Spend an hour talking to 37signals CEO Jason Fried, and you’ll find yourself drawn into his fixation on three frustrating facts about productivity tools today:
- They’re boring.
- They’re complicated.
- They’re overpacked with overhyped AI features that fail to do what they promise and end up providing little in the way of practical value.
Those same realities are the reason Fried decided to launch Fizzy—a new app that aims to reinvent organization software by undoing everything that’s happened to it over the past several years.
Challenging current standards is nothing new to 37signals, of course. Fried and his fellow face-of-the-company David Heinemeier Hansson have made a name for themselves as gadflies who aren’t afraid to take on conventional wisdom and criticize both Big Tech tendencies and general workplace politics across any and all mediums.
Their software, too, has often hinted at a decidedly rebellious streak that suggests the way we’ve been trained to do things is ripe for rethinking—something that’s apparent both with the company’s venerable project management product Basecamp and with its more recent email service Hey, which emphasizes privacy and control to give Gmail a run for its money.
Take a peek at the Fizzy homepage, and you’ll instantly see a sense of that same sort of us-against-them mentality in this newest project—with pointed jabs at the current states of Trello, Jira, Asana, and even GitHub Issues.
On the surface, interestingly enough, Fizzy actually seems a lot like Trello—the kanban-style cards-and-boards app that’s been through pivot after pivot and, in many views beyond just 37signals’ own assertions, got so bogged down in superfluous features that it’s lost sight of why people once loved it.
Fizzy, then, is “a return to the fundamentals,” Fried says—“with some changes.” And, fitting with the at-times contrarian philosophy of 37signals, the entire project started on a whim.
