The following is the first installment of my notes from Jason Fried’s (37 Signals) presentation at the AIGA/NY’s SMART/MODELS: Business Principles for Design Principles.

Jason’s presentation differed from the others in that he only had only slide. It was in keeping with his overall theme of keeping things simple. He spoke about this being the overall goal of 37 Signals’ products, to simplify interactions to their most basic essence.

He began by providing a history of 37 Signals. The company began as a web design firm. They had an initial client which made them pretty much profitable from day one. Managing the clients relationships and pricing was a challenge. In an effort to manage this pricing challenge, they came up with a 37 Express plan which simplified the client communications by standardizing deliverables and cost. Under the plan, customers paid $3500 for 1 page, delivered in 1 week; the customer did not provide feedback into the design. If a redesign was required, they could pay another $3500. From the beginning, the company had a real focus on only taking on quality clients and streamlining communications.

Out of the need to streamline communications, David Hansson was contracted to build a system, designed by the 37 Signals, to help manage communications with clients. Clients were so impressed with the solution that the company saw the opportunity to market the application with the understanding that “(their) problems (were) not unique.” Jason added, “we’re a small business just like other small businesses.”

Ruby on Rails was developed during this effort. As their first step in “the ethos of sharing,” Rails was made into an open-source project. The original goal for Basecamp, the product built on top of the Rails framework, was to gain revenues of 60k a year in order to pay for one more employee. This goal was met within 6 weeks of launching the product.

Still to come … The Company, Building Products and “Marketing”