McDonald’s museum. Photo by Bruce Marlin What startups and small business owners can learn from the giant’s struggles McDonald’s just reported a 35% bump in profits this quarter. That makes three consecutive quarters of positive financial results. As some speculate, after years of slumping, it seems like they’ve finally turned the business around. Here’s a few… keep reading
Back in high school my track coach would often get on me about my sloppy block practice. He’d say “You aren’t setting up in the blocks properly. You’re rushing it, just going through the motions.” I’d say “Why does it matter right now? I’m not racing anyone today. I’ll do it right at the meet… keep reading
Highrise has been around since 2007 and we have many loyal customers who have stuck with us from the beginning. So you can imagine how delicate it can be to change something. We try our hardest to improve the product without interrupting current product flow, but we can’t always predict the impact of a change… keep reading
The dose makes the poison Ignorance is a powerful catalyst for “unrealistic” dreams and ambitions. If you don’t know how hard something is going to be, you’re less likely to be discouraged. If you don’t know it can’t be done, you just might do it. That essentially describes how I got started with Ruby on Rails… keep reading
About three years ago, Basecamp built Know Your Company to solve their own growing pains as a company. The tool helped their partners, Jason and David, get weekly insights into their company they’d never known about before. Know Your Company worked so well for them that they decided to launch it as a product. Word… keep reading
Some examples of emails we get about our product roadmap at Highrise: Hope something like this is on the product roadmap. Is such development planned in your roadmap soon? I’m following up to see if we can add this to the product roadmap. You want the truth? Here it goes. Highrise doesn’t have a roadmap.… keep reading
I’m Mercedes, Basecamp’s COO, and I’m leading our marketing efforts. I’m looking for a wonderful designer to lead our visual marketing team. Designers at Basecamp are a fun bunch who bounce around different projects and do a bit of everything. In addition to graphic design, designers at Basecamp write tight copy, tell stories, design the… keep reading
Adapted from Gage Skidmore A few weeks ago, two seemingly unrelated events took over our news feeds — Sad Affleck and the “left-pad” fiasco. Sad Affleck exploded on YouTube with over 22 million plays, having a little fun with critic feedback on the new Superman vs. Batman movie. And the “left pad” fiasco was about an “npm module”.… keep reading
Illustration by Nate Otto LION’s products can mean the difference between life and death for the customers of this family-owned company, which makes protective clothing and training equipment for firefighters. From its origins in 1898 as a horse-and-wagon operation selling clothing to farmers in Dayton, Ohio, LION turns out everything from Teflon suits worn by medical… keep reading
It’s actually more Fridays I have a problem with. Fridays are often the anticlimax of the week. Sometimes you didn’t get as much done as you hoped, your energy is spent, and frankly, you just want to put a lid on it. Mondays, on the other hand, are always full of promise and freshness. Imagine… keep reading