We Don't Sell You
Source: https://37signals.com/07/ ↗
One of 37signals' numbered manifesto pages — a short statement that compresses the company's business model into a single principle: they sell software to customers, not customers to advertisers.
The distinction is small on the page and structural underneath; it determines the incentives, the product design, the relationship to users.
For product direction the page is useful as a diagnostic — almost every product decision descends from the answer to "who is our customer, really?", and 37signals makes the answer loud on purpose.
Share it in conversations about ad models, alignment, and what it takes to build a product that is honestly aligned with the people who use it.
A one-minute read; keep it as a conversation opener.
Central argument
37signals argues that their business model — charging customers directly for software — is not merely a financial choice but the structural foundation of their entire relationship with users. Because they sell to customers rather than selling customers to advertisers, their incentives are intrinsically aligned with making the product genuinely useful rather than maximally engaging or data-extractive. The piece frames this as a deliberate and public commitment: the business model is the product strategy.
Critique
The argument is clean but assumes a binary that obscures real complexity — many products operate on hybrid models (freemium, marketplace, platform) where the 'customer' is genuinely multiple parties simultaneously, and direct payment alone does not guarantee alignment. A SaaS product sold to an enterprise buyer, for instance, may be paid for by procurement but used by employees with entirely different needs, recreating the advertiser-user misalignment problem inside a subscription structure. 37signals' model works partly because of their specific scale and product philosophy; the manifesto risks becoming a moral credential that doesn't translate cleanly to more structurally complex businesses.
Why it matters for product
For a CPO, the question 'who is our customer, really?' is one of the most consequential inputs to metrics design — whether the team optimizes for engagement, retention, revenue expansion, or user outcomes depends entirely on whose interests the business is structurally rewarded for serving. When this question is left implicit, product teams end up in constant friction: discovery prioritizes one customer, roadmap decisions favor another, and success metrics reflect a third. Making the business model explicit — as 37signals does publicly — is a forcing function for alignment across discovery, delivery, and organizational incentives.