Two big announcements
37signals.com
37signals.com
However, it's weird to lose the 37 Signals brand. I actually don't like Basecamp as a product, but I love 37 Signals. I treat their books like a bible, and read their blog posts religiously. Somehow, they seemed like more like a philosophy than just a product, and Basecamp (and Rails and their books) were a side effect.
I know it's the same people and nothing will really change (A rose by any other name...), but it's still so weird to me to lose 37 Signals.
2 years ago, I watched DHH's Startup School presentation on YouTube, and it completely changed the way I perceived what a "startup" could be.
Today, my partner and I are recently ramen profitable on our first SaaS product, and growing. It's extremely exciting - we're seeing the fruits of a project that we love actually paying our bills. "Exciting" probably isn't even the right word... we're building our way to financial freedom and liberation from the rat race.
Our business is our livelihood now, and you can find evidence of 37Signal's influence in every nook and cranny of it. Their writings and philosophy have affected our business and our lives deeply, so a deep emotional connection to the name is an obvious consequence.
It feels funny, but as Jason clearly alludes to at the end of the post, a lot of their moves have. I'm looking forward to following along as the future of Basecamp unfolds.
Basecamp doesn't work for how I organise projects, and Campfire is a poor competitor to HipChat.
But I frequently point to them as an example of how to run a company. And they know their customers really well.
I guess I'm just not one of their customers.
Personally, I enjoy using FlowDock and Hubot.
2004 first product launched.
5 years after the company and team came together.
5 years of time to hone the skills and struggle.
Oh yah, and another 10 years to grow to 43 people.
Simple reminder of the commitment to patience it can actually take to build a remarkable business.
They were formed to design websites and that's what they did for 5 years. Though I guess you can view web design as a "struggle" with all that IE6 testing and what not, but some people really enjoy it :)
Who.
0_o
But then, I also used to write 4096 byte demos in x86 asm. And a bunch of other crazy things that don't even occur to me now, some things with JS ...
Seems to me that they've been successful mostly because of their involvement in the Ruby and startup world, rather than making great products. Nothing wrong with that, but it's good to be clear about the distinction between a company that makes great product and a company that's good at marketing itself.
Campfire is pretty bad though, yeah.
Or, rather, that there's no significant loss to them due to shuttering, because of the (relative) lack of use.
That said, spinning off would be the -wise- idea. Most likely they'll find a good amount from a buyer based on the name and reputation.
If your entire product can be copied in a day, it's probably not that great.
The idea that campfire is refined to perfection is laughable.
We[0] differentiate by keeping it as simple as possible: have discussions and make decisions together, that's it.
Other tools are great for other types of projects, such as Trello[1] for a sort of collaborative to-do list.
You also need to look at when basecamp & campfire were first released. They were significantly better in comparison to the competition at the time. And while basecamp doesn't personally fit with how I run and manage projects, I know a lot of people who are very happy with it. It fits in with how a lot of companies (many of them not "technical" companies) run their projects. For a certain kind of business it's a very good product.
"Nothing wrong with that, but it's good to be clear about the distinction between a company that makes great product and a company that's good at marketing itself"
A company that's not good at marketing and sales doesn't stay a company - no matter how good the products are ;-)
does a product that grows due to word of mouth amount to good marketing? i believe not. dropbox, github and recently put.io. i learnt about these products because of word of mouth e.g show hn not Google ads or some youtube marketing gimmick. i tend to use a product if a friend i know is immune to FOMO recommends it to me.
While everyone may not be happy with it, it's certainly better than a lot of shut downs and other moves startups have made that have pissed a lot of people off.
Also, did Jason Fried step out of a time machine with his IBM Selectric typewriter to compose this? 37Signals have always been on the hipster end of things but the design of this letter is ridiculously so.
I gotta admit, while it's the content of the article that has 99% of my interest (going to miss the "37signals" name, but it sounds like they know exactly what they're doing, so good for them!), I did also pause and wonder about the Courier font as well as the "scribbly" version of the Basecamp logo.
But then, that's me, and sometimes a font is just a font? :)
We will not sell either of these products to a company that is planning to shut the products down.
IMO Hipchat is a better chat tool than Campfire.
Anyone care to take a guess to what Campfire and Highrise revenue? What type of multiple of revenue do they expect to get?
[Addendum] Perhaps 6x was extremely low given the current market. Need to update my priors: http://tomtunguz.com/saas-valuation-bubble/
Here's to the future.
Though my guess is all the people who applauded 37signals for their product strategy, will now again applaud 37signals.
And there will be a book "The One Product Company".
Almost certainly a sign that you're not the target market for basecamp. They do a lot of testing on their landing pages (see http://signalvnoise.com/posts/2991-behind-the-scenes-ab-test... for example.)
The Q & A does highlight the reality distortion field around the cult-like status of 37 Signals though:
> Q: This is a really unusual strategy (..)
No. No it isn't. But if Jason Fried claims it is, I'm sure that will be echo-ed on HN.
(Not trying to be super negative, I consider 37 Signals a major source of inspiration, and I'm a Basecamp user.)
> Based on current revenues, current growth rates, and a conservative multiple, Campfire will sell in the single digit millions, and Highrise will sell in the tens of millions.
Amazing that those products are doing so well and they've largely been on autopilot for the past few years. This info + the switch to focus on Basecamp can only mean that they're making an absolute killing with Basecamp.
We already migrated away to Hipchat as a result, and I get the impression that others might have been doing the same.
We've also got an easy migration tool for any existing Highrise users: http://close.io/highrise and a solid REST API http://developer.close.io/
We're polishing up our new JSON-API-based http://jsonapi.org/ REST API, and we've got a well-supported JSON-RPC API published at http://nutshell.com/api
We want to take great care of any Highrise customers looking for a new home: http://close.io/highrise
Check out http://close.io/ - mention that you were a Highrise customer and I can make sure you'll get a special discount.
Close.io is a next-gen sales communication tracking tool with an easy 1-click migration from Highrise, as well as automatic 2-way email syncing, call tracking, etc. See what our customers say at https://www.quora.com/Reviews-of-Close-io
Highrise was an amazing product years ago, but let's face it, Highrise has almost been abandoned for the past couple years at least. Could a new owner take over and revamp it to be amazing? It's possible, but not the common outcome of acquisitions.
... well, the web would be a very different place than it is now.
Your navbar links don't seem work on your Highrise page.
As it happens, I use (and pay for) both Asana and Basecamp. I use Asana internally with my own staff, and I use Basecamp externally with clients.
My clients tend to be non-technical businesses with custom software needs -- and most of them would be like "WHAT. THE. FUCK. HELLLP~!" if I asked them to use Asana. Keyboard shortcuts, context menus, sliding popovers, disclosure widgets, multiple views onto the same data/work-graph, aiiiighhhhh!
On the other hand, Basecamp has really nailed their niche -- the project management app that really is simple enough for 'average folks'. Making that choice completely alienates the tech-savvy power user that most of their competitors seem to be targeting (e.g. Flow, Wrike, Teamwork PM, Azendoo, Dooster, Teambox, TeamLab, Do.com, FMYI, to name just a few that I have evaluated and rejected).
Which 37Signals, oops I mean Basecamp, is obviously OK with, given Basecamp's massive user base and success. Basecamp is a pretty cool software story, and actually a pretty cool piece of software, even though it is too limited and underpowered for me to use it as my own primary project manager.
[1] I develop software (among other roles) for a living, but I develop project-management web app software mostly just in my fantasies and rage-imagination... spending many hours in a week in these apps really makes a person want to develop the One True Project Management app, though.
We (http://countersoft.com) are pushing the approach of a single tool for both project tracking (geeks) and ticketing (customers). It's not easy to say the least because customers love to just do everything in email!
But in a sense a ticketing system is a double-ended marketplace of work: supply (fixer, be it IT, marketing, sales, admin) and demand (customers, be it internal or external).
Also I think Asana is beating Basecamp in terms of having both simplicity and power, although I would say that the Basecamp UI is more simple than Asana, Asana is a lot faster and a lot more powerful and Asana is free for up to 15 users. I think Asana will take a lot of business away from Basecamp over the long term.
Having said that, in our business we use Jira, Asana and Basecamp (part of the reason for using all 3 is that we integrate our product with them). We keep Baecamp as a central repository of information and for that purpose Asana is not really as well suited.
For task management, Asana is way better than Basecamp.
I tell this story because I wonder if this is what happened with 37Signals/Basecamp.
It seems to me if the transition process between the two could have been smoother they could have got all their users on board for the upgrade.
I'm really hoping that as part of their renewed efforts with basecamp they might re-address people that are stuck in basecamp classic due to the much less than smooth upragde process.
If your business has a great product, is it the best idea to follow Basecamp nee 37Signal's trajectory? In other words, build those other products, then later consolidate?
Or take the GitHub route and stick to (basically) one awesome product and leave it at that? I wonder what's a better choice? I lean towards the latter personally.
Preferring Trello or Pivotal Tracker.
Q: What about Basecamp Classic?
We are fully committed to running Basecamp Classic forever. As long as we're around, Basecamp Classic will be around. A large chunk of our customer base loves Classic and we'll make sure they'll always have their Classic. The same rigorous uptime standards of Basecamp also apply to Basecamp Classic.
Background: Basecamp Classic was the original version of Basecamp we launched in 2004. Then in 2012 we released the all new version of Basecamp. Customers had the choice to stay on the old version, transition to the new version, or use both.
>We are fully committed to running Basecamp Classic forever. As long as we're around, Basecamp Classic will be around.
So it's forced, and decorative. And makes me think the author is trying too hard.
2) I respect Jason very much and think this decision is the right one from a consumer perspective. If they are only going to make one product going forward (which is the right decision), there's no need for a separate company brand. Good call by them - and no doubt a difficult one to make.
In the short term, everything stays the same. Business as usual. No interruption in service, no changes that affect our customers.
In the long term, one of three things:
SCENARIO 1: We'll spin them off into separate companies where we'll retain partial ownership, but another fully-dedicated team will run the products and own the majority of the company. This would be our ideal situation as it would ensure continuity and no interruption for our customers, but we'd have to find the right entrepreneur/team with the right experience and enough financing to make it work.
SCENARIO 2: We'll sell the products outright (either separately or together). The key for us in this scenario is that the products, and our customers, are well looked after. We will not sell either of these products to a company that is planning to shut the products down. And since no one from our team goes with the sale, this is not an acqui-hire situation. We're looking to sell to a company that wants to add well-respected, well-established, profitable, growing products to their portfolio.
SCENARIO 3: If we can't find the right partner or buyer, we are committed to continuing to run the products for our existing customers forever. We won't sell the products to new customers, but existing customers can continue to use the products just as they always have. The products will shift into maintenance mode which means there will be no new development, only security updates or minor bug fixes. We did this successfully in 2012 with Ta-da List, Writeboard, and Backpack, so we know how to make it work.
If you're a company or team interested in exploring scenario 1 (spin-off) or scenario 2 (outright purchase), please get in touch. Based on current revenues, current growth rates, and a conservative multiple, Campfire will sell in the single digit millions, and Highrise will sell in the tens of millions, so serious inquires only please. Disclosure: We're currently in early discussions with a few interested parties.