Parse.ly has been using this product for the past several months. In fact, I think we are the "smallest customer" that Jason cited, with 16 employees. We're a fully distributed team (as I described in <a href="http://bit.ly/distributed-teams" rel="nofollow">http://bit.ly/distributed-teams</a>), so it was a particularly good fit for us.<p>Our team loves the product. They loved it from the first week it was in use. It sends a weekly email rounding up what everyone is working on every week. It also has team members sharing interesting social things like favorite recipes, childhood stories, books, and movies. And the "Company Question" (a weekly question picked by management) allows us to get regular feedback from employees, which we used to do sporadically using hacked-together Wufoo surveys, but this has much less friction and actually works. One of my favorite of these questions that we recently asked was, "Is there anyone at the company you wish you could apprentice under for a few weeks?"<p>I don't want to reveal too much about the product because I don't want to preempt their own marketing of it, but here's a quick glimpse of how the "Questions" view of the product looks -- this is where you can see the answers from employees of past questions. In general, it has a simple, sparse, and beautiful design that achieves the goal of the product with ease.<p><a href="http://ubuntuone.com/3gYi3mg65rCM30dTSGsYB8" rel="nofollow">http://ubuntuone.com/3gYi3mg65rCM30dTSGsYB8</a>
I'm surprised by the decision to spin off KYC: from what I understand, it fits nicely in 37signal's toolshed and would help cross-marketing quite well -- especially with those great numbers.<p>If I were to guess (and this is with the caveat that I'm not too privy to what the actual product <i>is</i> -- from what I can guess from the marketing copy, it's a mixture of one-time consulting and internal SaaS), the growth rate of the project is increasing in a way such that scaling on the part of 37signals is infeasible.<p>(Edit:) Napkin math: if a company grows from 25 to 40 over the course of two years, that works out to be $1500 over 24 months, or effectively $62.5/mo for KYC. It also strongly incentivizes the product (er, company) to help with a company's HR attrition and growth, which is neat.
I read through part of the slightly scammy-looking long sales letter (complete with bullet points and money-back guarantee) at <a href="https://knowyourcompany.com/" rel="nofollow">https://knowyourcompany.com/</a> and still don't have a clue what this product does.<p>Can anyone enlighten me?<p>PS: @jason - the comment about the sales letter is not a comment about 37S, of course, but I'm sure you're aware of the format you're using there...
I like the pricing model. At first it reads like a one time sell ($100 per employee, once), but considering attrition, this is much more attractive for KYC since most companies have significant attrition. What's the typical tenure length at an American corporation? 2-3 years? 5 years? Also, the organizations that need this service the most might also have higher attrition to begin with. Clever.
The issue of knowing your people is such a basic fundamental tenant of leadership that every year or two another tool is invented to solve it. 360 degree feedback was the previous hot company evaluation tool and 15Five had a pretty interesting approach to this as well. I haven't used know your company, but it seems to me that at its core it is an employee feedback tool - with the caveat that it is as minimally intrusive as possible (which is always the goal by the way).<p>I would love to see how it actually works compared to other management tools, but my company is not big enough to actually be able to implement it.<p>I do think this is an example of the way that startup/technologists/hackers do things when compared to the rest of the universe of management/leadership: reinventing the wheel that the business management community has been chiseling on for over a century. Hopefully this will do great things.
This will be interesting to watch. Given the sales page currently is simply a letter by Jason Fried, my assumption (and it is just an assumption) is that companies have gone with this offering because it's 37Signals. That said now momentum is built, that in turn should generate the referrals rather, perhaps more so than the initial buzz of working directly with 37signals people, so I guess this makes sense.<p>I've always seen 37signals as a very focused company, and this spin off enables them to focus back on their core business. I just finished reading Focus by Al Ries, hence this is top of mind, but 37signals seem the masters of relentless focus in the modern age.
It is really a good idea to know our employee's ideas and their work culture. It also provides a great things about our employee through this. We can know that what exactly our employee wants from us and are we giving or not??<p>And 100$ is not a big deal...
So basically, 37signals sold this product just like they sold Sortfolio.<p>(They seem to be on a bad run lately given Breeze was shutdown after a few months. Sortfolio sale. etc)
Isn't the thread in breach of HN rules?<p>The title of the post is: "Big: Know Your Company grows up and moves out."<p>Shouldn't it be exactly the same?