It Started with a Blog

Welcome to Rework, a podcast by thirty seven Signals about the better way to work and run your business. I'm Kimberly Rhodes, joined as always by the cofounders of thirty seven Signals, Jason Priede and David Heinemeier Hanssen. This week, I thought we would address a question that we get quite often, people writing in, sending in videos, asking how they can promote their product. They know that the thirty seven signals story started with a blog, but they're curious what they should be doing. So let's first before we kind of dive into some of this advice, Jason, take us back to the early beginnings of the signal versus noise blog. I assume that was just something you created because you wanted to communicate, not necessarily as, like, a marketing tool. Yeah. It was actually funny. We were sitting in our second office in Chicago. Few of us is me, Ernest, and, I think Matt or something like that. And we've been, like, sharing links to things back and forth and, like, thoughts. Like, I think we're using AOL instead of Messenger or what what or the hell was going on back then? Skype or something? I don't know what it was. And we're just like, we should just, like, put this down somewhere because it'd be easier to, like, publish it or something like that. And we're like, you know, we're sharing these things. There's probably other people who are interested in seeing these things or talking about the same things that we're talking about. We're just three guys We're doing this thing and like this stuff. And so we just kinda put together a very basic blog, which is a really early days, which is just, you know, a way to publish stuff. We used Gray Matter, I think, was the first tool we used by this guy named Noah Gray, I think was his name, who made this great blogging thing. Put that together and just, like, put it out there. Like, the idea was, like, maybe other people might wanna hear this music we're playing, you know, basically, somewhere in the world maybe. And it wasn't like, we're gonna do this so we can do this, and this is gonna be this, and this is gonna be this, and it's gonna lead to this, and we can do that. We're just sharing stuff, you know, that we're sharing already. So we're kinda documenting what we're already doing. And it just sort of grew from there. We just started sharing as often as we could. As often as we had an idea internally, we just put it externally. And And that's how it grew. And that's how all the early blogs kinda grew. The links and ideas and thoughts and whatever. Again, no anticipation of what this could turn into or what it's for. It was for nothing other than just sharing stuff we thought was interesting. And eventually, you build up a small audience, you …