Fizzy is 37signals’ fix for boring, complex, AI-infested productivity apps
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, gotten 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.
Fizzy’s bubbled-up beginnings
Two years ago, Fried and his team were sitting around at a company meetup and talking about bugs—the buzzing, leg-biting variety, not the virtual ones we sometimes see in software.
“Someone said something about bugs hitting a windshield,” Fried recalls. “And I said, ‘Wait—that’s interesting.'”
Fried had been wanting to create a simple app for tracking software bugs for ages, but he’d never quite landed on the right approach or angle to make it unique. The visual of literal insects splatting onto a windshield struck him as the metaphor he’d been missing.
“The [computer] screen would be a windshield, with the splatters all over it—and the splatters would be like bugs,” he explains. “Bigger splats would be like bigger issues, and smaller splats would be smaller issues.”
This led to the creation of an internal tool called, fittingly enough, Splat. Eventually, the bugs-on-a-windshield concept evolved into bubbles representing different bugs—bubbles that, notably, looked fizzy—and from there, the interface became a simpler and less cartoony series of boards and cards.
And then, another light bulb went off in Fried’s busy brain.
Basecamp has had a feature in it called Card Tables for a while now—essentially a form of Trello-like kanban boards for organizing info within the service. The same sort of setup exists as a feature or an optional view in lots of other productivity suites, too, ranging from Notion to ClickUp, Asana, Any.do, and beyond.
But Fried suddenly realized that with Trello’s seemingly endless identity crisis, no simple, stand-alone option for easy kanban-style organization existed as a de facto default anymore. And while that sort of interface worked well as one feature within a broader service like Basecamp—as well as an element in Jira, Asana, and the other productivity tools Fizzy’s web marketing calls out as having grown stale and sluggish—there was also a demand for it to be its own isolated entity, without an entire ecosystem of features around it.
“I’ve always been fanatically obsessed with ‘what’s the simplest good version of this idea,'” Fried says. “We didn’t build this to compete with anybody. . . . We build things that we want to exist.”
And thus, Fizzy was born—a freemium and open source app that’s “Kanban as it should be,” as its homepage declares, and not (ahem) “as it has been.”
The Fizzy kanban experience
When you first sign into Fizzy and start a new board, you’re greeted with three default columns: “Not Now,” “Maybe,” and “Done.” And, interestingly, only one of those columns is open and fully visible at a time.
You can always add more columns beyond those, of course, but that opening trio is intended to serve as a simple starting point and way to remain focused—with an approach that Fried believes will work for a surprising number of organizational needs.
That’s the main Fizzy framework. Within any column in any board, then, you can create a card and fill it in with any manner of text, lists, or images. You might create cards to track bugs, for instance, following Fizzy’s original vision. Or you might use cards to represent work tasks, household chores, customer feedback—almost anything imaginable.
From there, you can easily move cards between columns or even to different boards to represent their status at any given moment. You can add steps, leave comments, and assign cards to collaborators as well as place tags on cards to group related items together. And you can pin cards, too, to put them in an easily visible stack in the lower-left corner of the screen—a possibility I’ve found myself especially enamored with as I’ve explored Fizzy and figured out how it might work for me.
Another particularly fun and helpful touch is Fizzy’s feature for labeling a card as urgent: You just click a ticket icon in the card’s corner, and that turns it into a “Golden Ticket”—which causes the card to both appear golden in color and move to the top of its column.
One struggle I’ve absolutely experienced with Trello and other organizational apps is what I think of as “the graveyard problem,” or the tendency to start seeing these systems as dumping grounds for info that you never end up revisiting. Fizzy helps you avoid that dump-and-jump mentality by automatically moving any card you create into the “Not Now” column if there’s no activity on it after 30 days—though you can opt to change that timing on an account-wide basis or specifically for any individual board.
“The idea [is] that you cannot just keep adding things that you’re never going to do,” Fried says. “These things are ephemeral. You don’t get to just have something on a list forever.”
That’s all well and good, and it helps Fizzy feel like a fresher version of a familiar environment. What’s most striking about using the app, though, is its simplicity—for better or, sometimes, for worse—and, alongside that, its unabashed boldness in what it wants to be.
The pros and cons of simplicity
More than anything, what I noticed within seconds of trying Fizzy was the absence of overwhelming menus, buried options, and integrations I never asked for. At the same time, I was struck by the presence of a distinctive design and sense of whimsy that’s largely faded from the greater software universe.
That feeling is palpable in everything from Fizzy’s large, playful fonts to the splashes of color throughout its interface—all subtle-seeming touches on paper but noticeable contrasts in practice, coming from the largely gray-on-gray world that’s become commonplace in what Fried considers the “Notionization” of software design.
“Software’s become boring—corporate,” he says. “It’s lost a lot of personality over the years. We wanted to bring some of that back in.”
Design aside, the relatively small number of feature-oriented bells and whistles acts as both an asset and a liability for Fizzy, especially now in its early form. As someone who spends hours a week inside Trello, not having Fizzy feel slow and bloated and larded up with awkwardly tacked-on options really is refreshing. But at the same time, for me, there are certain elements missing that make Fizzy difficult to fully embrace.
To wit: At this point, I use Trello primarily for organizing my writing—and that means I’m constantly saving stuff I see on the web for later revisiting. I rely heavily on both an unofficial Trello browser extension and the official Trello mobile app for being able to beam anything I see on any device I’m using into a specific Trello spot with a single swift click on my computer or a couple quick taps on my phone. It’s integral to my workflow.
Fizzy, as of this moment, exists only as a progressive web app—something you install from your browser, without any platform-native form. And for the most part, that approach works admirably. But when it comes to a use case like mine, where I need a native presence that makes link-saving easy, it’s a limitation that would keep me from being able to leap to Fizzy today.
Weighing out cases like that and deciding what’s worth adding versus when it’s more important to prioritize the product’s purity is high on Fried’s mind, particularly as someone who’s watched so many other apps get weighted down, overly complicated, and increasingly unpleasant to use over time.
“Software slides downhill—that’s how it evolves, unfortunately,” he says. “What was once good is now complicated. It’s now harder than it used to be and unnecessarily so, for most cases.”
Fried readily concedes that there are always instances where someone needs something more in a piece of software. For what it’s worth, he says his team would like to make mobile apps for Fizzy eventually. (37signals offers a full complement of native versions of Basecamp and Hey.) And he seemed intrigued by my browser extension use case as well.
But by failing to maintain a strong vision for what a product should and shouldn’t be—and what specific needs it should and, equally important, shouldn’t serve—an app can try to be everything for everyone and end up being nothing of consequence for anyone.
“What ends up happening is . . . almost everyone lose[s] the charm in the beauty of the simple thing,” argues Fried.
AI, source code, and beyond
One feature I’ve found myself pleased not to find in Fizzy is any manner of AI—as in, the large-language-model-powered generative-AI fiddliness that’s being crammed into every nook and cranny of so many other services and serving as the entire raison d’être for countless new tools.
Fried says his team experimented with bringing AI into Fizzy in a few different forms but ultimately determined it wasn’t useful enough—and good enough, for now—to release.
“When it exists, people tend to lean on it in a way where it’s considered to be the be-all, end-all truth,” he says. “In our testing, it was not that at all. It was a bit of a mirage.”
One early experiment involved a system that’d let you ask your account questions in natural language and receive summarized info about your data. Given how new the product was, though, 37signals found it was often failing to provide any meaningful insights—and decided not to present an opportunity for users to ask questions that the service couldn’t effectively answer.
Another AI experiment offered a weekly newsletter-style overview of all the activity across your Fizzy boards, with five headlines of things that happened in the previous week. Fried says it was fine, but he found that reading it didn’t make him feel any more informed—so the feature didn’t really need to exist, unless it was there solely for buzzword bragging.
“I don’t want to put software out in the world that’s checking a box if it’s not really doing its job,” he says.
To be clear, Fried doesn’t see his present stance on AI within Fizzy to be any sort of dogma. If and when the technology serves a clear and effective goal with genuine practical benefit, he says, he’ll consider it. But until then, he sees no reason to indulge an industry obsession and add to the hype only to leave folks disappointed when they actually experience it.
Another area where Fizzy is breaking the productivity app mold is in 37signals’ decision to share the software’s source code, with the option for anyone to host it themselves and use it—heck, even customize and modify it—for free. The only limitation, according to 37signals, is not being able to run it as a hosted commercial service for other users, a right the company reserves for itself.
If you use the app in its more standard 37signals-hosted setup, you can create up to 1,000 cards across 1GB of storage without having to pay—a threshold Fried expects will be more than enough for most people to embrace the service for years before having to shell out a dime. Once you cross the 1,000-card threshold, it costs $20 per month for unlimited cards and up to 5GB of storage, with additional space available for an extra fee.
Fried says there’s no sweeping strategic vision behind this or any grand plan for Fizzy to act as a gateway toward Basecamp or other 37signals products. It’s just an app he and his team wanted to see exist and so decided to create, as its own stand-alone thing, for anyone else who might benefit from using it.
“This is not going to be our breadwinner,” he says. “We’re at the point in our careers . . . [where] we can do stuff we just want to try to do because we think it’s the right thing.”
Fried even goes as far as to say that if current 37signals customers find they can accomplish everything they need with Fizzy and no longer require the much more ambitious Basecamp subscription, he considers that a company win. In fact, he says that’s happened numerous times already—and in each instance, he’s done nothing but celebrate it.
“If you don’t need [Basecamp], now we have something else for you,” he says.
More than anything, Fried’s hope is that Fizzy can not only serve its direct users but also serve the tech industry by setting an example of—and maybe even creating expectations for—how satisfying software can be when it deliberately tries to be different and doesn’t just blindly mimic trends.
“Our products don’t look like anybody else’s,” he says. “They don’t work like anybody else’s. And I’d like to see more companies do that versus just follow the established patterns.”