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- Rework Book Review & Ideas for Small Businesses
- Thursday, May 06, 2010
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After reading tons of reviews and online chatter about the book “Rework” by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, two of the founders of the company 37 Signals, I finally got around to buying it last week. We have used their product Basecamp as our project management tool for many years and I have been fascinated for a long time at their ability to garner great publicity and an almost fanatical fan base, by basically taking a very no-nonsense, common sense approach to business and the products they produce.
Before I had purchased the book, I was really impressed with the promotional videos they created with Coudal Partners to promote the book:
You can see some further videos here and here.
Other than a little bit of fancy editing at the very end of the video and some nice lighting, this video couldn’t be simpler. The amazingly annoying, but pitch-perfect management speak (“I think that’s a good jumping off point to talk about goals that we want to accomplish today”) on the conference call is enough to make the required impact.
I have to admit I came to Rework slightly wanting to dislike it. I thought it was just going to be a rehash of previous blog posts that have appeared on the 37 Signals blog and a cynical money making scheme, with some infuriatingly simple, but true lessons from the 37 Signals book of how to do business. Although this is actually partially true – I had read decent chunks of the books in different forms on their blog – throughout reading the book I found myself reinvigorated about our business, enthusiastic to try new ideas and generally more upbeat about moving forward. You can read Rework in one or two sittings. Each chapter is generally 2 pages long – making it perfect for dipping into. There are no ground-breaking ideas in this book and most of the advice is actually basic common sense, but Jason and David’s general belief that “anyone can make it work” is contagious and actually quite inspiring.
The reason for this blog post is a chapter entitled “Tone is in your fingers”, that rang especially true for me and what we are trying to achieve with trakAxPC.
“It’s tempting for people to obsess over tools instead of what they’re going to do with these tools. You know the type:[…] Amateur photographers who want to debate film versus digital endlessly instead of focusing on what actually makes a photograph great.
You also see it in people who want to blog, podcast or shoot videos for their business but get hung up on which tools to use. The content is what matters. You can spend tons on fancy equipment, but if you’ve got nothing to say…well, you’ve got nothing to say.
Use whatever you’ve got or can afford cheaply. Then go. It’s not the gear that matters. It’s playing with what you’ve got as well as you can.”
We believe that with trakAxPC, any small business can start creating great videos to promote and showcase their products and services with little or no experience. Whether you’re an independent real estate agent wanting to create video tours of your properties, a retailer showcasing this season’s new stock or a service provider wanting to create a short promo video to introduce yourself and your services, for $24.95 trakAxPC has all the features you’ll need to put your video together. So forget having to spend hundreds of dollars on fancy software or hours and hours trying to get your head around complicated editing features. Give trakAxPC a try today and remember – it’s not the gear that matters!
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