Fizzy Q's and A's – REWORK

The featured chart comparison is the worst possible way to pick a piece of software. This is how you end up with the enterprisy [ __ ] that no one wants to use. Like, oh, I I checked all these boxes. Like, yeah, but like, did you like it? But I think it's a little bit more fun to use a product that's a little bit more colorful and has a little bit of texture and the transitions are kind of delightful, but not so ridiculous and not in your face. And speed is fun. And feeling like you're able to to enjoy things when you look at them is fun. It's fun. Fun should be part of it. Now, of course, it's not as fun as a lot of other things, but it's a little bit of fun is a good it goes a long way. I think especially in software, surrounding yourself with beautiful things that give you joy and pleasure in life is right up there. Like, all right, bread, water, aesthetics. >> Welcome to Rework, a podcast by 37 Signals about the better way to work and run your business. I'm Kimberly Rhodess from the 37 signals team joined by our co-founders Jason Frerieded and David Hineimire Hansen. We've been talking a lot about a future product we have coming out called Fizzy and we've gotten a couple of questions either from our YouTube videos. Jason's been doing some posting on X. Thought I'd pull some of those out and let you guys answer those directly. So the first one is from YouTube. Someone wrote something that just passed through my mind. Isn't Fizzy a potential base camp competitor? What are you guys' thoughts about that? >> Um, sure, maybe, maybe not. I I I don't really care because they're both ours in a sense. Um, but but really they're they're they're quite different in scope and scale. I mean, Base Camp is something you can run your entire business on. It has all the different tools you might need. Fizzy is not that kind of thing. You can run a lot of stuff with it. Um, but hey, choose whichever one you want and we're happy to have you as a customer is the way I look at it. Something and someone and somewhere is always competing with you and it might as well be yourself if if that's kind of one of the outcomes. So yeah, I that's how I kind of see that sort of thing. >> And I guess we could say base camp project management software. Fizzy, you're not considering project management software. It's more of >> I mean you could every you know there's different scales of projects and like people for example manage entire projects on Trello which is a conbon board or with to-do lists or with paper and pencil or or or or no software whatsoever you know in their heads. So you can do all sorts of things with all sorts of tools. >> Um and this is just another take on on a way to organize information to track issues to track ideas to track bugs to track a project in fact and I think people will use it for that. And again, if they're if they want to use that, that's a better fit for them. I'm glad that we can provide that option. Um, so that's that's my take on it. >> I think the greatest illustration of this is that we've been competing against email with Basecam for literally 20 plus years. People still using email. They're also still using Basecam. And the two things coexist even within a single organization. So almost anything can do almost everything. If you look at these information tools, you can do everything in notes. As Jason says, you can do everything on pen and paper. You can do everything noodling in your little head. But what has the right grip for the particular project and for the particular group of people? That's quite different. Like when you find something that really feels like, yes, this is it. This is what I've been looking for. that shape fits perfectly with this problem, you'll know. And the only way to really know is to pick it up, to try it out. Like, does does this feel right? It's funny, I mentioned the knives because we've been actually shopping for some new knives. And I mean, just like cutlery and I am always amazed by how quickly I can look at a piece of cutlery and go like, eh, no, I don't like that. Eh, no, I don't like that. Like, I just I didn't know. I had all these opinions about cutlery and their design, but I clearly do because in about 2.7 seconds I can look at a picture and go like, uh, no, no, no, no, absolutely not. Or like, oo, I don't know, maybe. And I think the same thing is even more true when it comes to software, right? You look at something and you think like, oh, I have this thing we want to work on. This would be perfect for it. Or you don't know. You're simply just like, well, I'm going to spelunk about. I'm going to have a look. I'm going to kick the tires. I'm going to see if this is something that I actually like to do. This is something I think uh Jason and I used to do both more when I was living in Chicago. I love going to the dealership lots. Literally to kick the tires. Now, I don't know if I actually kicked the tires, but to take a test drive in a car that I thought like, you know what, maybe there's a 7% chance I'm actually going to buy this. I was always trying to rationalize in my head that I weren't I was not going to waste someone's time. Like if there was literally no chance I was ever going to buy that car, I wouldn't go. I wouldn't ask for a test drive. But if there was like a 7% chance that I might like it, I'd go test drive it. And you know what? Lo and behold, you realize all sorts of things. I would build up this idea in my head. They're like, "Oh, this car, this is exactly what I want. I'm almost I have the checkbook in my [ __ ] pocket." And I show up, I just want to do the confirmation drive. I give it a drive and like absolutely not. How did I get into my little head that this was going to be a good fit for me? I hate it. I HATE EVERYTHING ABOUT IT. AND THEN I'LL TRY SOMETHING else and it's like, oh, I had no idea. I had no idea that I like just the way this feels. I like the buttons. I like the clicks. I like the the rattle. I like the Mercedes. Right. Like the whole game there where you realize that just those tactile elements, that's actually what sells you on it. And software has so many of those. So many of the microtransactions that you can't even capture in a screenshot like the flows. What does it feel like to put in [snorts] seven issues to track that, assign it to a few people, move it around, keep up to date with it. Do you know what? You're not going to know until you take it for a test drive. Now, the great thing about almost all internet software is you can literally just take all of it for a test drive. This is why whenever folks ask me is like, "So, what should I pick? Should I pick Base Camp or like ClickUp or whatever?" One of the competitors, I'm like, "You tell me go for test drive." They're both free. You can literally figure it out in 10 minutes. 10 minutes is actually enough to get a 60% indication on whether this is something you're going to enjoy or not. Because as I am with my cutlery, as I was with the test drives, humans are really good at honing in on like what do they like, what do they don't like, and you will realize quite quickly. You sign up for one of these competitors and you give it a go and like maybe it's just right. Wonderful. I'm so happy for you. Or maybe you realize, ah, this is a little clunky. Like this is hard to figure out. I had to look up the manual three times. And then you try Base Camp and it just goes like click. That's exactly how I think about problems. actually projects and problems and now it all flows in. So fizzy is essentially another way of giving you another drive or another car on the lot, a new one, a new model. It doesn't do all of it. It's not an SUV, right? It can't fit everything. It can't go to [ __ ] Lake Tahoe in the middle of winter. Got smaller tires. >> So you got to stuff things in a little more neatly, maybe. But also, maybe that's just the feel you like. Maybe that's all you need. Maybe you just drive to the [ __ ] grocery stores a few times and one time around a little hill and like that's your transportation needs. Great. Fizzy, man. You know, [laughter] that's that's a slogan. Fizzy, man. Um, so I I did I think the knives metaphor is actually quite interesting because think you can think of base camp almost as a as a set of knives. Like you can buy a set of knives together and then you can buy specialty knives and a good chef would tell you all you need is one chef's knife. You know, like there's all sorts of different ways to to use these things. And like I'm thinking about like we have a set of knives. I actually have a couple really really nice individual knives. Then we've got some separate pairing knives from a different brand just cuz we wanted to try them. And I happen to like the handle, not the bl the blades are [ __ ] fine on all of them. It's the handle I like on one of them and that's the one I reach for. And and you just don't necessarily know what it's going to be uh until you try these things. Which is why, you know, like David said, you should advocate people People should try all sorts of things. Now, one thing you don't want to get into, I don't think, is like this habitual dissatisfaction with everything and feel like you need to keep jumping around forever until you find something. You should find something that works, use that, and then have curiosity about other things, but but the the the feel of something, it it really does click in. You're like, "This just feels like the handle of a knife. I can't really describe I could describe it, but when I feel it, I'm not describing it. I'm feeling it. I just know why I like this somehow, right? Um, it's a preference and it's very hard to describe your preferences ultimately. It's just something about maybe it's the weight or the feel or the material or the texture or the thickness or the thinness or whatever, however it hits your particular fingers. That's what products are like too. And I think when people try Fizzy, they might go, "Oh, like I've used conbonsesque things before, but I just like this feels right to me. This feels like a good handle on a good knife. I want to use this instead." So they reach for that and you can reach for both. We use base camp. Basec camp has card tables which is like a conbon tool which fizzy in some ways is based on conceptually but visually is very very different. And we use both. Some of our teams use use card tables in base camp. Some of our teams use fizzy. We're having more people use fizzy for certain kinds of things. You can use both. It's okay too. You don't have to wonder like which one do I have to use? Use the one that feels right for the job. And you have different companies have different jobs. So I think it's kind of a nice nice thing to offer two possibilities >> and this is why the feature comparison chart is such a bane on this industry that it reduces all products down to checkboxes. Does it have these things? Now put aside for a moment that they're all [ __ ] right? Like all of them are like let's just come up with some feature and we'll frame it in such a way that there's an X next to the competitor and next to us there's a nice little check box. But you know what? Even if we're comparing our own products, if you are just going to compare Fizzy to Basecam, Basecam is going to destroy Fizzy under checkbox comparison chart because Basecam JUST DOES A WHOLE LOT MORE. It can run your entire company. Bizzy is less. And what a moronic way of comparing those two products and figuring out which one you're going to go with, right? The feature chart comparison is the worst possible [snorts] way to pick a piece of software. This is how you end up with the enterprisy [ __ ] that no one wants to use, right? Like, oh, I I checked all these boxes. Like, yeah, but like, did you like it? Did you want to use it? Could you figure out how it was? Then you onboard someone new. Could they figure it out? Or you just pulling your hair out? It's actually remarkable to me just how much software in our industry alone people truly hate with an absolute passion of a thousand sons. Now I haven't actually ever used Jira so I feel >> okay just reciting the amount of hate that Jira gets online it's unbelievable. Maybe it's one of those classic things where the people who talk [ __ ] about Jira outnumber the people who say nice things about it simply because that's what the internet does, right? Like it attracts all the [ __ ] that someone wants to say about something and it's not the full picture. But holy [ __ ] man. The amount of dislike that exists in this world for some of these products should give you some indication that the feature chart is not the beall end all. If you look at the feature chart of a Slack or of a Jira, you're going to find about two billion check boxes, right? It does this this this this and about a trillion other things. And none of it matters because for a ton of people, the grip is not just wrong. It's backwards. It's like, holy [ __ ] THIS IS A KNIFE. AND THEN I'VE STAB myself in the goddamn chest. Yeah. Okay. No. Don't like that knife. Don't like the one that tries to murder me. don't like the one that wants me to jump out of a window jurro style when I've been frustrated for the time. Now, some of this is of course also people just projecting their miserable lives onto inanimate pieces of software and that's also a thing that happens. But you know what? It also flows the other way and that could be quite positive. Sometimes an inanimate piece of software can give you all sorts of nice fuzzy vibes. You like the people who make it. You like how it looks. the frivolous color choices. You like some of the little flows. You like some Easter eggy stuff and like it gives you a little smile in your otherwise dreary day. And isn't that a service? >> So, let's talk a little bit about that. Since David, you brought in aesthetics. Jason, I've seen you posting things on X about Fizzy and the visual aspect of it and how that is what makes it different. Talk talk to me about that. like what have you guys put into this product that people are going to see soon um that has made it different from other conbon tools? >> I think it is interesting because in our industry most software actually looks the same. >> Really almost everything looks the same. Um in most industries though like things stand out because of the way they look. uh clothing, cars, art, you know, uh you know, obviously there's a lot of things that have kind of come a little bit closer together, like in the car world, BMW and Audi kind of look similar now, and there's things like that. And of course, each brand kind of goes back and forth, and there's sort of some consolidation around things that are forced because of safety regulations and whatever, but generally each brand has its own distinct look and feel and vibe and taste and flavor. In the software world, it's not typically that way. It's like everyone finds one thing that like for a long time it was like everything looked like slack. Like you've got a thin sidebar on the left. Actually, a lot of things still do look this way. You have a thin sidebar on the left, a darker sidebar, the rest is white. And you know, it's like that's how it looks. Or things are always in perpetual dark mode and it's just like text and boxes and dark mode, right? And in some cases that's cool, but it's rare to actually find software in the business world specifically that has its own distinct flavor. And we try to bring that to our products. Basec camp, nothing else looks like Basec Camp. A lot of things look like Monday. A lot of things look like ClickUp. A lot of things look like aauna. Nothing else looks like Base Camp unless someone's like distinctly copying Base Camp. And nothing else looks like Fizzy. Nothing else looks like hey. There's no other hey or email tool that looks like Hey. There's a lot of email tools that look like Gmail. [snorts] And it just is like people tend to follow the leader in that respect and they forget that they're not making a name for themselves. And so we've always tried to do stuff that doesn't look the same as everyone else. Not only for the sake of being different, but sometimes simply for the sake of being different. There's value in that, too. It's okay to be different for the sake of being different. Um, we happen to think, though, that there's actually just a feel. These things have a feel and a mood to them. And I think it's kind of um it's it's it's I feel like it's incumbent upon us since a lot of other companies don't seem to do this is to think about the mood of the product that you're making. How does it make people feel when they use it? Do they feel like they want to smile? Does it make them feel kind of good about themselves or is it like this dow sad depressing everything looks the same situation? Uh and so with Fizzy, we're trying to bring some color in partially inspired by uh what Dave has been doing on on the Linux side of things uh themes and colorful things and colorful backgrounds. Um it's nice to see some color again. It's nice to see some saturation again in the colors as well. like pastel colors have been something that some people have been using in software for a while. We're going like full full-on saturated colors um and some gradients and bringing some texture back and having some texture behind things. I just think it's nice to see texture and color and shape and and vibrance and so we're bringing that to fizzy. And some people are going to go I don't like this is too much. I get it. Fine. That's cool. I think a lot of other people are going to go this actually feels pretty nice. I feel good when I use this. I want to actually turn to this. I like I like when I hold this knife. I like when I hold this product. And so that's sort of what we're what we're aiming to do here. >> I think what's so interesting with the car metaphor, as Jason puts it, is that very few people feel any need at all to excuse that the reason they bought a certain car was because they liked the way it looked. In some cases, it's literally just I like the color. I like that it was red. I wanted a red car, so I bought this car. And they don't mind that. Like that's a very prime objective for how they pick things. Somehow when it comes to software that's almost unprofessional like it just needs to be functional. This is what I met especially in the Linux world when um was first bursting on right. I put a lot of emphasis on the aesthetics on the saturated color on color coordinating everything so it looks really nice and people were like why are you wasting your time? as though somehow aesthetics were beneath us. As somehow somehow aesthetics weren't important. What do you This is extremely important. Surrounding yourself with beautiful things that give you joy and pleasure in life is right up there. Like all right, bread, water, aesthetics. [laughter] Like that's that's about the masslo's pyramid of needs here, right? You need beautiful things to sustain yourself and we feel perfectly fine doing it in all these other facets and aspects of life. When it comes to software, suddenly we have to be Mr. or Mrs. Rational all the time. Like can I get that in cornflour blue? That's about the degree to flourish that you can have, right? And I do actually think I want to blame Apple for some of this. And not because I don't like Apple. I think Apple does exceptionally well of what they do and their aesthetic. It's so uniquely Apple, but it's also, as Jason says, incredibly muted in a lot of cases. It's all about just a piece of aluminum that's just been just right. Okay, it's gray, dude. And it's been gray for 20 years. Could we get that iMac back that had all the funny flourishing colors? That'd be great. I'd love to see a goddamn MacBook that didn't just look like the same gray it has for 20 years. So, when a company like Apple has had such a dominant position in our industry and has influenced so many designers, I think that sort of just seeps into the water and they feel like they all have to be monochrome and monotome in the same way and all just gray. And he said, "No, no, they don't. Let Apple be Apple. Continue with the gray [ __ ] for another 40 years. Great. You do it really well. Everyone else find some [ __ ] color. Reintroduce it. The world is going gray already. We were talking about cars for a second. I remember this chart I saw about the color palette of cars. You go back to the 80s, 90s. Great variety. And then you see the whole thing just compress. And now the majority of cars are white, gray, or black. You're like, "No, GET A [ __ ] GREEN CAR. [laughter] GET A RED CAR. GET A BLUE CAR. GET ANY color that isn't white, gray, or black. And I also like white, gray, or black. So, I'm talking as much [snorts] to myself as anyone else. But I did just buy a red car recently, >> and it's sitting in the garage right here in Copenhagen next to two gray cars. And I was actually thinking like, do you know what? It has to be a color. It has to be a screaming color. I cannot be a contributor to this monochrome world. It's too depressing. >> Look at us. Black and white. You're wearing black and white. I'm wearing gray and gray. >> Damn it. is wearing [laughter] green. Anyway, um but but yeah, it's actually interesting lately. Lately, >> there's [laughter] a dash. >> I need to get some neon lights under my desk so they kind of cast a purple glow like you know those cool cars with the >> gamers have it right, man. RGB everything. In >> In fact, in fact, in many ways, I I've turned myself into like when there are two choices, I'm going to pick the more colorful choice is what I've decided to do most recently. And it's it's enhanced my life a little bit actually in the smallest little way but in a meaningful one. It's just fun. And like that's the other thing. Look, I mean there's different degrees of fun, but I think it's a little bit more fun to use a product that's a little bit more colorful and has a little bit of texture and the transitions are kind of delightful but not so ridiculous and not in your face, but just and speed is fun and feeling like you're able to to enjoy things when you look at them is fun. It's fun. fun should be part of it. Now, of course, it's not as fun as a lot of other things, but it's a little bit of fun is a good it goes a long way, I think, especially in software. >> Okay, I'm going to go to this one last comment for you guys to noodle on. Let me know what you think about this. I know we've talked a little bit about introducing some AI into Fizzy. Maybe not right at first, but eventually. Someone wrote, "For what it's worth, anytime a company adds AI to their product, I cringe. As a customer, AI no longer feels valuable as a feature to me. I use AI. I like it, but I want to choose when and how I use it. I want to get your thoughts on that. >> I generally agree and which is why like we actually had some AI baked baked into Fizzy early and we pulled it out and there's one more thing sitting around. I'm not sure we're going to we're going to ship it. It was an experiment. I think it's good to experiment and I also think AI can be very valuable in a variety of different applications and different kinds of things. Um I'm sure David can speak to some stuff at Shopify. He's he's talked to Toby about whatnot. Like AI can be incredibly valuable. I think when when it's actually just pulled for the for the um lowest hanging fruit and like well it can just summarize this so let's have it summarize that or it can help you write this so let's have it write that that's kind of sloppy actually and I don't think it's really very handy at all in fact it's probably worse so that's my general sense I I think I think that the there's a cringe factor but I don't I also don't think it's a smart thing to to cringe anytime you see something like that used anywhere everything you know some things can be it can be used well in some places it can be it can add a lot of utility in some cases. Um, but a healthy skepticism I think is is is healthy, but uh you also don't want to close yourself off because certainly there are places where where it is valuable. I I'm I don't think a lot of products have actually figured that out yet though to be honest is is sort of my take. >> I feel like this is such a polarizing issue like we have people ask anytime I do like a live office hour session like someone asks about AI in Base Camp in particular and people feel very strongly one way or another like don't touch my product. I like it how it is or everyone else is doing it. Why aren't you guys? >> Well, I think one thing I'll add, I know David's chomping the bit to get in here, but I think um the beauty of it is natural language. >> The fact that I can tell the computer what I want it to do for me is an incredible lever. And typically, historically, we've all had to use interfaces, which are translation layers essentially, and like I hope this thing has a button that lets me do the thing I want to do versus just being able to tell it what you want to do. So, I I think there's a ton of a ton of wonderful things that are going to come from just natural language interfaces. And the AI part there is primarily translation and like you tell it what you want it to do and it will figure out what it what what it can do. I like that a lot. Um, but the general low-hanging fruit summarization stuff I'm not finding very useful at all. >> I think the term healthy skepticism is one of those encapsulations that we throw around all the time. I'd like to see some healthy optimism. That's what I try to embrace because I totally have the same reaction to a lot of the AI sludge and slob that's just filling out like, "No, I don't want this. Where do I turn it off?" But I constantly try to pair that with some of that healthy optimism. Do you know what? I've seen AI do the most incredible things where I just had to lean back in my chair and go hot diggity damn what a time to be alive. [laughter] I didn't actually say hot diggity damn, but like that's what I was thinking in my head. [snorts] That AI truly is incredible. And when you see the glimmers of its majestic abilities, it's hard not to be taken back. Now, what we have right now though is mostly glimmers. mostly this shimmering of do you know what at some point it's going to do most of everything really well we're not there right now we have these glimmers I use it all day long just as a developer it's incredible just the amount of information it's able to distill for you APIs and the rest of it even when it keeps hallucinating and it makes up stuff that doesn't exist is still hugely valuable but you take that something that has a relatively high error factor and then you put it into a real product that someone actually has to use and suddenly your tolerance for error really drops. The great example we've had for quite a long time is self-driving cars. Elon famously went out in 2017 and said that at the end of the year all the cars are going to drive by themselves. We don't even need to manufacture more steering wheels. Now, that didn't pan out. Firstly, because, well, it wasn't even really AI at the point, but then even after it became AI, I drove my Tesla for a while with the self-driving version. I was like, you're insane if you're trusting your life to this. Absolutely goddamn insane. And then suddenly, seemingly overnight, you were no longer insane. You were almost like, why aren't you using this? It was so incredible. It's been working so well. the journeys I've had just taking me from where we are in Malibu to LAX, the airport in Los Angeles. Truly magic, right? So, you have this that like somewhere some people are figuring it out. You should be trying to figure it out, but you don't have to ship all the in-betweens. I think that's what people don't like right now is there all these experiments and then there's all this pressure that you got to stamp AI on freaking everything, right? Because that basically means new, it means modern, it means with it. But a lot of times it just means failed experiment. I mean, we have a long list at this point of experiments that we've done internally, features we've created, features we've injected AI into, and then benchmarked and run with and ended up deciding, you know what, either this isn't better or it's not better often enough, like it fails too often, it's wrong too often. Vizzy had several really interesting interface ideas built around this natural language recognition that were really nice until they weren't. And it's it's actually the age-old clippy problem. Like Microsoft was one of the first companies trying to go with this, hey, it looks like you're writing a letter to your lawyer. Do you want me to help it format for you? And you're like, what? No, I'm writing the PTA. What are you talking about? I don't want this reformatted in some formal way. Comic sense will do just fine. Thank you very much. Um that when you're wrong, when AI is wrong in a context where you don't feel like it's appropriate to be wrong, like the context I have for software development, I know it's going to be wrong all the time. I don't need 100% hit ratio. I just need like 80%. I'm good. I can filter out manually the 20% that's nonsense and still take the 80% that's valuable. That does not work in an enduser application. If the interface idea we had for Fizzy only worked 80% of the time, you'd forget those 80% real quick and just focus on can I throw this [ __ ] thing out the window because it's wrong one in five times. A little bit like the self-driving cars. Even being correct like 95% of the time, that sounds really high. Like wait, does that mean it's going to murder about 200 people a day? Uh yeah, note that math doesn't work for self-driving. They actually got to be right 99.9996% of the time maybe. And the bar is not quite as high for the software that we do, but it's probably 99. Like even 1% error rating on something you use on a regular basis is going to feel quite annoying. And way too much software is being shipped right now with AI features that at best work 87% of the time. >> Okay. Well, with that, we're going to wrap it up. Fizzy is coming soon from the 37 Signals team. This has been an episode of Rework. ReworkWork is a production of 37 Signals. You can find show notes and transcripts on our website, 37signals.com/mpodcast. Full video episodes are on YouTube. And if you have a question for Jason or David about a better way to work and run your business, leave us a video question. You can do that at 37signals.com/mpodcast or send us an email to rework@37signals.com. Fizzy man, [laughter] you know.

With the launch of Fizzy getting closer, 37signals co-founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson use this episode to answer listener questions about the upcoming product. They talk about how Fizzy and Basecamp will coexist, why aesthetic design choices matter, and which AI features are actually worth using. *Key Takeaways* 00:00 – Episode highlights 01:01 – Fizzy and Basecamp, competitors or complementary? 02:59 – Finding the right tools that fit your workflow 13:02 – Why aesthetics matter in software 21:09 – Not every AI feature adds real value *Links and Resources* Record or upload a video question for Jason and David — https://www.37signals.com/podcastquestion Get a free Basecamp account at https://www.basecamp.com Books by 37signals – https://37signals.com/books 30-day free trial of HEY – https://www.hey.com/ Once. com – https://once.com/ Campfire – https://once.com/campfire HEY – https://www.hey.com/ The REWORK podcast – https://37signals.com/podcast/ Get some REWORK podcast merch – https://37signals.com/podcast/shop *Let's be social!* Twitter/X: https://x.com/37signals Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/37signalshq/ Rework is a production of 37signals. You can find show notes and transcripts on our website https://www.37signals.com/ Leave us a video question at www.37signals.com/podcastquestion or send an email to rework@37signals.com, and we might answer it on a future episode.