37signals is a massive inspiration and I feel privileged (am I the only one that has to look up how to spell that word every single time?!) that I: a) work in an industry where so many fantastically successful individuals take time out to share this kind of wisdom and b) there is an online community where you can go and see the author themselves taking part in the discussions.

Here are the most important parts of this article that stuck with me:

"Understanding what people really want to know - and how that differs from what you want to tell them - is a fundamental tenet of sales. And you can't get good at making money unless you get good at selling."

I know I harp on about this constantly but there's this fantastic interview on Mixergy with Tom Rossi (http://mixergy.com/tom-rossi-molehill-interview/) where he talks about the early days of promoting his CMS and there's this part where he says that one of the first things he did was "pick up the phone" and just start calling people to sell it. Andrew Warner is kind of surprised - picking up the phone and actually selling something is so rarely discussed as a "user acquisition strategy". If you can cold call, if you can sell, then you can get money today.

"I thought about the problem and decided to try something new. Instead of doing long, expensive projects, we'd do short, affordable ones. Instead of billing $50,000 for a 15-page website redesign that would take three months, we'd charge $3,500 per page and offer to complete the page in a week. If you want another page, it's another $3,500 and another week. We called it 37express."

Of course, this is one of the biggest lessons from "agile" and 37signals in particular. One way we've implemented this in our own projects is to give an idea of "likely budget" for a big project, then bill in very small increments with the smallest of the small at the beginning of the project.

Say there's a job, and you look at the basics of what should be achieved, and you say "well, $25k will be a good amount for getting something like that done", then the first bill should be for some prototypical product or even just product research and documentation delivered in about a week for something like 10% of the total budget.

Next invoice might be a slightly longer iteration for maybe double that, then by the third iteration everyone trusts each other, you have a good idea of the problem domain and you can really just do a 50% upfront 50% completion for the remainder of the budget.

The other really important part is that each of these early iterations should deliver discrete value - ie. that you could deliver it, the client would have gained some value, but could easily discontinue the project or use someone else to continue if they dislike working with you for some reason.

So you can still do these big jobs, but just treat them as several little tiny jobs, especially in the early stages. This also removes the need for that "contract overhead" - when you remove all the risk, you find that you can more often than not work on basic trust and human decency.

"But that's it. Everything else has been bootstrapped - even though dozens of venture capitalists and private equity firms have offered us lots of money. Instead, my customers have always been my investors. My goal has always been to be profitable on Day One."

We're in the opposite boat ;) although we'd love to get funded for Decal, it turns out "yet another CMS" just isn't hot enough ... maybe we should make it social? In the absence of buckets of VC or angel funding it's been great to have role models in the industry telling us repeatedly that bootstrapping is not only doable, but preferable!

"On the other hand, from Day One, a funded business is all about spending money. There's a pile in the bank, and it's not there to collect interest. Your investors want you to hire, invest, and buy. There's less - and in some cases, no - pressure to make money. While that sounds comforting, I think it ultimately hurts. It replaces the hustle, the scrap, the fight, with a false comfort of "we can worry about that later."*

I've been in both situations - I've been in a company with heaps of funding and (right now) with barely adequate funding and I have to whole heartedly say I 100% agree with this.

Man did we waste money when we had it (office, sales staff etc.). And not only that, but we wasted effort building heaps of features that never made a dime and didn't make the product more saleable. If your product development process isn't commercially driven, I reckon you're heaps more likely to end up with a product you'll never be able to sell.

Thanks for an amazing read Jason, and not just here, but all the other talks, articles, books (Getting Real is great, still haven't made it to Rework yet ;), 37signals/svn, the products (I'm an avid Highrise user), the lot. You're an inspiration and a super hero. Keep bangin'.