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or can afford cheaply. Then go. It’s not the gear that matters. It’s playing what you’ve got as well as you can. Your tone is in your fingers.

Sell your by-products
    When you make something, you always make something else. You can’t make just one thing. Everything has a by-product. Observant and creative business minds spot these by-products and see opportunities.
    The lumber industry sells what used to be waste—sawdust, chips, and shredded wood—for a pretty profit. You’ll find these by-products in synthetic fireplace logs, concrete, ice strengtheners, mulch, particleboard, fuel, and more.
    But you’re probably not manufacturing anything. That can make it tough to spot your by-products. People at a lumber company see their waste. They can’t ignore sawdust. But you don’t see yours. Maybe you don’t even think you produce any by-products. But that’s myopic.
    Our last book,
Getting Real
, was a by-product. We wrote that book without even knowing it. The experience that came from building a company and building software was the waste from actually doing the work. We swept up that knowledge first into blog posts, then into a workshop series, then into a .pdf, and then into a paperback. That by-product has made 37signals more than $1 million directly and probably more than another $1 million indirectly. The book you’re reading right now is a by-product too.
    The rock band Wilco found a valuable by-product in its recording process. The band filmed the creation of an album and released it as a documentary called
I Am Trying to Break Your Heart
. It offered an uncensored and fascinating look at the group’s creative process and infighting. The band made money off the movie and also used it as a stepping-stone toward reaching a wider audience.
    Henry Ford learned of a process for turning wood scraps from the production of Model T’s into charcoal briquets. He built a charcoal plant and Ford Charcoal was created (later renamed Kingsford Charcoal). Today, Kingsford is still the leading manufacturer of charcoal in America. *
    Software companies don’t usually think about writing books. Bands don’t usually think about filming the recording process. Car manufacturers don’t usually think about selling charcoal. There’s probably something you haven’t thought about that you could sell too.

Launch now
    When is your product or service finished? When should you put it out on the market? When is it safe to let people have it? Probably a lot sooner than you’re comfortable with. Once your product does what it needs to do, get it out there.
    Just because you’ve still got a list of things to do doesn’t mean it’s not done. Don’t hold everything else up because of a few leftovers. You can do them later. And doing them later may mean doing them better, too.
    Think about it this way: If you had to launch your business in two weeks, what would you cut out? Funny how a question like that forces you to focus. You suddenly realize there’s a lot of stuff you don’t need. And what you
do
need seems obvious. When you impose a deadline, you gain clarity. It’s the best way to get to that gut instinct that tells you, “We don’t need this.”
    Put off anything you don’t need for launch. Build the necessities now, worry about the luxuries later. If you really think about it, there’s a whole lot you don’t need on day one.
    When we launched Basecamp, we didn’t even have the ability to bill customers! Because the product billed in monthly cycles, we knew we had a thirty-day gap to figure it out. So we used the time before launch to solvemore urgent problems that actually mattered on day one. Day 30 could wait.
    Camper, a brand of shoes, opened a store in San Francisco before construction was even finished and called it a Walk in Progress. Customers could draw on the walls of the empty store. Camper displayed shoes on cheap plywood laid over dozens of shoe boxes. The most popular message written by customers