141: Jason Fried - Running the Tailwind Business on Basecamp

06/10/20 • 66 min

Full Stack Radio

Topics include:

How did Basecamp evolve from being a team/client communication tool to focusing on keeping your whole company organized, and is it really even that different?
How exactly should we set up Basecamp on day one to support a small 3-5 person remote software team? What tools should we use and which ones should we ignore for now?
Finding the balance between being organized enough and splitting things up too much
How big should projects be? Is "HEY v1" a project, or is a project something more like "HEY File Attachments"?
What tools do you normally enable for regular projects, and how do you use them?
How are you normally using chat at the individual project level?
Why todo lists should be created by the individuals doing the work, and not the people assigning the work
How should we use the company HQ project? What are some less obvious ideas we can apply there that can make a big difference?
Using a "what we're working on" project to keep everyone on the team in the loop and feeling connected
Using "heartbeats" to summarize the work a team has been doing over a period of time for the rest of the company
Advice on bringing on new employees and how to assign them their first project
When you're such a writing-driven company, how do you make sure decisions get written down when they are made in real-time instead of naturally occurring within Basecamp?

Screenshots:

Links:

Basecamp
Shape Up, Basecamp's recent book on how they work
Going Remote: Basecamp Walkthrough, a livestream where Jason and DHH go over their real Basecamp account

Supporting the show:

I decided to stop taking sponsors for the show because I think advertisements are annoying and no one wants to listen to them.

If you do want to support the show, the best way to do it is to purchase one of my products:

Tailwind UI, a collection of professionally designed, fully responsive HTML components built with Tailwind CSS
Refactoring UI, a book and video series I put together with Steve Schoger on designing beautiful user interfaces, without relying on a designer.
Advanced Vue Component Design, a course on designing simpler, more flexible Vue components that are both more powerful and easier to maintain.
Test-Driven Laravel, a massive video course on designing robust Laravel applications with TDD. Learn how to build a real-world application from scratch without writing a single line of untested code.
Refactoring to Collections, a book and video course that teaches you how to apply functional programming principles to break down ugly, complex code into simple transformations — free of loops, complex conditionals, and temporary variables.

Topics include:

How did Basecamp evolve from being a team/client communication tool to focusing on keeping your whole company organized, and is it really even that different?
How exactly should we set up Basecamp on day one to support a small 3-5 person remote software team? What tools should we use and which ones should we ignore for now?
Finding the balance between being organized enough and splitting things up too much
How big should projects be? Is "HEY v1" a project, or is a project something more like "HEY File Attachments"?
What tools do you normally enable for regular projects, and how do you use them?
How are you normally using chat at the individual project level?
Why todo lists should be created by the individuals doing the work, and not the people assigning the work
How should we use the company HQ project? What are some less obvious ideas we can apply there that can make a big difference?
Using a "what we're working on" project to keep everyone on the team in the loop and feeling connected
Using "heartbeats" to summarize the work a team has been doing over a period of time for the rest of the company
Advice on bringing on new employees and how to assign them their first project
When you're such a writing-driven company, how do you make sure decisions get written down when they are made in real-time instead of naturally occurring within Basecamp?

Screenshots:

Links:

Basecamp
Shape Up, Basecamp's recent book on how they work
Going Remote: Basecamp Walkthrough, a livestream where Jason and DHH go over their real Basecamp account

Supporting the show:

I decided to stop taking sponsors for the show because I think advertisements are annoying and no one wants to listen to them.

If you do want to support the show, the best way to do it is to purchase one of my products:

Tailwind UI, a collection of professionally designed, fully responsive HTML components built with Tailwind CSS
Refactoring UI, a book and video series I put together with Steve Schoger on designing beautiful user interfaces, without relying on a designer.
Advanced Vue Component Design, a course on designing simpler, more flexible Vue components that are both more powerful and easier to maintain.
Test-Driven Laravel, a massive video course on designing robust Laravel applications with TDD. Learn how to build a real-world application from scratch without writing a single line of untested code.
Refactoring to Collections, a book and video course that teaches you how to apply functional programming principles to break down ugly, complex code into simple transformations — free of loops, complex conditionals, and temporary variables.

Previous Episode

140: Evan You - Reimagining the Modern Dev Server with Vite

Topics include:

What is Vite and what makes it different than existing tools like Webpack?
How do ES Modules actually work in the browser and what are the limitations?
Will we ever be able to use ES Modules in production for large complex projects?
How does Vite work under the hood, and how does it support non-JS files like Vue files, or CSS files?
How hot module replacement is implemented under the hood in Vite
Optimizing modules with many dependencies to keep the development experience fast
What is VitePress and how does it compare to VuePress?
Bundling sites for production with Vite
What's the roadmap for Vite 1.0?

Links:

Supporting the show:

I decided to stop taking sponsors for the show because I think advertisements are annoying and no one wants to listen to them.

If you do want to support the show, the best way to do it is to purchase one of my products:

Tailwind UI, a collection of professionally designed, fully responsive HTML components built with Tailwind CSS
Refactoring UI, a book and video series I put together with Steve Schoger on designing beautiful user interfaces, without relying on a designer.
Advanced Vue Component Design, a course on designing simpler, more flexible Vue components that are both more powerful and easier to maintain.
Test-Driven Laravel, a massive video course on designing robust Laravel applications with TDD. Learn how to build a real-world application from scratch without writing a single line of untested code.
Refactoring to Collections, a book and video course that teaches you how to apply functional programming principles to break down ugly, complex code into simple transformations — free of loops, complex conditionals, and temporary variables.

Next Episode

142: Jason Cohen - Learning to Hire and Manage a Team

Topics include:

How do you decide what role to hire for?
Why it's so important to figure out exactly what your biggest struggle is before hiring
How to decide what the most important thing to focus on is when it feels like there's too much to do
Why it's important to consider the impact of hiring for a specific role on your own happiness vs. just the company's bottom line
Coming to terms with the fact that you can't do everything, and why it's important to focus on something instead of spreading yourself thin across everything
Mistakes people make when they start managing a team for the first time

Links:

Jason's blog, one of the greatest treasure troves of startup advice on the internet
Designing the Ideal Bootstrapped Business, one of Jason's MicroConf talks

Supporting the show:

I decided to stop taking sponsors for the show because I think advertisements are annoying and no one wants to listen to them.

If you do want to support the show, the best way to do it is to purchase one of my products:

Tailwind UI, a collection of professionally designed, fully responsive HTML components built with Tailwind CSS.
Refactoring UI, a book and video series I put together with Steve Schoger on designing beautiful user interfaces, without relying on a designer.
Advanced Vue Component Design, a course on designing simpler, more flexible Vue components that are both more powerful and easier to maintain.
Test-Driven Laravel, a massive video course on designing robust Laravel applications with TDD. Learn how to build a real-world application from scratch without writing a single line of untested code.
Refactoring to Collections, a book and video course that teaches you how to apply functional programming principles to break down ugly, complex code into simple transformations — free of loops, complex conditionals, and temporary variables.