Basecamp Breeze - Private Email Mailing Lists from 37signals | Hacker News Reader

Basecamp Breeze - Private Email Mailing Lists from 37signals

basecamp.com

70 pointsyesimahuman54 comments

Your messages are private and won’t show up on Google, Yahoo, or Bing.

In other words, HN, this product is not targeted to people like you, because people who read HN don't say things like "will my emails show up on Google Yahoo and Bing?"

Right. It's targeted to people for whom the complexity of something like Google Groups, which can be made public and indexable I think, is a barrier. They don't want to worry about something they don't understand releasing everything to the public.

This is pedantic. Copywriting has to reach a broad audience. Not all products designed for the layman are useless to the technical.

No, I think this is the opposite of true. It is very easy for copy that attempts to include nerds to alienate normals, or, for that matter, for products that would be more lucrative if targeted to normals to lose marketability by trying to include nerds.

People trying to get traction with new products should be unembarrassed by featuresets and supporting copy that targets normal people and irritates nerds. 37signals offerings are a great example of that technique executed well.

Does anyone else find 37signals competitor comparison dishonest/disingenuous?

For example, when 37signals compares Breeze to Google Group [1], Google Group steps #3-6 are all the same "step" but 37signals breaks it out to multiple artificial steps to give the illusion there's more work in the sign-up process for Google Groups (when there's not).

What 37signals did was make each form field on the same sign-up page into multiple "steps".

If this same logic was applied to 37signals Breeze sign-up process, then their process would in fact be nearly 10 steps as well since a "step" is required to input your List Name, another "step" for credit card info, etc.

This seems a bit shady ... just saying.

[1] http://basecamp.com/breeze/compare#google

Absolutely. Also I usually have to get up and search in my pocket for my credit card, and then type it in. Time wise that counts for at least 3-4 steps on basecamp's "timescale". Only companies with really good reputation can pull off such a simple product and make some money out of it - and I'm not even sure they'll be successful at it.

I'm curious as to why they put this under the Basecamp brand. While it can be used by teams, it sort of gets lost on the homepage and its target market probably won't even discover it. Why not make it a separate product that can handle its own marketing and brand without trying to be interchanged with Basecamp?

If they did, it would be just another mail group provider, charging ten bucks instead of zero. I think they are selling the Basecamp/37signals brand image as much as the service itself.

They have lots of products that aren't branded as Basecamp. I think the likelier implication is that we're going to start seeing more bite-sized Basecamp apps like this. The pricing model for this one is very app store.

My guess: because they hope that this simple offering serves as an introduction to the Basecamp brand and works as lead-gen for the more expensive Basecamp offering.

Not sure why anyone would pay 10.00 for this. We offer this functionality free in our app at http://teamloopapp.com and not only that the people on the receiving end can choose to get via SMS as well. I'm sure you can find it for free in many other places too.

The "team" thing confused me on your site. I thought you were using the team metaphor for small business teams, especially since you talked about player availability on dates. It took me a minute of examining the site's content before I understood, "Oh, he really is talking about sports teams." The functionality would work great for, say, conference attendees who want to set up parties and get-togethers and email each other leading up to the event.

Thanks for the feedback and you weren't the first to be confused. We are working on new design on front side to help clear it up. We thought about larger use-cases but the problem I'd been experiencing as a parent with young kids in sports was directly related to communication with the coach (and as the coach with the parents) so that's why we focused on sports teams up front. But, I have created a "team" for other purposes in our app including the development of the app itself.

I would pay $10 yesterday to outsource this away from my org's IT if I felt I had a chance at actually getting said $10 request approved (to be fair, the fact that it's a third-party-run list for our internal ops would be the issue, not the $10).

If it made my life easier and wouldn't get me fired, I'd gladly donate the $10 to get it done myself. And I wonder if that might be the target market here. Small groups in bigger companies that want a no hassle listserv?

Makes sense to me. Or Microsoft shops that can't just throw Mailman on a random machine and can't get around the Exchange administrator's policies. They may not be able to skunkworks a new @foocorp.com email but they can have a third-party host it.

Not to slight 37signals, but I think this is one of those cases where they can sell something that other companies have had limited success with simply because they are 37signals.

I would concur with that. I also don't think that's a slight at all, what a great place to be as a company!

Or the opposite could be true, and this very simple offering could serve as lead-gen for Basecamp, which also explains why they extended the Basecamp brand to accomodate it.

What proportion of the addressable market for Basecamp is aware that the product exists? 1%? 0.5%?

I would agree with this. If the target market really is "mom's church group" (which it seems to be from the examples), then I doubt they're going to know who 37signals are.

Basecamp Breeze is targeting people like my mom, who would want to setup an email "club" for her church prayer group.

Pretty positive she'd have no idea what to do after reading "simple team management for coaches" — even if you offer the exact same functionality as Breeze.

(product messaging > feature lists)

True, and I didn't mean to suggest that people should just use my application instead of this. I guess I was just pointing out that this to me is a simple feature (one that I think I added in less than a days time to our app) and they've turned it into a full-fledged product that they are charging for. As the commenter above stated, I guess once you have the rep of a 37signals you can charge for this sort of thing.

As an example of this kind of very specific use case targeting: http://basecamp.com/breeze/bookclub

This seems to emphasize the wrong features.

> No need to remember email addresses.

In the last couple of years, I had to copy-paste a few addresses to send an email and that was the worst case.

> No important announcement is missed.

Hm, have you seen my father managing his email? Also, when you take email overload into account, this is clearly weaker than nagging alerts in a collaboration software.

> If you can send an email, you can use Breeze.

Certainly I can send posts to a Breeze list, but what if a misbehaving user needs to get removed from the list? What if I need to rename my group email? There are a few more tasks involved for a list administrator than a regular end-user. The premise might be good, the phrasing is not.

> Your messages are private and won’t show up on Google, Yahoo, or Bing.

Unless someone leaks it, yes, so this is a false sense of security; and what implicit publicity do people expect from email anyway? They are trained to trust their email account too much already.

And what if my group works just fine until I need to add the 51st member? Darng, now we have to migrate. It definitely smells like a limitation just for its own sake.

Overall I don't think this fits well into the well designed product line of 37signals, but then I welcome anything that keeps people from using Facebook for simple group communication.

This is the sort of over-critical analysis that is too prevalent on HN.

There's a counterargument to any decision, and it seems like you're trying to find ways to disparage something you don't like.

I'm not sure any value was added beyond stating the obvious limitations (read: design decisions).

Yes, it's a simple product and my review was probably too in-depth, although if there's any one place to submit it I thought HN would be it.

Perhaps stating the obvious is not counter-productive if the product in question is not well thought of, and considering 37signals' history (especially Basecamp Next) I'd argue it applies to Breeze.

I tried to phrase my opinion not to be overly cynical and I'm sorry if my comment still remained offensive.

> The test for substance is a lot like it is for links. Does your comment teach us anything? There are two ways to do that: by pointing out some consideration that hadn't previously been mentioned, and by giving more information about the topic, perhaps from personal experience. Whereas comments like "LOL!" or worse still, "That's retarded!" teach us nothing.

For heaven's sake, don't apologize for giving an honest opinion. If we had to apologize every time someone in the world found something to get offended by then half our speech would be apologies for the other half.

If it matters, I stood completely by my statements. It is not always easy to evaluate whether my tone is appropriate or not, which is why I followed the path of the least resistance.

I thought your statements were insightful and relevant. Some of the the time the HN community is right that somebody is being gratuitously critical or missing the point, but rest of the time they are just touchy and don't want to hear any good criticism.

Apologizing for their unreasonableness only encourages it.

How many times can somebody monetize listservs? Good on them for seeing the opportunity. Now I've got to get started on my paid Gopher app :)

Does anyone else find the cursive (Narrative) font tough to read?

Yes.

Definitely a candidate for A/B testing.

Yes. It also has the tops chopped off some times due to bad sizing.

For once my org's third-world IT infrastructure (IE 7) comes in handy. Everything is gloriously degraded down and readable and with only slight layout breaks.

I did find it to be a strange choice. I also thought the main navigation (Compare Basecamp Breeze, Make a group email list) was a Google Ad and instinctively ignored it. It took me a few glances to realize that it was actually part of the site.

I wonder how this compares to Google Groups (which has gotten awfully bloated lately).

It's interesting how 37s continues to eschew using high value domains (breeze123.com, campfirenow.com, highrisehq.com).

I get daily / weekly digests for all of my Google Groups. I didn't need to see the UI in months.

Looking at it it is a bit feature heavy, but since it doesn't interfere with my day to day I don't think I will be using breeze...

Interesting too that they did buy Basecamp.com. I guess it's their most important product, revenue wise.

Who is the target audience of Basecamp Breeze? Is it meant for business use or personal use?

Based on the example emails addresses (my-book-club, classic-movie-club etc.) on the front page, I assume it's meant for personal use; after all, most business have email servers that can easily handle/manage email lists.

On that note, I believe the "Company Announcement" images on http://basecamp.com/breeze/compare should be replaced with a non-company email (@37signals.com), something more similar to the email examples on the front page (my-little-pony-fanatics@breeze123.com).

Lastly, if it is targeted at non-businesses, using the Basecamp brand, which is primarily used by businesses, is a bit confusing.

I would like to know the reason why they used the "basecamp" brand for this instead of releasing it under the name of "breeze" alone, like any of their other products. I'm sure there is a very good one!

Is this a joke? I'm really struggling to understand if this is an actual thing.

Seriously, who would subject themselves to this reply-all hell?!

Open source developers do, almost by definition (this is just a listserv, but explained in terms the target audience would understand).

This must be a new pricing for 37signals. 10$ One time - access forever. Is there any other product where they have a one time payment?

Video games :) Guild Wars 2 is a MMO that costs a one time fee of $60 (plus optional in game purchases).

Pinboard is a one time fee - that gradually goes up as they add members. It's currently right around $10.

Half-half, the archive account costs a recurring fee.

Yahoogroups and Googlegroups are hugely used on daily basis. It is just that there is nobody else credible out there to take over their market. Yahoo has locked in user's archives so it is even impossible for people to move.

I guess that $10 does not provide a migration utility to move Yahoo/Google content out. Nope, not going to work for me.

I'm curious what the long-term plan for this service is. Surely it won't be sustainable at a one-off $10 fee?

They already have the infrastructure for this and they have to maintain it running for Basecamp so what they're doing here is more of their "sell your byproducts" thing.

I totally agree. I don't get why 37 signals would be at all interested in taking one time $10 payments from Moms and Pops when they have monthly recurring revenue coming in from a bunch of companies. Even if they have the infrastructure, just the support overhead from un-tech friendly folks will be a pain.

Dear 37signals,

Thank for your detailed step-to-step guide for creating a Yahoo or Google group! I'm making my first mailing list in Google Groups right now.

Sincerely, grateful user

PS: With apologies to http://dearblankpleaseblank.com/

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