It was about helping people in the style that the co-founders thought was best. And after the success of Basecamp, Fried and Hansson began to try to find other ways to help people with simple software. Fried and Hansson started exploring how simple software could help small businesses by creating new, highly specific products for different tasks.
A lot of users loved these new simple tools just as much as they loved Basecamp. That made it all the more unusual when 37signals cut all of these new, money-making products and returned to being a one-product company a decade in.
In the early days, Basecamp experimented by building a bunch of smaller projects and apps outside of the core project management product. As other companies started building their own SaaS tools, there was pressure to maintain and add to all of their tools to out-do competitors. Other companies in similar positions try to own all of these different verticals by creating a lot of different tools that are all the best at everything they do.
They doubled down on their original project management tool, and focused all of their attention on improving the basics. They released a statement in reflecting that in , the company was getting more revenue from Basecamp than from their design services. With all of their focus now on product, the team released their next web application. At the time, this was one of the only simple and free tools for to-do lists. A sample list on ta-da list in Next, they released a tool called Backpack , which was a way to manage different documents, files, and schedules.
An image from a product tour for Backpack explaining different features. The ideas for these apps came from expanding niche features in Basecamp. They were directly born from what the 37signals team thought would be useful for themselves, and therefore useful to other people.
And in the relatively new SaaS environment, these simple tools were extremely helpful for users who could easily complete these basic tasks with simple tools that had never been available to them before. An image from a product tour of Campfire explaining different features. After using it internally for 45 days and deciding that they loved it, they released it as a product they called Campfire.
That same year, they released Job Board and Gig Board, classified job and gig listing services for people who build websites. Since 37signals was growing as a team, this was also something that was immediately useful and relevant to them—so they knew other people would like it, too.
The original interface of Job Board. Highrise kept it really simple by focusing only on managing online contacts and integrating with ESPs like Outlook. An image from a product tour of Highrise explaining different features. With their four main products—Basecamp, Campfire, Backpack, and Highrise—37signals was now serving over 1 million users. This idea came directly from the web design work that 37signals used to do. The goal was to help small businesses find designers—something that they knew from their old clients could be difficult.
The Sortfolio interface in Between all of their apps, 37signals now had 3 million users. The company continued to be cash flow positive. Still, in they decided to sell it. So instead of half-assing their work on it, they sold it.
Fried said:. Sometimes you have to prune your winners. That way, you can focus your attention on your bigger winners. So they doubled down and launched a redesign of Basecamp called Basecamp Next.
If you have a general question for us, just drop us an email at email basecamp. We love sharing our ideas on business, culture, design, and technology with the world.
Either way, thanks for visiting Basecamp. We the Basecamp! Read the story of how Basecamp got started. Ruby on Rails was born here! We did? Back then, we relied on email for everything. Know what I mean? So we started looking for a project management tool. We needed something to help us communicate ideas, organize the work to be done, and present work to stakeholders.
Simple as that. We tried a few tools, but they were complicated and too hard to use. So we slowly slipped back to using our old standby - email.
Our problems continued. Frustrated, we decided to build our own simple project management app. By making workplace chat a politics-free zone, Coinbase was freeing employees to do the work they were hired to, rather than wage partisan warfare on the job. What that view misses, I think, is how confusing rules like these are to employees.
One Basecamp worker I spoke with today, who requested anonymity, wondered the extent to which parenting issues could be raised at work. Jane Yang, a data analyst at the company, told me that restricting internal conversations would negatively affect diversity and inclusion efforts. Making that discussion off-limits internally could ensure that inequality in profit sharing becomes a structural feature of the company.
Yang also wrote an open letter to the founders about her experiences at the company. That confusion is compounded by the fact that, for a small company, Basecamp has taken an outsized number of political stances — all of which employees are encouraged to discuss. But it has also involved itself in politics at a much lower level: in Basecamp let a candidate for Chicago mayor use its office in the West Loop as a campaign headquarters. Keeping track of which issues of the moment are up for discussion thus becomes one more chunk of mental overhead for employees who are already struggling.
Hansson told me that the rules are not draconian — no one is going to be bounced out the door for occasionally straying out of bounds. But to employees, the move was received more as a shift to willful ignorance — about the world around them, and about the lived experiences of the employees who occupied it. And this is the culmination of that. This column was co-published with Platformer , a daily newsletter about Big Tech and democracy. Cookie banner We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from.
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