Very interesting announcement. I'm sure they're making the right decision, and I'm even more sure they did a ton of user testing.
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.
HipChat was a clone of Campfire that out-did them. It's a smart tactical move to give up on that conceding to Pete, Chris, Gary, et al. which did a superb job on HipChat.
Though I share your sentiments about losing the 37Signals name, their philsophy remains the same and I have high hopes that this change will result in an even better Basecamp!
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 :)
I used to love battling with IE6 to get a webdesign looking great, cross-browser compatible and degrading gracefully. Ok it was maybe more like love+hate, it was a challenge, a puzzle and particularly trying to solve it in the least (subjectively) "hackish" way possible.
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 ...
We use basecamp and campfire at work. Basecamp is mediocre, not horrible and not great. Campfire sucks compared to similar tools that I've used in the past.
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.
A lot of people (myself included) would disagree with you there. The fact that they can afford to do something like the OP is announcing is sort of proving that... I've not used any project management tool that I've liked as much as Basecamp, and I've used heaps of them.
"Seems to me that they've been successful mostly because of their involvement in the Ruby and startup world, rather than making great products"
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 ;-)
"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.
The thing that Basecamp does well is that it is a generic project management tool that can be used for any kind of project - thus its wide appeal. The most interesting alternatives are ones that specialize in particular types of projects. For example, if you are a designer there is Solo and if you are a product manager there is my product Aha! - http://www.aha.io. These alternatives specialize by taking the common elements of project management software (like todo lists, calendars and comments) and tailoring them towards a particular job function.
Totally depends what you're trying to accomplish. Basecamp can be great for managing a whole project in all its complexity. But often times that's overkill, and too many features get in the way.
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.
Execution is somewhat hard, but there needs to be durable competitive advantage: user base, brand, IP, talent, etc. All other things being more-less equal, a few apps will inevitably dominate. (I would acquire Asana and Rally Software which owns FlowDock.)
I think it's commendable to take this approach. They are doing a few things very right. 1.) Not shutting down existing products and leaving users without a service, 2.) Not wanting to just sell it to the highest bidder but actually are concerned about their users, 3.) Having the guts to just put everything on the table and changing major things up. I feel like a lot of companies feel like, 'Well we have these products we have to either keep them going and scale or kill them.' Their solution here is a wise one that is certainly putting users before dollars and ease.
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.
Interesting. I always saw 37Signals as a good example of a diversified portfolio. I notice they're going to keep the side projects (books, job board) which probably have the highest margins and require very little ongoing investment of mental energy. I don't see where the growth in Basecamp is going to come from, but then I don't use the product (tried it once, too limited.)
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.
> 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? :)
My bet was going to be Atlassian. They have the clearest competitor to Campfire (Hipchat), a history of pulling off acquisitions (Bitbucket) and from 37Signals perspective could probably make a better case that they could take care / migrate their customers.
Not sure why anybody would want to acquire Campfire? It's an utterly terrible product. If GitHub wanted to added chat collaboration features they'd write them from scratch based upon WebSockets / Socket.IO... not the legacy polling that Campfire does!
GitHub are known to have invested a lot in using Campfire, for example their bot Hubot integrates really well and they use it to manage the majority of their infrastructure.
It's definitely possible but I wonder what Githubs strategy long term is and how it would fit into that. While I'm sure there are lot of people that use Campfire at GH (or maybe not), it may not be right for them to take care of and expand.
But Github is already doing what 37signals is aiming for and that is being a company focused on a single product. I'd think they want to maintain that.
They actually sold Gauges to Fastest Forward a couple months ago. Hopefully the new owners will give it some much-needed love; it's pretty, but... let's say unnecessarily minimalist. (If there's a way to get it to give me all the referers in a time period other than day-by-day, for instance, I still haven't figured it out.)
"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"
Anyone care to take a guess to what Campfire and Highrise revenue? What type of multiple of revenue do they expect to get?
Congrats on figuring it out and having a clear focus, but also to trying a lot of things over the years and figuring out what works. And thank you for being so responsible with the future of your legacy products. There are too many companies that are too happy to simply shut down things as soon as ROI numbers don't line up.
Am I the only one who doesn't get why Basecamp is praised so much? I think it is okay, but nothing exceptionally. Also if I didn't knew the product, I would never signup when looking at the frontpage, it looks very outdated, and not very trustworthy. Hopefully a better focus, will make the experience more up-to-date.
" I would never signup when looking at the frontpage, it looks very outdated, and not very trustworthy. Hopefully a better focus, will make the experience more up-to-date."
Understandable move, focus on the one big product. And as far as company name is concerned, nobody outside our tech bubble has ever heard of "37 Signals".
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.
Seems like a weird strategy. I admire the focus shown, but what if Thomas Edison had decided after 10 years to rebrand GE as Something Something Light Bulbs, Inc?
It's a good idea for them to take the plunge and do this, because it pretty much just aligns their official strategy and brand with their actual strategy. Campfire hasn't seen an update in forever, and the rest of the ecosystem also felt like it was already in maintainable mode.
We already migrated away to Hipchat as a result, and I get the impression that others might have been doing the same.
The last I heard, it needed to be entirely dormant (meaning not a single log in) for 30 months in order to be eligible to transfer. Though they might have a trademark claim that would likely help.
No, it won't be a problem.. I'm sure they're already talking to Twitter about it. I heard something along the lines of accounts inactive for 6 months can be seized by Twitter.
Check us out at http://nutshell.com — we've got a one-click import tool from Highrise. We're an established, profitable company focused on CRM with gorgeous UI.
We use Capsule + Streak. We're big fans of streak, but it's a baby CRM perfect for pipelines... we use Capsule to manage all of the other stuff. (Who talked to whom, etc.)
Big news! We've been big fans of 37signals for a decade or so and in many ways they have inspired us in building Close.io. I love that they are able to make the hard decision to focus on one thing.
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
Your comment implies Highrise is going to disappear - however, that's not the case. They're either going to sell Highrise (to a buyer who is committed to keeping it running + growing) or continue to run it themselves in maintenance mode.
I don't think it's going to disappear, but I do think many customers will consider alternatives when it's clear the original designers are no longer onboard with the product anymore.
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.
There are so many project management apps out there, the competition is fierce. For a proj mgmt app to succeed, there either has to be USP and massive value. For example, Asana is especially good. I haven't tried Basecamp recently but it wasn't as lightweight, low-cost and nice as Asana.
I am extremely interested in this space, both as a user and as a developer[1].
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.
It's not easy building that project-management app that is usable by both geeks and customers.
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!
There's different use cases. There are high-level / strategy oriented task systems and low-level microtask work systems that tend to have more specialist features for getting shit done baked in. As payware goes, JIRA is a pretty well-rounded high-level one. Gitlab seems fairly popular for dev work because it emulates much of github and is more integrated with source control (getting shit done) than say redmine.
The enterprise use-cases have to manage immensely more complexity than F(L)OSS projects, but at the same time, they want the agility and features of those lightweight services. (Without forgetting to CYA: document and hide as much information as possible.)
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).
HOw is having two versions of Basecamp (old and new) simplification?
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 started a software company years ago with three friends. We had some good success. We then saw an opportunity to start another product that was adjacent to Photoshop - basically a tool to improve Photoshop productivity. We moved most of our engineering team to focus on this product. Then Adobe built the functionality we provided right into the product, and our entire installed base moved to that. Meanwhile, we had neglected our core product and customers had become frustrated with the lack of progress and were moving onto other tools.
I tell this story because I wonder if this is what happened with 37Signals/Basecamp.
This is really cool. I love basecamp and have been a daily user since close to day one. However their maintaining legacy basecamp in parallel to new basecamp seems to make even less sense to me now then it did then.
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.
They did this for another reason as well. They can't grow past 50 employees or they will have to pay through the nose for Obamacare. If they continue to grow, they would inevitably require more staff besides developers that need expensive healthcare. Obamacare is a great way to keep small companies small.
Brilliant. 37signals inspired a generation of developers, nearly every modern web framework and dozens of direct competitors. Makes complete sense to double down on their biggest winner. Many people talk about cutting, simplifying, focus, editing - but few people and even fewer companies follow through on it.
I really like 37signals, for Ruby, Rails or basically their taste for tech and their startup culture / their books. But none of their product really catches me. They are from ok to very good. But not great. Actually Basecamp was the only very good one.
Based on the lack of attention the new Basecamp has gotten after launch, this is incentive enough for me to more to a new project management tool. The only real incentive to say was the very minor integration with Highrise
So, what about Basecamp Classic? That's something they won't sell to another company, but is it something they'll continue supporting? I'd imagine it's simple to maintain.
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.
Hats off to the simplicity and focus these guys have. I have loved and admired this company over years. These announcements have only added more respect for them.
1) I never understood the odd trend of having a jpeg of a handwritten signature included in a digital email. A signature is supposed to designate authenticity, but a letter on a authenticated website is inherently authentic.
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.
Q: If you're going all in on Basecamp, what happens to Campfire and Highrise?
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.
37 Signals is the reason I started learning how to make web apps. They are really the poster child of successful independent software vendors. Not focusing on burning investors cash but growing as a profitable business. One can only dream to match their level of success.
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.