Talk directly to your customers – REWORK

When it comes to things like retention, if somebody's using a product and they're at the point of like a little bit of frustration and maybe I should look at something else, I think it's a lot easier to leave a piece of software than it is to leave a personal connection with someone who makes the software. They're vastly more lovely people than they are when they have access to a Twitter input box, right? And that's just a really good way to get faith back in humanity. developing some of these loose connections. Some of it through commerce, some of it through community, some of it through hobbies, and just making sure you have enough of that as a shield to withstand the [ __ ] torrent of [ __ ] and abuse that everyone is being exposed to, not even as direct recipients, but just as spectators on a daily basis when they watch the horror show that is the internet. >> Welcome to Rework, a podcast by 37 Signals about the better way to work and run your business. I'm your host, Kimberly Rhodess, joined by co-founders of 37 Signals, Jason Freed and David Hineimire Hansen. This week, I thought we'd look talk a little bit about the importance of talking directly to your customers with the approaching release of Base Camp 5. Jason recently sent a message to all of our Base Camp 3 and four customers and got some great responses. So, I thought we'd start there. Jason, tell us a little bit first why you decided to reach out to customers directly. Normally when we're sending announcements, it's kind of on behalf of the company, but this time you wrote it directly coming directly from you. Tell us a little bit about why you decided to do that. >> Yeah, I had this feeling um I try to really pay attention to like the feeling of things these days. Like I had this feeling that like our customers have not heard from us from a while, which is not just like a feeling. There's some truth in that, but >> but there's also like there's this feeling of like there's a lot going on in the world right now in the software world. Things are changing very rapidly. We haven't updated Base Camp in a bit because we've been heads down working on this brand new version of Base Camp, which is a massive new version of Base Camp. So, we've been working like crazy, but no one can see it. And I just and and I just had this sense like people should hear from us and should probably hear from me that like everything's okay and we're making something great for you and like stay tuned. It's coming soon. We're working on it right now. So, I wanted to do that and I also wanted to wait until we had enough that I could share that I knew we were going to release. Like the worst thing is to like share all these new things that we're not going to give them. Like so there's a combination of a lot of things going on here. Timing in the market, timing in our work where we actually think we are in terms of releasing this thing in a few months, whatever it might be. And anyway, I wanted to reach out to everybody and say we're still here. We're doing great work for you. There's a lot that's coming. Most of this is what you've been asking for. Stay tuned. Right. Um and I also put my email address in. I said just like I would love to hear what you want to say or whatever what what you think or whatever. And um >> wait, I'm gonna stop you right there because you wrote it very specifically. I'm gonna read it because it says, "As always you can reach me directly and you put your email address. I read all my emails and get back to everyone personally. No assistant, no AI. Emailing me is emailing me, which I thought that was great. >> That was another just feeling, you know, again, like I mean, if you pay well, at least my timeline on X is like it's actually kind of gross. It's just everyone's bragging about how much AI stuff they're doing and using and I'm actually kind of tired of it. Um, but I imagine like and everyone's talking about all this stuff, right? So, I'm like, "Okay, look, I'm just a person writing this email or writing this announcement. Like, if you write me, you'll get me." And just seemed like a nice thing to say and and I meant it, you know? And actually, a lot of people who responded appreciated that. um they said, "Hey, I appreciate that I can reach you out reach you directly and that you know my email is not going to be lost or reply replied to you by a bot or whatever." Like it was an appreciation moment and I wanted to appreciate them that I'm taking the time to write you and you can write me back and if you write me I'll write you back and that whole thing. Now it also created like a few hundred emails of work for me last week. And a lot of the emails that come in from customers are quite long actually which is very interesting. Some are very there's actually very short ones or very long ones. There's nothing in the middle. And the long ones are also like love all the stuff you guys are going to do and here's you know nine other ideas. And it's actually really nice to hear these ideas because what you what you realize is that a lot of the things that people want are really specific and pretty small actually. Um like I just want to be able to see this thing across all my projects. And you're like yeah that makes sense. We actually don't have that view. I don't know why we don't have that view. And in fact we had that view in base camp 2 but we don't have it in three or four. like what happened there? And you kind of remember that like some of the things you did before were really good. Other things you did before weren't good enough. That's why you did new things. And it's just a really good healthy reminder that some of the requests are quite big. Some of them are quite surprising. Like I'll give you an example. The most common requests we got, this is not scientific. This is just me going through them and remembering voice notes. Like so many people want to leave voice notes in Base Camp, which kind of caught me a bit off guard. Um, I I use them occasionally for my own like dictation. If I have a thought and I just want to like get it down really quick, I'll I'll leave myself a voice note or something, but it's people are talking about it a lot and I was really surprised by how much it came up. Um, and actually just yesterday we we built it early prototype, but we built so I don't want to promise but we we built it. We're prototyping internally. Um, it's pretty it's pretty cool. And um so that that's not something I probably would have heard or even thought about had I not just reached out to people and invited them to write back to me. So there's some of that. There's some stuff that like there's some complaints like totally valid. There's some other complaints that are things that like we're just not going to do and I can like talk to people about why we're not going to do them and share like our point of view and people tend to appreciate that even if they're getting a no. They just want to appreciate that someone heard them and there's a a reason why. Other stuff's like that's a really good idea. We're actually doing that. Like we're doing that. I didn't put it in the long list that I put in the announcement, but we are going to do that and we have actually done it and you're going to like this, too. And and um anyway, it was just it was just a feel-good thing. It felt really nice to do. It felt like the right thing to do at the right time. It's also really nice to hear customers use their own language to describe things because it reminds you like the things you call things aren't what they call things and like why is that? Why are these things different? What's more natural way to say this versus like how I'm saying it? Um it's just a super healthy good thing to do occasionally for sure. Um and so um anyway, it was it was worthwhile and and I plan on doing more of these as we get closer. I I'll share some videos, I'll share some screenshots next time and like kind of get a little bit closer as we're a little bit closer to feeling like this is probably what we're going to deliver. >> I think what's so special about this kind of outreach is is the default mode for early stage startups. So it was when we started with base camp, Jason for the first three years would answer simply every single customer support request. And I find that sometimes when I talk to founders like they're in a real rush to get out of this that like that early phase where they have to do all of this stuff feels like it's a bit of an imposition. It's just a phase that hopefully they can get through real quick and then they can have a full customer support department and then they can get aggregate reports of what people want and maybe they can use AI to summarize all these things. All that's all great but it's not the same thing. You're not touching the nerve as you are when you talk directly to a customer as someone who has full power to make this happen. And I think this is why Jason would get this kind of response and I don't know some product manager inside the depths and belly of some huge corporate beast just wouldn't wouldn't get that kind of honesty or would not be able to create that kind of connection because we all know that if you are somewhere in the middle layer of a huge pyramid you just don't have the amount of power to make the pyramid turn. But a single customer can convince Jason of a good idea and then that idea just happens right like Jason can simply just say this is going to happen and it will happen. That is that magic when you have direct connection from customer to founder, from customer to person who calls the shots on which direction this company and this product is going to go. And that's a bit of a superpower that I find is often underused by other founders that I look at and I always hear the appreciation from customers when they have an experience like that. And I think we often have these opportunities to deliver that kind of experience and then we just squander it. Now that's not just in software. In all sorts of domains, right? Like you have a sometimes a bad experience somewhere and you go to complain about it and half the time you have this defeated notion that already the person you're talking to about this can't actually do something about it. But you know what? that one out of 10 times where they literally can and do, you're just blown away, right? This is what creates these word of mouth magic moments where you deliver a direct connection. Not even always that you immediately do what they're asking you to do, but just that you authentically and genuinely listen, you respond, you engage, and now you've created a bond. Right? Again, someone sitting at the top of a very large pyramid can go like, "Yeah, well, what am I going to do with one bond? I need a million bonds. Like, that's not going to scale." Well, first of all, Gary Vee will tell you, "Yeah, [ __ ] it." Well, Gary will respond to 2,000 people in a single day. Sometimes got Yep. Yep. Yes. All right. Like maybe not super thick strings of bonds here, but still they're being created. Um, and you could certainly do more of it. that Jason could process 200 emails in a week and something over this topic is a great example of how much you can move the needle just for math here. And you don't even [ __ ] need the math because you should do it for yourself in your own edification and the improvement of the product for everyone. But even if you do the math and you just think like here's 200 people who get a good experience, direct connection to company leadership. Are they going to tell like five people, eight people? Now you've talked to a thousand people already in this way in a week. Actually, that scales pretty well. Like you don't need to do that that many times before you've talked to 10,000 and you do all the math on how that accumulates and it really actually does work. I also think this is going to be more and more important because we're going to get more and more of these AI impersonations. We're going to get not even impersonations, but like just like AI interactions and many of them are going to be perfectly fine because you just want a piece of information and AI is really good at get that information. But there's also something as excited as I am about AI where I'm like, yeah, I just want to talk to human. I I I value the connection itself, not just the information, not just that I've delivered my request inside the big belly of something. I want to look someone in the eye digitally as it is through an email and feel like, yeah, there was someone who actually heard me. I think this is where that pivot in marketing we've talked about a few times founder marketing is really influential and really important that if you can do this if you can structure your company in such a way that even at our size with a product as big as base camp with as many customers that we have that Jason can take the time to do this it's almost like a cheat code like you found a shortcut both to the highest fidelity information about what people want and also to create these connections. And on that first point, the fidelity of the information I think is really important because I remember being on the other side of Jason getting these feature requests in the early days all the time. And I could just like sometimes I'd get some aggregate sense of like, oh, there's a lot of people been requesting this. And then Jason would just show up with this determination that we had to do this thing because he had talked to three or five or seven customers who had echoed just that notion but just in the right way that fit his understanding of why this was an urgent problem that when you package it inside of a pipeline of feedback that goes maybe you're talking to a customer agent in many cases for a lot of companies now you're talking to an AI customer agent. Okay, well that's one layer. That's one filtering. And then that goes into an aggregate system. Then that goes into a report. Then that get reviewed like a quarter later. It is not the same. It's like comparing a strawberry to like strawberry gum. Like that piece of gum has never [ __ ] seen a strawberry. It has seen a similacra of a strawberry condensed into sort of an R35 color taste code. And then that's strawberry. But you know what? You want to bite into that real strawberry. It's just a different experience entirely. Even if the word strawberry is applied to both of those objects, they don't have a lot in common. Something else I want to add really quick, Kimberly. Actually, this is another thing that came up that um it's just a good reminder, and this is actually one of the only ways to get at this information is um customers will write back, you know, it's my thing, and ask for features, and I'll be like, "Oh, we already have that feature." like we you can already do this. Here's how you do it. And so in in some ways there I wouldn't have known that they wanted that and then they wouldn't have known that we had that. There's almost no way for those two ends to meet really. It just happened to be a conversation between two humans who like hey I wish you had this and go oh gosh you know what we do have this go over here and hit that and then hit that. Now it's also a reminder that you know in a big system like base camp there are things people will not run into. I mean that even if we do it like now I told them that that they can do it but are there a thousand other people who have the same requests that don't know that they could do that. That said just tying a few of these knots up feels really good and then someone asked for something and they have it already is also really good to know that they already have it already. That feels really nice. The other thing I'll say and this is a total side effect but when it comes to and this is not why we do this but it it does make sense when it comes to things like retention. If somebody's using a product and they're at the point of like a little bit of frustration and maybe I should look at something else, I think it's a lot easier to leave a piece of software than it is to leave a personal connection with someone who makes the software. Now, again, that's not a trick. We're not trying to tie people into this. There's no, you know, no tricks here, but it is something still. And they will remember, well, you know, I could actually just reach like I'm frustrated. I can actually just reach back out to this person who wrote me before and I can, you know, air my frustrations versus like just yelling into the void at at a company. Like companies don't have ears. They they can't hear you. I can hear you. And if we've talked before, write me again, you know, and um maybe I can fix that. Maybe I can't, but at least I'm here for you. And I think people are more willing to give that kind of experience a second try or to go, you know what? Hey, nothing's perfect out there. The grass isn't always greener. what these what these people have is really good. It's not quite exactly what I want, but I like who they are. I trust them. They're accessible, which is something we've always tried to be for 25 years is accessible. You can write all David's email is public. My email is public. We're both on X. We're both on LinkedIn. We talk to people all the time. You can reach out to us. You can talk directly to us. Um, and get an answer. Uh, and that's that's rare, too. And I think that that keeps people that's that's a feature also of a product is can I at least like reach the people who make the damn thing and and give them a piece of my mind even if they're not going to do what I say at least I can give them a piece of my mind I know it's been received. That's an important detail as well. >> Yeah. One of the benefits of staying small as we've talked about many times. Um, I also think it's interesting or not interesting but smart that it was an email like email me because I think there is this sense like yes you can always reach someone on X or LinkedIn or whatever. For me that doesn't feel as guaranteed that it's going to actually land. You know the way social media just scrolls it's like yeah you can easily miss something and I'm not going to hold it against them that they missed it because everything's going so fast. Email just feels more permanent like it's really going to get to you. Well, email is is very personal because most people don't share their email addresses because spam and all the other things. So like of course your social handles are public. That's the whole point essentially of them. >> Email is not that way. So I do think it's a little bit of a like a secret key like hey you can write me at this address whatever you want. And like you you know it and I know it and we know it now like you can get a hold of me >> and it's going to come directly to me. I think is a really important thing as well. So yeah, I do I do think that's key and critical and important and something we've done for a long time. It's in the back of our books. You read Rework, you read it doesn't have to be crazy at work. Our email address is on the like the last page or something like that. And we get hundreds and hundreds, probably thousands of emails now from people who've read our books and then when they write us, they're shock some of them are shocked that we respond. Like especially like Rework, which has been out for what, 16 years now or something like that. they just figure like that person's dead or I don't know what they figure like the email address doesn't work anymore or something or whatever but then you respond and they're just they're floored and it's like it's it's it's great. It's a wonderful way to connect with people and I and usually those those rework ones are quite short and some of them are quite long and the longer ones sit around in my inbox a little bit longer but um I do tend to get back to everybody I can who writes in. I think what's fascinating about email 2 is that it now, as crazy as it sounds, requires a bit of extra effort. Most people are doing the bulk of their communication on instant messaging platforms or on social platforms where it's all sort of quick sentences. There's a weight now to email, which is crazy because when email first came out, they were like, "Oh, this is going to replace letterw writing." There's a lot of weight in letter writing when you're literally relying on your penmanship and stuffing [ __ ] in an envelope and putting a stamp on and going to the post office. So, it seems incredible that email has now taken that role of being sort of the higheffort bar that only few people will actually take advantage of. Which is why this works to some degree, right? like out of all the um hundreds of thousands of people we have using our systems all the time, they don't all write emails, right? Like then it wouldn't scale. But for the folks who take the effort to write a personal email to Jason or to me or to anyone else in the company, they're going to get an answer because that signal in and of itself that they just took the time to literally put an email together, as crazy as it sounds, is a is a really strong signal and a growing signal. It is even more effortful now given all the alternatives that we have than it was 10 years ago and certainly than it was 20 years ago. So I also use that the other direction. I very often think you know what if I've had a bad experience I actually just did this. I was staying at a hotel in uh Seattle and I had a bit of a bad experience and we almost missed our flight because the ballet lost our car and it was just a mess, right? And I found out who was the manager on duty that day and I sat down and wrote an email. This was like five paragraphs of, hey, do you know what? Here's what happened. I would care if it was my demo. So I'm I'm kind of doing me a favor through you of reminding me that like, you know what, I would like this feedback. So, I get a very long personal response back of not what they were going to do to make the situation better because I mean whatever. But what I really appreciated was here's what we're going to do internally. Here's like this was a real failure. Just an authentic apology. First of all, also quite rare in this modern day, right? Like an apology actually signed by a human who took responsibility for something that were wrong already. like that imaginary review went from a two star to a three and a half star and then there was just here's what we're going to do to change things such that this doesn't happen again. These moments, these exchanges are just incredibly satisfying on both ends. I've been on both ends of it. I've been on the end where an irate customer had a very clear point and I needed to apologize for something that we had done wrong and I'd been that customer who had been wronged and gotten an apology and you like when I accumulate all the interactions that I've had with strangers over my lifetime these are some of the real highlights like that sense of give and take of seeing eye to eye often because something didn't go quite right it's just really meaningful and I think the more we can do that the more we can humanize this very cold software computer world that we're in increasingly cold in some ways like as we've talked about with all this AI taking even more of that human touch out of it the more special those moments are going to be the more special that short interaction over email is going to be the more it's going to be worth your time if you're a founder or you're someone in charge of a product who engages with the customers or audience or whatever you have in this way Can I add one more thing too? Um, this just happened to me a few days ago which I want to mention it. Um, >> so if you're a founder, whoever listening to this and you're like, "Well, no one's writing me, so I can't write them." Like, you can also look through your like customer list and see who's been buying your stuff lately. Maybe you might recognize a name or something and you can just reach out. So, for example, I just bought some I'm kind of on this like decaf coffee kick. Like decaf coffee has been neglected forever. Like there's a few people now doing good decafs. I posted this thing on X like wish someone was doing good decaf. Someone reached out like you should try this product from this company called WIMP. So uh which is a great name for decaf coffee wimp. Um so so uh so I bought some and uh and and the the guy who runs it happened to recognize my my email address and my name because he's actually a tech guy who is also doing this coffee thing. And so he emailed me saying, "Hey, I just going through the orders and I just saw your name. I'm so glad you, you know, you order my stuff and been a big fan of Base Camp for years and all that kind of thing. And we struck up a nice conversation. Now we're going to have a phone call like next week because I'd love to hear how his business is going. And I'll tell you what, I haven't gotten the coffee yet, but I promise you the coffee will taste better. The coffee will taste better because we had this conversation before the coffee arrived because he reached out to me, said something nice. I had sent something nice back. We have a little relationship now as tiny and infatimal as it is at the beginning here, but there's something there. and um I I'm going to order more. Of course I am. Like how could I not at this point, you know? And again, that's not why he did it, but these are side effects and they're all good. It's okay. It's okay that like you don't want to feel bad that you like hooked someone into something. If I really hate it, I won't buy more, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to like it and like it more than I normally would have. So, you can go through your list. I remember we did this in the early days of base camp. I would go because we we would actually get like I think in the early early days like a chuch-ching sound or something when we had like an order that came in. David, I think you made some system like this. >> That sounds right. >> Or maybe it was for like the getting real book for the PDF, something like a chuch-ching. And like, oh my god, I know who that is. Like I I admire that person. Let me write them and thank them for buying this book or or base camp or whatever. And it was a wonderful way to build some rapport early on when people were not used to this and still are not used to this. You buy something at whatever, you're going to almost certainly not hear from anybody. Um, unless maybe you buy something on Etsy. Etsy is a good example of this where you're like buying directly from one person and sometimes they'll write you a nice little note back. Maybe it's automated, maybe it's not. I don't know. But there's still that onetoone connection which is nice and it'd be nice, I think, to have that in more places. >> Now, let me zoom out for just one second and make a broader point here. I think this is one of the key reasons for why we have this loneliness epidemic, why we have this despondency about the modern world is because we've lost all those natural loose connections. And I'm reminded about this in one specific case like where I live um in California, there's a little kiosk at the bottom of the hill and I I will not offend him because I've known him now for years. It's not the world's greatest kiosk. is actually kind of messy and very often I'd be like >> like what kind of kio what kiosk of what? >> Uh it's like uh beverages, right? Like so mostly drinks and snacks and and whatever. Um in New York it's probably would be a bodega. And I go down there and and I've known this guy now for I think seven years and we've started talking cars and just sharing some of this stuff and he asks about my family and I asked about his and he still will manage to not stock the [ __ ] Mexican Coke that I'm there for. Right. And literally we've had this relationship for seven years and the number of times I get down there and he doesn't have what I want is just incredible. But you know it brings real joy to the week to have a number of those kinds of loose connections where I know the person behind the counter. I have it with a few eeries in that area too where I go often for lunch and you just start developing that rapport and you go do you know what all this e-commerce as wonderful it is that you can get everything overnight from Amazon or a Shopify store or wherever something is also lost in that we have to find a way to compensate for what's lost there that we have fewer of these loose connections is that we feel more part of a community is that we feel like we have connections to people who are not our direct friends or family or whatever. And the social media parts occasionally when they're at the very best can provide like a drop of that, but it's not even close to the same of what an email exchange can provide. And that even is a sort of poor substitute for what Jason's talking about having an actual phone conversation with someone or going to a store and meeting someone which is one of the reasons why um I've loosened up more about this idea of conferences. I used to really hate conferences actually. Um I still don't love him. I'm not an extrovert person. I can play one for a short period of time at very high intensity and then I need to just recuperate for two weeks. But the last actually I'd say since Rails world where I took a more active role in being part of the organization and therefore also feeling more of responsibility as a host and therefore ending up willing myself into just having conversations with a bunch of people for like eight hours straight for two days in a row really like oh yeah this is that this is that connection. This is that way of being able to persuade someone about an idea or introduce them to something or maybe even change their mind. This is one of the things that fascinated me for arguing with people for 20 years on the internet is that you cannot change anyone's mind on the internet. Not in the moment, at least not in a direct exchange. You know what you can in person and this is I don't know this shouldn't be shocking. Hasn't this been how Socrates uh convinced half of Athens that um whatever the moral good was? But it's still shocking when you're used to exchanges on the internet then to bring them into the real world and realize, oh, humans are actually rather lovely directly face to face most of the time. Not always, but most of the time they're vastly more lovely people than they are when they have access to a Twitter input box, right? And that's just a really good way to get faith back in humanity. Developing some of these loose connections, some of it through commerce, some of it through community, some of it through hobbies, and just making sure you have enough of that as a shield to withstand the [ __ ] torrent of [ __ ] and abuse that everyone is being exposed to. not even as direct recipients but just as spectators on a daily basis when they watch the horror show that is the internet right you actually you need this otherwise you're going to go crazy which evidently many people have gone [ __ ] crazy over the internet that have turned them that way because they did not have this resilience that is built up through direct loose connections with strangers and acquaintances >> I mean they say the blue zones you know the areas of the world where people live the longest Community is a huge part of that. Like having a sense of community, having people who you have a connection with is important for longevity. >> Yes. And do you know what? I hate that piece of advice because as an introvert, >> it is uh you're going to die >> remarkably difficult for me to will myself into actually doing it. But do you know what? Some of those uh the good truths are also the hard truths. And this is is literally one of the reasons I have that in mind. Like momento, do you know what? you get another 10 years if you're not just [ __ ] stuck in your little cocoon, if you occasionally go out and interact with people in the real world. The fine point I'll say on that is I don't know if that's also about age because we talked about that with the trees in the other episode, but I used to like and maybe this is also in the Scandinavian thing, right? I I remember when I first came to the US, maybe I've shared this anecdote before, but the first experience I had when I walked up to Jason's apartment, which was where I was going to live after I'd landed in Chicago, my neighbor said, "Hey, what's up? How's it going?" And as a Dane, 25 years of age, I was like, "Wait, are we engaging in conversation? Me and stranger that I've never seen or met before?" Like, this is crazy. I do think Americans do this to a better degree than than many other um uh folks do. So, I've grown to appreciate that more. I've grown to even engage in that, which my 20-year-old self would be horrified of my 40-year-old self just striking up conversation with strangers at the airport, but here we are. And I think it's a good thing. And I wish I'd done that earlier, more of it. >> You know, it's so funny that I distinctly remember that uh that comment that you made. I don't know why that sticks in my head, but you're like people say like have a nice day and they're like you're like they don't [ __ ] mean it. Why would they say it? And it's like they say just to be nice. I don't know. I don't really know why. It's just what we do here, I guess. But it was so funny how like almost offended you were by someone saying have a nice day cuz you didn't believe that they meant it. You know, that was sort of the >> That was a culture shock. That was a culture shock. And but do you know what? I've come around to the American way. Do you know what? Just say have a nice day and don't [ __ ] mean it or mean it. It doesn't matter. It sort of like it sort of greases the social exchange in a way that the cult north of Scandinavia could learn a little from. And I actually now think that the Americans got it right. Like that only took 20 years of indoctrination to arrive at that conclusion. But now I do think it actually is hilarious that I used to be halfway offended when an American would ask me have a nice day or say have a nice day. >> Come down south and we'll talk to anybody about anything at any time. So, you are welcome to visit us here. With that, we're going to reap it re we're going to wrap it up. Rework is a production of 37 Signals. You can find show notes and transcripts on our website at 37s signals.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 37s signals.com/mpodcast question or send us an email to rework@37signals.com.

Connecting with customers is part of the job. In this episode, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson share why staying close to the people who use your product still matters, even as companies scale. They touch on writing customers directly, keeping the door open after the first reply, and why real conversations beat shouting into the social media void. *Key Takeaways* 00:00 – Episode preview 00:58 – Writing customers from a real inbox 06:31 – Building real relationships with the people who use your product 13:00 – Keeping the line open after the first exchange 15:46 – Why email still feels more personal than sliding into DMs 21:20 – Getting to know who your customers actually are 23:57 – Why real human connection is still the point *Links and Resources* Fizzy is a modern spin on kanban. Try it for free at https://www.fizzy.do 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.