that sharing, storage and organization are vital to every business, 37signals introduced Backpack in 2005. Backpack’s delivers management tools for business documents in a variety of formats, providing a secure and easy-to-share solution for a wide-range of small to large businesses.

The piece de resistance is Campfire. In 2006, Campfire spun into the virtual marketplace as a tool for team collaboration with real time chat. Working and communicating across the office or across the planet is now a breeze. Logically, we all need a way to keep track of everyone we talk to, what we say, and when and how we are going to follow up. In 2007, Highrise was at-the-ready to meet all of our needs and more. Highrise is a stellar example of contact-management software.

37signals has revitalized, perhaps reinvented, the office. Now any space with reliable Internet access can be completely web-based with the integration of their suite of communication-management tools. In the office, in the islands, in a remote park (don’t forget your hotspot), 37signals is our go-to communications partner.

www.37signals.com