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Comment by akmiller | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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.

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.

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!

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.

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