One of my favorite heroes in this industry is 37signals. They're the guys who make Basecamp, Highrise, Campfire, and Know Your Company; they write incredible books like REWORK, and REMOTE; and the CEO even has a TED Talk. I've talked about them before a few times here because they're so awesome and so inspring. They take away all of the bureaucracy & red tape and only do things that actually help people work.
One of the points they make in Rework is to do less. We always try to do too much and it gets in the way of us doing our most important tasks. Meetings & managers are two excellent examples Jason Fried brings up in his TED talk. Just yesterday they announced a major change at their company. They've created a ton of products but none of them have been as successful as Basecamp has been so in an effort to keep the company as lean as possible they're dropping all of their other products. All of them.
Not only that but they're also rebranding themselves as Basecamp. They're no longer 37signals – they're just basecamp since that's all they're going to work on. And yes – I think this is great!
They can stay small (just 43 people), focus all of their energy on one product, and be incredibly agile to make the best product possible. The entire brand of 37signals – now Basecamp has always been “It just works. It's simple, it's easy to use, it's easy to understand, it's clear, it's reliable, and it's dependable.” By focusing on one product that will help them achieve these goals more than any amount of extra money or separate revenue streams will.
The reason they've been so successful is because they've always done things their way. This is their way and I'm really excited to see where Basecamp goes in the next year.