Introduction to Shape Up Method from Basecamp / Ryan Singer

guys got Bruce and Jake here how are you guys doing how you doing Jake talk to us but they can put some comments in so if you're watching on YouTube or if you're in if you're in Facebook feel free to drop a question or we will be reading those as we go through this this is just part of our weekly stream we just try to share some advice for other creative business owners who are trying to build a business trying to be creative but also do all the kind of boring business stuff at the same time. So hopefully we'll be able to provide some value. Did Jake get a Mac? Yes, he did get a Mac. That that is correct. So we've been trying to get Jake to get a Mac, I think this whole year since January. So yeah, that's awesome, guys. Yeah. So very good. I'm going to talk a little bit today about a topic that I've gotten very very into the last like couple of uh weeks and months and i've kind of been driving my team crazy with it but um we um as our company we build a lot of software build a lot of products and so we have been refining kind of how we scope up and and we this is this topic called and this method called shape up and how you shape up work and how you get it done um to kind of plan it out you know organize what you want to do how much time you want to spend on it and then kind of figure out like uh you know what resources do you want to actually devote to this idea this concept and trying to take a lot of the risk out of it and a lot of the unknowns out of it and so um the guys from base camp uh have written a book called shape up which i'm gonna kind of be looking through today and you can go i'll link to it down below but let me share my screen real quick here um so this is the um Book it's basecamp.com slash shapeup free book These guys are very original and kind of how they do stuff They publish the whole book for free online and you would think they would ask you for an email address so that it could be some sort of lead magnet But no these guys are like a breath of fresh air you click that you know read it online and guess what you can start reading it There's no email opt-in or anything. So for all the marketing guys out there That's it's kind of refreshing to just have content just available and this is an entire book so this i'm not going to go through this is about 150 pages um they talk about how they shape up work at base camp how like kind of gets into the nutty kind of nitty-gritty of how to organize projects and they really focus specifically on software and like product development and product design type angle so i'm going to kind of talk a little bit about some of the concepts here and then talk about how this actually applies to just running a small business and how you can like kind of pull this into your everyday stuff so um the kind of place where i want to start um is uh just talking through um this idea of setting boundaries so they have this concept that's called um uh setting an appetite for a project so what this is is you kind of break it down into like a two, four or a six week appetite. So this is you as like the business owner saying, hey, I'm willing to devote, you know, six weeks of our time to this, you know, this is a full cycle. So they, Basecamp works in like these six week cycles and then they take like a two week kind of buffer and then they do another six week cycle and then they stack kind of these modules of work inside that. So they kind of plan out. this project you know will take two or three people six weeks to go do um and then they kind of fit it into that span of six weeks and the idea of setting an appetite is so that you actually make sure that you launch in that six week time frame you don't act you don't um just keep extending it and adding new things and let me put this one up more idea in there um the idea is to kind of shape the work back like scope it back to fit inside of six weeks because if you as the business owner are saying and really you're the one who has to set that appetite you're the one who's kind of you're the one paying the bills you know at the end of the day like so if you have a team of two or three people like you're having to pay those people for their time so if six weeks like you can do some math of like how much that's actually going to cost and um and so you're the one who has to pay for it so you're the one who needs to decide essentially like what you want to spend time on so you may have an idea to launch a new idea like a sales page for a product or whatever and say look i'm willing to invest you know two weeks of time into this and what you do is you try and fit you kind of scope the work back to what can actually get done inside of two weeks by you or by your team and kind of looking at what bandwidth and stuff you have so the idea is to kind of zero in and focus just on that one thing as much as you can for those two weeks and then go off this is not something where you want to go in and have like seven different projects running and they're all two weeks and you're trying to jump between seven different projects. This is kind of getting very focused on just one thing and getting it out the door inside of that. The appetite conversation is very helpful because it doesn't talk about dollars and sense it actually is just a way to talk about people's time, which is the most finite resource you have at your in your company. So the project kind of starts by sending boundaries of like the timeframe that you want inside us you as the as the owners are setting that. And then you're setting out like to go and solve some sort of problem and then have some sort of solution. So while I'm kind of talking about this, I'm going to actually just pull up kind of how we use this at our company. And I'll pull up a little template we have right here. We're huge fans of Notion, so I'm going to be showing it to you in Notion. All right. So this is what the bedding process looks like. Let me get this front and center and big. So we start a new project. This could be like, we want to send gift bags to new customers. We want to launch this new sales page. We want to launch this new product or service or whatever. And so we start everything like this. We have a little template built and we have to go through and fill this out. And this is... mostly for me as the owner, as Bruce, because the way that I think, like I kind of like to get an idea for something and then we just dive head first for it. We're like, cool, sales page. I'm gonna just open ClickFunnels and start building something. That's like the worst way to do this. Taking literally 15 to 20 minutes. This does not take long to do this for every project. saves so much time on the back end, especially with your working with like other team members. We have saved so much time and honestly, like I feel like I have a different team like because of using this process and guess what changed? Like the team didn't change, but like how Bruce talked to the team changed a whole lot. Like so guess who's the guess whose problem it was? So this has been this has been very, very helpful for me. I feel like I can spend a lot more time. kind of thinking these things through putting this together so i'm going to go through this and then we'll uh kind of debrief it a little bit um so when we're starting out you know we have a a category we kind of organize it as like a draft and then we move it into pitch when it's ready to go but we choose the appetite like do we want a two week a four week six week project and this is me saying like hey this is such a big issue such a big thing if we can solve this one thing in six weeks like i would i would be willing to spend all of our resources as a company for six weeks to get this one thing solved. So it has to be a pretty sizable thing, but it also has to be something that you can actually, they always say you have to ship it in six weeks. You got to get it out the door. You got to turn on the ads. You got to get it live. This is not kind of still spending another week or two after that, like working out the bugs. It's just kind of going live at the end of six weeks. Then you can kind of close that chapter and move on to the next block of work. So that's the appetite. And then we go through these different things. We talk about, the problem. So this is if you're doing software, it could be like, what's the problem customers are facing. So this could be something like our customers are coming to us who they can't afford a $3,000 website, but they do have $1,500 to spend. We currently don't have a product at $1,500 price point. And you just talk about the problem, you know, we feel like we could sell it to these two or three things. If we did that, whatever, kind of go into some details of that. And so that's the that's how we kind of frame up the problem and this can be like you know a few paragraphs you can talk about what's wrong look at you know comments the idea is to kind of frame up the whole problem in this section um next we have uh the solution so this is where we kind of propose what we think is the solution to the problem now i'll speak a little bit to the software side if you are designing software the goal is not here to go and do these pixel perfect wireframes and designs and stuff the idea here is to essentially just put enough information to kind of frame it up and so that a designer or whatever can do it later so we they use this um this this uh uh process called like the fat marker sketch and it literally is that you take a giant sharpie or an expo marker and you kind of draw what you think it's going to be so if this is a landing page you could draw the landing page like i think there's going to be a picture here maybe some text over here you're not putting words in or anything you're not choosing which colors or anything like that it's just ugly dirty it's just kind of putting in just what like you know just using a fat marker to kind of get the ideas there's no fine detail just the the big kind of broad strokes um and you're kind of writing out all of the different things like it's gonna it should be able to do this when i go here it needs to be able to do that these you're kind of speaking to all the different things of how you're going to you want to set out to solve this problem now you're thinking of this like you've got the walls of this kind of four weeks or six weeks of time so you have to choose a problem that you can solve in four weeks um you have to choose a solution that you can implement that will actually solve that problem in four weeks so you're constantly like kind of whittling it down and shaping it up to kind of fit inside this this four week box um and so uh that's the solution. Then we go and we kind of write out any rabbit hole. So this is things where like the project can just like go into a rabbit hole and kind of get lost. Like we may end up getting like stuck on this one thing. Like maybe we can't figure out how to price it. Maybe pricing it's going to be or what to include or, you know, a rabbit hole could be like getting the copy just right, getting the ads to actually be effective. Like that could be a rabbit hole because we don't really it's a lot of unknowns. we haven't done this one type of thing before, we've never launched Facebook ads before. So now we have to launch them like that could be a rabbit hole where you could spend kind of it could suck all your time just figuring out how to do Facebook ads. So you want to list those things out like, hey, we're aware that this could be a rabbit hole, this could be a rabbit hole, this could be a rabbit hole. And then there's sort of out of bounds things. So we say, hey, in this project, we are not doing this, we are not doing that, we're not doing this, we're not doing this, you're kind of drawing these other kind of lines around. sort of the problem and kind of and again putting more of those constraints in and then just a quick little one lines you know description of what it means to be um if this is successful you know if it's successful we'll solve this this is a problem you know to use my example of the website clients will be able to you know afford an awesome looking website at a kind of you know discounted price um without us having you know still keeping good margins or whatever so i'll kind of show you really quick what one of these looks like that's been completed. And so again, this is for a piece of software. So you can see like we wrote out the problem, like on this app, we wanna be able to show video and chats and static ads to a client to show pieces of content. So we needed to create these new screens. We wanted to be able to show an article. We wanna be able to show like a video. um piece of content we wanted to share like a home page where all this stuff would be listed so i even put some inspiration links of different like things we liked and this is my very beautiful mock-ups here which took me all of like three minutes to draw to write and so and i just did them on my whiteboard took a picture from you know on my phone it's kind of adjusts the colors and kind of scans them in and this is just enough information for the designer to kind of know generally what we're talking about like okay there's a home page there's a video there's like some other pieces of content there there's a row of content so it's kind of looking like a netflix or maybe like a news site you know when i'm on the video detail page i'm gonna have a video there's gonna be some chat stuff and then maybe ads but i'm not getting into what this looks like on mobile and all these different use cases so this could be for a landing page it could be for your new website it could be for any of this so anytime you have to kind of design something and that you're delivering as a product or service or client you can do this for that same thing for the article and then we go through rabbit holes like one of the things we thought would be hard to be like getting the typography just right on all these different devices so we kind of scoped that back as well um so it's kind of i don't want to get too specific to this one example because it can be used for um business stuff as well uh and i i don't have a Another example handy, but we did this recently for, we wanted to start sending clients a little gift box that shows up, some swag that will show up. And we did the exact same process. We said, hey, currently clients sign up with us. They spend all this money way up front. Then there's not a lot of fun elements. So the solution was to go add fun to the onboarding process. So we got one of our team members to go in. They put this whole gift box idea together. solved all the right problems and we were able to kind of write this whole process had nothing to do software you know it had some design elements and stuff but it was very much around like just taking a problem thinking through the solution and then all the places we could get lost you know in the project and what this all it's really doing you know is helping you think deeply about what you're about to do which as entrepreneurs especially creative entrepreneurs we tend to be very like just like squirrel and we like off into one direction and then we see something else shiny and we go off the other direction. So this has been very helpful for me to get a little more disciplined, take an extra few seconds like between me saying I had this idea and then start assigning tasks to people. Like we have, I have like 12 different like contractors that are always working with us that are available in Slack. That's very, very dangerous for someone like this because I can just, you know, drop. bug things I can drop notes people hey let's do this let's do this it was this and literally like let it go for a few weeks and I'll spend all of our money just paying all these people for all these ideas rather than getting really focused and saying hey look let's all focus onto this one thing let's get this one thing done and so that's kind of the how this like the pitch works and that's kind of the biggest thing that we've used as a takeaway and the last thing I'll just touch on and then we're gonna jump in some like little questions here and feel free to drop questions if you're kind of watching on youtube or facebook drop them in the comments um i want to just show you this uh here we go what they call like the hill chart example so this is the second thing that sort of been a huge help for us um in thinking about this so what they do is let's say you you had those three pages of a website or let's say you had a sales funnel you have a landing page an order form and then you have this thank you page those things obviously need to be kind of connected together but the goal let's say let's say it looks like a website like you have a home page an about page a contact us page so each one of these projects kind of starts on they have like this hill chart example so there's a bunch of unknowns like I don't know what the copy is gonna look like I don't know what what it's gonna you know what the design is gonna lay out like what colors are we gonna use there's so many things we don't know and you know the least amount about the project when you start So if you've done any kind of agency or creative work, like you're very familiar with this process where you don't, you just don't know, like you kind of generally know because you've done this project before, but you don't know specifically for this project. So as you kind of start up on this project, and we figured this out as far as designing websites for clients, once we get to the top, this is where the client says they've approved the design, they've approved the copy. After that, it's super it's everything we is known we know how to build the page test it launch it host it all the things can happen after that point we don't even have to talk to the client after this and we've actually created a little video that explains this to clients so they know they are critical in this first process to get get to the get all the unknowns out of the way and we're going to try and do that as quick as possible and the one key point here is just that each of these can be done on a per page basis the goal is not to move three pages down the field in parallel. The goal is to get the first one out the door and launched as soon as possible and then come in and do the second and the third because what you'll do is you'll build momentum and then that third one will be really, really fast to knock out. So I'm going to stop there and there's so much more I can talk about and I'm going to link to some really cool resources below. If you're interested in reading ShapeUp, it's definitely worth it. You're going to have to skip over it because a lot of it's around software and development, but there's a lot of really cool product design project design kind of things that i feel like in there so um we can chat i wanted to share that with you jake and and if you've got any thoughts or questions or yeah we can implement this i love it man that's so cool anything that's like around the idea of like minimalism and efficiency and and essentialism more than just minimalism but essentialism which this is really essentialism it's core anything around that idea and marketing like huge into that or business development strategy so did they build base camp using this model they did yeah i mean base camp launched in like 2003 right now in base camp three already so they've done version one then they did version two version three but the um they'll take something like a calendar in base camp and then how much time they spend around just this one calendar getting it just right um and they talk about how they spend a lot of time they have a whole team that just does the shaping up and then another team that executes so of course they got like about 50 people in their company but there's two or three people that are kind of mainly responsible for the shape so they kind of take a problem they kind of work it together they figure out like what it's going to look like and then they hand that off to the team um to go execute on it So the idea is like kind of trying to fit all those things, kind of pulling it into just like a finite amount of time and energy they want to invest in something and then kind of going from there. So it seems like one of the biggest benefits is that it prevents like a scope creep and things growing. And you're like, oh, well, I also have to do this and I have to. But then while I'm at it, I might as well like find an icon for the like tab. browser oh crap well i don't have any good icons maybe i should go design one okay well you know and then you like go down those rabbit holes and if you're like me sometimes those rabbit holes can be a lot of time like fatal yeah yeah and it is hard because as a creative you know um you're there you're working on it you get inspired you're like oh i bet we could do this and that's like like you said you kind of have to look back and say look well what the goal is to actually like finish a rough version and get it out the door as fast as possible like get an ugly version of your sales page up and launch with facebook ads then come back and like add color to it like that would be their their way of doing a landing page um because if there's time if you want to go back and change that little icon and make it and that and they have little like cool notion things where they use a little uh the tilde little um symbol on your keyboard they put that in front of any task that is not um required so it's like a nice to have so as you're kind of throwing tasks together and you're thinking through like oh i want to fix this icon like you said put a little till the thing in front of that to do item and you know it's not essential like you can kind of skip through it and right that's been super helpful uh for us to look at Right, right. And so then you know, it's like, okay, if I have time, I can have this in. Yeah. And that way you can still capture the idea. Like maybe it's a really good idea. But you're not having to like stop everything you're doing. And then you end up missing your whole deadline. Just to go after that one little thing that really honestly isn't going to be, you know, a huge, huge win anyway. Yeah, for sure. It helps you to get like data quicker. You get stuff out there quicker. It sounds like. Exactly. Yeah. Just to get the, it's kind of getting the feedback loop a lot tighter. Like let's say you did launch an ugly Facebook, ugly sales page. You put like, you know, a quick ad that you didn't spend a whole lot of time on. At least you got it out the door. Like you're now getting feedback on that. And so when you sit down to make it pretty, you're, you've got. hot jar data, you've got clicks data, all the stuff that you can kind of think through, oh, people spend a lot of time on this one area, maybe I'll move it up, maybe we'll put this on like a different color. Like, so it's rather than getting this like beautiful, like, stunning thing and then launching it and you only start getting your data, you know, a few weeks from when you have the initial idea, kind of shrink that all back and rather, rather relaunch the sales page three times inside of that three weeks instead of waiting three weeks and launching it once, if that makes sense. Exactly. And I mean, I think that's so important because I would argue that like probably 80% of the time when you're a six figure or under entrepreneur, like who like 80% of the time that you launch a new project, website, ad campaign, line of business, like 80% of that time, you usually don't even really know what your customers want. Like you think you do. But most of the time we don't. I mean, there's exceptions, but like a lot of the times, and I, cause I see it all the time. People think they know what's going to look good on Facebook or they think they know what kind of offer, but until you get out and test it and push something through the door, you don't have any feedback. So it's really easy to waste a whole month building out a funnel and then you get hyped for a big launch and then no one buys it. And it's like, well, if you had like started with just a campaign on day one that was drafted out well, but didn't necessarily have all the bells and whistles, well, then you might have had more success. Yeah. And I think it's also something like if you are a quick start, which I know like Jake and I have that blessing, have that curse and that blessing we'll say. But. It just means you have to scale it back and be okay with launching something ugly. You could have an idea on Friday and spend a couple days and a week and then launch this idea. The idea is just to shrink it back. The whole goal is not to do eight weeks of work inside of four weeks. The goal is to do four weeks of work inside of four weeks. So it's also great just life kind of goal. You don't want a quality of life goals, we'll say as well. Not to try and just kill yourself to get. way more work done in a shorter period of time. Just kind of scope it back and kind of frame it to like, look, this needs to be up in a week. So I need to like scale this back, simplify where I can. Maybe you don't even need a landing page. Maybe you just need like a Facebook lead campaign. You know what I'm saying? Like if you think about it, you're like, okay, actually all this could be done on a sales call. i don't even need this like sales page like i could end up spending weeks designing a sales page when honestly it's going to be better if i just talk to that person and and the goal is to get it live get talking to the people you know you know what i'm saying so it's it's a um faster way to result essentially so as a quick start it is actually a fast way to get where you want instead of kind of going in sort of a a crazy like you know route to get there it is faster it really is yeah it is ironically it's more effective and it's faster to spend more time up front than on the back end fixing things that were broken or you know yeah it's better to get it out the door and ship it yep exactly cool well that's my uh that's what we're going through and i wish i could probably spend like hours going into this stuff and like we do a as part of our team and you know if you have a small team we try to read something every week as a team and then on fridays we spend 30 minutes just kind of discussing it that's a great way to like get your whole team excited and kind of on the same page because a lot of times like we as the business owner get inspired by reading this blog or watching this video and then we kind of come back we're like why aren't you guys all you know on on board with me um this is a great way to kind of bring everybody along so i actually read it for the first time with the team And it's been very helpful. So lots of cool resources. I'll link to a bunch of stuff down below if you guys are interested. All this stuff is free and out there on the internet. So nothing to buy. Just take advantage of it for sure. Cool. Well, if you guys have any other questions on this topic, drop it in the comments and just tag me or Jake or anything else marketing-wise. Just drop it in the Facebook group. you know drop it uh in the comments we'll try and uh next week we're going to do this every tuesday just kind of share a little little something that we think is useful um but if you guys have questions please let us know and we'll uh try and get those things answered talk soon everyone yeah tag us stuff you have any questions

Quick introduction to the Shape Up methodology from Basecamp. 

Shape Up is for product development teams who struggle to ship. Full of eye-opening insights, Shape Up will help you break free of "best practices" that aren't working, think deeper about the right problems, and start shipping meaningful projects.