EP54: DHH on why 37signals is becoming Basecamp

Justin Jackson here. Welcome to the product people podcast. This week, David Hanemeyer Hansen of thirty seven signals, they just did something that took a lot of people by surprise. They said they were going to change the name of the company to Basecamp and basically stop building the other products, Campfire, Highrise, all those other things except for Basecamp. They're gonna focus exclusively on their flagship product.

And so I figured I should get together with David and just ask him what was behind that decision, why'd they make that decision, and kind of how do they see that working going forward. So check that out. If you want more information about the book I'm writing, marketing for developers, head over to justinjackson.ca/marketingfordevelopers. Hey. This is Justin, and I am with David Hanenmeyer Hansen.

How's it going, David? Good. Good. How are you? I'm doing well.

Doing well. It's snowing here in British Columbia. Where where are you right now?

I am in Spain. No snow, but a little bit of rain.

A little bit of rain. And you were doing some racing there?

Nope. Right now, I'm I'm I'm living here as I do about a third of the year or so.

Yeah. Cool. Just to escape the Chicago winter.

Yes. It's a little brutal there right now. Was looking just this morning and I think right now it's 11 degrees. So here in La Belle at 65.

So You're happy to be there. Absolutely. Cool. Alright. So let's get right into it.

You guys over at formerly thirty seven Signals made some pretty big changes. Maybe just tell us what were the the two announcements you made this past week?

Sure. So we announced that first of all, we're gonna work on one prod product going forward. For many years, we've worked on a lot of different products. We've worked on Basecamp with the original product. We've then worked on Backpack, Tadahalist, Highrise, Campfire.

All these other apps that we've been starting over the years. We've accumulated kind of a large portfolio of products. And what we sort of learned doing that was that that's hard to do when you have a lot of popular growing applications and you want to do well with all of them. So we sort of decided that that couldn't continue because the trajectory that that was going to take us on as a company was very foreseeable, We would have to be a much larger company to do all these applications justice. And we'd already sort of been internally positioned like this for a while.

Since the launch of the new version of Basecamp, that has been the predominant focus at the company. All the other applications in our portfolio hadn't really gotten a whole lot of love. And that just didn't feel great. It didn't feel great to have active products in your portfolio that you were selling that you weren't dedicated to and fired up to be working on simply because you couldn't. We're a tiny company.

We have 10 programmers right now out of the 40 some people we have at the company. Most people have that as a single team working on something small somewhere, right? And that's our entire company. So there's just limits to what we can do and especially when it comes to this new world of applications where it's not just about making a web app. Basecamp today is on the iPhone, it's on Android, it's on mobile web views, it's on all these sort of different ways you can use it.

And we have all these ideas for how to make it better. That even when we today use a 100% of our company to to work on Basecamp, that still feels stretched. So how are you going to fit HiRise in there? How are you gonna fit Campfire in there? How are gonna fit all these other apps that in and of themselves also deserve that kind of dedication and that kind of focus?

Well, as I said, we we hadn't really been doing that for the for the past couple years, especially since launching a new version of Basecamp. And we just came to the conclusion that that was actually the right thing to do. It was not something for us to feel bad about, feel guilty about. It was something for us to own up to and recognize that that was how things were going to be and then commit to it. So that commitment that we were just gonna work on one product, that Basecamp was going to be the one app going forward, that all our energy would flow into and all our dedication would flow into, naturally led to the second announcement, which was that it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense to have a company called thirty seven Sequels that just makes one thing basekin.

That's just confusing. It's already confusing today. When I talk to people and I tell them about where I work, I usually say, oh, I work at thirty Simsicles and they're like, what's that? And they're like, oh, we make Basecamp. Oh, Basecamp.

I know Basecamp. Like, we use that here or or my brother uses that or Basecamp just has a lot better name recognition outside of the tech circles. So it just it felt natural that we should commit to that as a company as well as the company name. Focus everything around it. One of the things we talked about just having our paychecks be signed by Basecamp.

Like, that really puts the focus on who's paying for this. Like, the customers of Basecamp are. Yeah. Right? So just it's just an easier too.

Like, less things. We're all about less stuff. Less complication, less shit going on, and if we can just be one application, one company, one name, that's simpler living. So that seems very appealing. The drawbacks, of course, is that both Jason and I and many others at the company and and many fans are invested in thirty seven Sequels as a name.

I've been working with an app for 37 signals for what? Twelve, thirteen years? Basically, it's a rounding error to consider anything else I've done in my professional career. My entire professional career has been for for 37. So there's a lot of emotion attached to that.

I think that that was why we took a while to come to this realization that being base camp was the right thing to to do and be because it just we had a lot of investment in 30

And I think it's it's kinda like writing. Right? Where they say, kill your darlings.

Yeah. Don't fall in love so much with with a paragraph or with a sentence that you can't take it out for the greater good. And that was what we realized that thirty seven seven sequels was was a great paragraph or it's great sentence. Was a great story, and it was a great legacy, but it didn't have to be part of sort of our future. And our future would be simpler if we were just dedicated to one thing.

I see you have the the tweet up on your screen where I was saying, you're not working on your best idea, you're doing it wrong. This is something I said back in in 2010 and and and I continue to believe it and I'm I'm happy that we can lift to it even better that that this we we try to have a very congruent company like do as you as you say and and and say as you do. And it feels great to sort of be closer to that. So, yeah, that was a long ramble.

No. That's good. That's good. I think and I think a a lot of people are interested in how you and Jason make decisions behind the scenes. And so was this one, because I remember you talking about this idea of I've been working on my best idea for a long time, it seemed like were hinting that your best idea actually Basecamp.

So when, how did you guys decide to do this? What was that process like?

It's funny because we've been talking about it on and off for some time. We've been talking about Basecamp being our best idea. I've mentioned that for a very long time because that's been true since the since I joined almost since I joined thirty seven signals that base camp was our best idea. It was our biggest business. It was where most of our customers were.

It was what we were most well known for. It had all these sort of good things going for it. Right? And I usually talk about it in the context of entrepreneurship. A lot of people have a fascination with serial entrepreneurs that you're not a real entrepreneur unless you can do it twice.

Right? Yeah. That well maybe the first time you're just lucky. Do you know what? So fucking what?

So what? If if it was just sheer luck that we came upon the idea of Basecamp and that really resonated with millions of people. Like I can I can deal with that? I can live with that. I can accept that a, maybe I was just lucky.

And like that's one way to describe it. Right? Another way to describe it is just maybe Basecamp is just the best idea we've had for business. That's completely okay. And I think for some time at least, we've been drawn to the same siren song that lots of entrepreneurs have been drawn to, namely proving that you can do it more than once.

And who's that good for? Like for stroking your ego? Is it good for your customers really? I don't necessarily think that it is. Actually I don't think that it is and I think that that's why or I don't think that is why we've made this choice that that we come to this acceptance.

And I've come to this acceptance. I've talked about another context too, between Basecamp and Ruby on Rails. Like there's enough there to satisfy a lifetime. Like We talk a lot about going this distance that we're in for the long term and the long haul, and we try to design our company and our products around that belief as well. So if I look forward ten, twenty, thirty years from now, are these fundamentally good ideas that I wanna continue working on?

When I think of something like Basecamp, helping people make progress on projects together, is that gonna grow out of fashion? Like as a mission statement, as something you're invested in? I don't think it is. I think it's relevant now as it's going to be a hundred years from now. Not necessarily in this incarnation, I hope I sure hope not.

I mean a hundred years from now we're on horses and carrots and stuff like that. So I hope it looks different in a hundred years from now, but I actually I do hope that Basecamp is gonna be here in a hundred years and then we're still helping companies and organizations make progress and projects together. How that looks? Who knows? Yeah.

But it just feels good to to invest in something at such a core level and come to the acceptance that this could be the last thing I ever worked on. Right? Mhmm. Yeah. That's kind

of a

I mean, I'm I'm 34. Hopefully, I have a good I don't know, a hundred years left in me to go. Committing to something like that, it feels great. When I look at companies that I really admire, a lot of them have stuck with it for the long term and for long haul. We've so long ranted against short termism.

I have to sort of like build it and flip it and sell it and just ride the fad and jump on the next one. Just not it's not what we're here for. It's not what we're interested in. It's not what we're invested in. So this this there's just a sort of a lot of threads that are coming together and and making this feel really good.

Yeah. I think the idea that maybe Basecamp, you were just lucky with Basecamp. I mean, is one explanation. Yep.

Yes.

What but is there other reasons you think Basecamp was your best idea? Like, for example, maybe if you'd started with HiRise, do you think maybe just because you'd focused on it, it could have been just as great? Or was there something special about Basecamp, the product itself, the timing, all that stuff?

Yes, I think there was. I think it's very special when you are basically ignorant and you are without resources and you sort of we didn't know anything. We didn't know anybody. We didn't know what not to do. We we didn't have a whole lot of money to build it for.

It was built on the side. It was a side project. It was forged sort of out of constraints. The most extreme case that we have had of of having to build something out of constraints because since then, it's gotten easier. Now that we have Basecamp, now that we have this really amazingly successful application, we don't have those same constraints anymore.

We still try to enforce them the best that we can, but it's just not the same. When we built Basecamp, we were three people. I was working ten hours per week, week on building it. Like that was the first version. It launched off that off five or six months of me working ten hours a week.

And with with Jason and Ryan doing other stuff on the side, I think it was just a it was a special and was a magical process. And again, there's so many variables. How are you gonna control for any of them to to sort of know which one was it that that really did it? But I think many things contributed to it. And and I certainly believe that the constraints that we we created Basecamp from are contributed to to what it is still today.

Mhmm. And that's what we're trying to get back to in many ways. Right? We're trying to hold on to that that we we gave birth to Basecamp as a tiny company. We wanna stay and if not tiny then at least small company.

Right? Yeah. That that's what we enjoyed and and just because we have the opportunity to be a big company with a big product portfolio doesn't mean that we should or that we would want to. Yeah. I think people are that's what really, I think perhaps in some ways resonated with folks when we announced this simplification and this dedication to just Basecamp, is that everybody usually expected this is the one path.

The one path is growth. The one path is getting bigger and bigger and doing more and more. And nobody it's very rare that people question that. It does happen occasionally. I remember the story of Steve Jobs walking into Apple when he came back and said, yeah all these, I don't know how many fucking products they were doing at the time.

We're not gonna do any of them. We're gonna do four. Yeah. So we want to sort of sort of stay to that and say, no, it doesn't have to be bigger. We don't have to be 200 people or a thousand people or 10,000 people just because we could.

Yeah. We want to make a choice and say, that's not the company we want to build. That's not where I want to work for the next hundred years. So we're not going to do that.

Yeah. I think what resonated with me and probably a lot of people is a lot of us do want to have that idea of if I could just simplify my life, like if I could just give up some things that would be so much better. I think what's hard what's hard when you have a company or some products is you're thinking, like for you guys, I'm sure you were thinking like, people know us for Campfire, people know us for High Rise, people know us for all these other things, and people know us for 37 signals in this little tech bubble.

Mhmm. That must have weighed

on you a little bit to think, man, we could like, we're giving up something special here.

That's why it's hard. And that's also why it's interesting. And that's also why it's invigorating because it's not free. Like we're giving up real money, real sort of access to certain groups of customers. We're giving up real things and and I think that that's why it rarely happens.

Right? Humans are incredibly loss averse. They're not just gonna fucking throw something out that's valuable or say we're not gonna do that if there's still value to be squeezed from it. And we have like high rise and and campfire, they're they're barely squeezed. Right?

They're barely squeezed lemons. There's so much juice left in them. And the natural tendency is to say like, let's squeeze every single last drop out of it. And what we're saying is instead, nope. We're gonna let somebody else do that.

Like, we're not gonna get all the juice. We're we're gonna sell it before or or even if we we can't do that, then continue to run it unsqueezed. Like we're simply gonna say, all this economic value, all this influence, all this good stuff we could have gotten from it. Yep. We're not doing that.

Yeah. And I think that that's that's why it was hard and it's why it took a long time. 37 that you said have very good value. There's a lot of brand equity in that, If we were gonna put it on our balance sheet, we put serious amount of goodwill under the thirty seven singles name. It stands for something.

It's a it's real like that. And and again, we're giving it up. We're walking away from it. And it's just it's it's I think that that's that's what really fascinates me about everything. That that's what I'm interested in.

Interested in trade offs where where it's not easy. Like everybody can say just like, oh yeah, I want more. Yeah. Just give me just give me more. Like I want more stuff.

I want more money. I want more influence. I want more more more more more. Like that's very easy to say if you don't have to sort of if there's no trade off from it, right? What's far more interesting is to say, I want more peace of mind.

I want a company I feel better about. I want more of this small company and I'm gonna give up some things for it.

Yeah. Yeah. Now when you guys were building Basecamp, it seems like from what I've seen, a lot of the people that purchased it in the beginning were people like you. Like they were web agencies, you know, development companies, things like that. Am I right in that?

Like that was kind of their initial audience?

Absolutely. That was the whole audience. The original marketing pages for Basecamp even talks specifically about design companies and client focused companies. We got dragged in to the larger vision by our customers because customers started showing up. Were not design companies, they were not just programming companies that were from all walks of business and life, right?

And they said, hey, this is great. I don't know why the hell you're just saying this is for design companies. It works great for my architecture firm and works great for my nonprofit and works great for my school. It works great for my church. It works great for all these other things and we went, Figure that.

Yeah. And I think what sort of was interesting and appealing to that was that it ultimately was more satisfying. It was very satisfying and is very satisfying to build a tool that's not just for techies. Yeah. That's great too and we love sort of that group and that's who we are when we're using Basecamp, right?

But it's also really satisfying to help people who are very different from who we are.

Yeah. Now, because when you started, you were basically speaking to people like yourself. I think that's one of the reasons signal versus noise became so popular was you had this voice for these people in this context, basically, that were like you. Do you think it's gonna get harder to now speak to a more general audience? And maybe even talking about signal versus noise itself, I don't know if you've mentioned what's gonna happen to that blog, if that will continue, and if it'll have more of a general focus in the future.

Sure. First, no. Like, we're gonna continue to talk about the things that we know, the experiences we've had, and the lessons we've learned. How that appeals to people, it's it's really more up to them. When we first wrote Rework, Rework was basically the greatest hits of the last decade of the or of Signal versus Noise.

Right? I think it was 80% essays, blog postings from Third Time Signals. Yeah. They weren't designed to reach a mass audience. They were designed again to share our lessons and our experiences and our takeaways.

And what happened with Rework was the same thing that kind of happened with Basecamp right? That these things are not so niche. They're not so narrow and Rework turned to New York Times bestseller. Continues to sell amazingly well to this day. I think we've sold more than 300,000 copies.

So obviously, the message has resonated with a far greater group of people than we imagined. So I think in that sense, don't change anything. If we were to say, oh, wow. Now we're based and we just based and we gotta appeal to more people. Let's like stop fucking swearing all the time or put on a suit or try to speak in generalized business language to make sure a broader math, try to become more of a a gray goop.

Yeah. Like, what kind of, I mean, idiotic approach would that be? Like, we got to where we are being who we are doing what we do. Are you gonna fucking change all of that because now like you gotta reach for something else? Fuck no.

And I think that that's also part of the commitment. Right? It's part of the commitment to independence that we've always had. That we could say all those things and we can be ourselves and we can speak the things that are often the hard and spoken because we're not really beholden to anybody. Right?

Like, there's there's no VC control holding our leash. We're not on public markets. There are all these sort of things you can get yourself into in in pursuit and chase of the bigger, the more that actually ends up really constraining who you are and who you can be. And that's that's not us. So short answer is no, we're not gonna change.

We're gonna continue to talk about who we are and what we learn. Signal versus noise in particular is gonna continue as well. That's a block. We now have a dedicated domain for it. It's signalsthenoiseorsignalbeingnoise.com.

They're all URL redirects as well. We could continue to share on that. We even actually have a couple more ideas working on another magazine idea of something called the distance that Jason hinted at for exploring a lot of untold stories for businesses that we feel deserve more spotlight for for the things that they are. Really tying into to everything that we're about, is going the distance, staying in business for a long time, and and so forth. And and and who knows, maybe we'll we'll write another book as well.

If you had asked me a year or a year and a half before we started remote, I would have said we didn't have any idea for a book. But it's sort of when Jason wrote it up in the announcement, see, oh, we've actually released a book like every three or four years. We did Defensive Design for the Web, then we did Getting Real, then we did Rework, and now we've done remote. And it's sort of been about three or four years between each of them. So I'm a big believer in yesterday's weather and I would say I could certainly foresee there being another book in three or four years.

And signal versus noise is our premier platform for developing ideas for that. Yeah. It's a place where we can share these pretty much everything we've ever written starts out on signal versus noise. That's the first place. It's kinda like the the comedy club thing.

Like, you try out new material. Yeah. And then you try out new material on on signal versus noise and see what works and what doesn't work, and then we produce our HBO special in a hardcover book format.

Now do you think that's gonna be continue to be your marketing approach? You've been famous about saying you haven't spent very much on marketing. It's been mostly through your blog and your book and some of these other things. Is that going to continue to be the approach, especially if you're trying to grow the brand of Basecamp and have more, I'm assuming, more customers? Are you going to try different things to reach out to more people?

I think first of all, for the list you mentioned, number one thing that actually has mattered for us is word-of-mouth. All these other things got things, the ball rolling and the ball started and and they help and they contribute. But the number one thing is word-of-mouth. So that's what we're focused on. That is like if you see the pie chart for our marketing energy and budget, like there's 99% focus on fucking getting best word-of-mouth and then there's 1% of all the other stuff.

Right? You continue to experiment with things. It's not very focused to be honest. The only thing that is focused is sort of our approach to the audience and sharing what we learn. So that's that's a great strategy and that works, but it's secondary to focusing on word-of-mouth.

And how do you focus on word-of-mouth? Well, first of all, you may get fucking great product that people want to buy and they want to tell other people about it. Then you have exceptional service. And that's one of the things I think we perhaps haven't spoken as much about over the sort of last few years is just how much we've invested in having exceptional service. For the first, I don't know, what three years, more years, Jason responded to everything himself.

And I don't think even Jason would would argue with this point, but having a founder of a company write all the customer support emails, having somebody so close to the product, having to deal with customers who say, hey, let's fucking do you have that feature, right? Moron. That's not a good recipe for keeping calm and carrying on.

Are you saying that actually happened one time?

It happens daily that people tell us we're idiots for not having a certain feature, not doing things a certain way. And in their minds, we are. Everybody comes to a product with their own sort of set of baseline assumptions about what it should be and could do for them, right? Why the fuck don't they do this? I fall into this trouble all the time.

We all fall into this trouble time. We usually go to Twitter and be like, why doesn't this product do exactly the thing I wanted to do, right? Yeah. Nothing that whoever built it didn't build it just for us. Right?

Mhmm. Anyway, so we learned that lesson eventually that that having a a great customer support team is different from just have building a great product. You can have a great product and and I've dealt with number of customer companies, many companies in my time where I felt like they had a great product and still I said, I cannot wait to get these assholes out of my life because they just had shitty customer service and I felt bad about supporting their product even if I like their product. I was like, I cannot wait not to buy their product anymore. Yeah.

So that's really the two prong approach for us. Build a fantastic product and continue to make that product better. And build a fantastic customer service organization that can say yes more of the time and quicker. Like, right now when you when you look at our site, a lot of times it says because this is actually live update. It's kind of cool.

One of the cool features of the new basecam.com is that it's all just written like a story, but we plop in little areas of dynamic content. When you see that we have, for example, 90 nine point nine nine, I think seven or 8% uptime right now, that's a live number. Like that's Gotcha. If we have out downtime tomorrow and that gets dragged down to ninety nine point nine nine four, that'll be live on the site right away. Oh, yeah.

Actually, if you click give Basecamp a try, click on that one. You'll see there's a number last week, 6,898 companies. Like that's a live number. We calculate that runningly and it is not just a fake number. And we have a bunch of numbers like that.

If you click on support. Up there. Currently, we're able to respond to in just about one minute. Like that's a live number. Just about one minute.

I mean, I'll tell you what, but Jason was not responding to anybody in just about one minute in the beginning. We were quick. I mean, compared to a lot of things like I've been dealing with Iberia the airline and they say, you can wait up until twenty one days to get a respond to the email. I agree with fucking speed of Gonzales in the beginning when we were responding to people in like a few hours.

Yeah. But we really

just try to take that up a notch. And and one of the investments we've been making recently is is make that true for everybody in the world. Like, we we've been US focused for a long time in our customer support. Yeah. And we're extending that just to the twenty four seven.

Whether you're in in The UK or The US or Japan or Australia or whatever, you should get a respond in just about one minute. Yeah. Wow. Anyway, so I think that that basically is to say that we stay true to sort of the notion of what will not change. One of the best piece of advice we've ever gotten as a business was Jeff Bezos telling us to invest in the things that do not change and invest heavily in them.

The product, are people gonna wake up tomorrow feeling that, oh, it'd be great if base game was a little slower. Oh, man, if I could just wait an extra second for every page load, that'd be that'd be awesome. Of course, they're not. They're always gonna want it to be faster. So we invest heavily in continuing to make Basiscam faster.

Are people gonna wake up tomorrow and think, oh, it'd be great if it took three hours for me to get a response on customer support. Of course not. We invest a bunch of money into making sure such that we can say in just about one minute and sort of that's about that's the thing you do when you have this clarity of focus and you have this longevity is you can say, well, we're gonna invest in shit right now that's gonna pay off for the next fifty years. Right? Let's not invest in the things that's gonna pay out over the next eighteen months or at keep this thing proportionate and the vast majority of the proportion should go to the things that will stay smooth for the next fifty years.

Yeah. Yeah, I think that's important to talk about the idea of that two pronged approach where you have great software, but you also have great support. And I think when I was in Chicago at your office, I think you were actually doing some support. Do you still do that every once in a while?

Absolutely, we have something to call everyone on support where everybody in the company will spend a day on support. Like every day, there's somebody who's not in support who spends time on support. Yeah. How did It just helps out.

How did you realize? Because I think especially for creators and builders and developers, sometimes we just wanna create a thing and just have it run on its own, and we wanna stay behind our screens and maybe not relate to human beings. So how did did you guys realize that from the beginning that actually, like, this manual work of taking care of people over email and answering the questions, how did you realize that was important and that you were gonna focus and invest in it?

Because we had to. Because that's how it started. Jason used to respond to almost everything. And do you know what he would do with all the uncalled cases? He would just forward them to me.

So I

would deal with all this shit.

Right? So we have this very specific feedback loop where there is no hiding, nobody else will hide behind. And we got a lot of good stuff out of that. When people keep nagging you day on day about a certain bug or something else, you'll fix that. Because it's in the ass to keep writing back to people and saying, oh, no, I'm sorry.

Like that just doesn't work right now. Not only is it pain in ass, it's a shitty thing to do. So we kinda got indoctrinated early on by necessity. And that's what I mean when I say like we were forged out of our initial constraints. These were lessons we were forced to learn.

And when we then grew bigger and and had sort of the money and the customer base that we could hire the dedicated support people, we still knew of that initial experience and we wanted to retain that. That's what everybody on support is about. That everyone in the company should know who they work for. They work for the customers. It also feels great.

It feels great that you're not just creating in a bubble. It feels great to know that there are people who actually really like the stuff that you do. It's very easy as a programmer or designer or anybody else who's working on the product to be in your little bubble as you say, and you're just moving your pixels around and moving your code around and getting tests to pass. And that's a very sort of, it's not the real thing. The real thing is creating software that matters to people.

That has an impact on their lives that they're passionate about and that they're Or even if they're not passionate about it, that helps them get shit done. Like they're paying you for a reason. And feeling that and knowing that sort of on your skin as having to respond to their direct emails is invigorating.

Yeah, that's well said. I think in the last minutes we have here, a lot of people of course, are asking about what this means for them. For a long time, 37 signals was kind of the example. Like if you want to run a bootstrap startup or even just a startup, you know, everything from Ruby on Rails to, you know, just the way you organize your company and remote work. So there's a lot of questions about, you know, what does this mean for someone who's starting out?

And so I think one question we had from Samuel here is, does your best idea equal the idea you're most passionate about?

I don't know. That's hard to tell. For us, I think that's it's quite true. Basecamp has been the app that we since the beginning has been used more than anything else. Campfire is a close second, but I I think that was a sort of you can weigh it on two scales.

Right? Campfire is vanishingly small speck in the grand sea or beach of base camp. Now I'm really mixing my metaphors. But it's such a tiny thing. It didn't it was very important to us and we're passionate about using it, but it didn't appeal to customers in anywhere remotely close to the same way that Basecamp did.

So from very early on, though like we're passionate about Basecamp, it was clear that Campfire wasn't as good as an idea. It wasn't on the same scale of Basecamp. At least not in its current rendition, right? So that helped us answer the question of like, which is the better idea? Well, it's Basecamp because we love it and we use it.

That's true for Campfire too, but also millions of other people love and use Basecamp and not exactly the same amount of people love and use Campfire.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think what's gonna be helpful for in all of this is to realize the different stages that a company or people can be at like like right now you guys are giving up on Campfire, but that doesn't mean that a little team of three using Ruby on Rails couldn't build some sort of group chat and make a profitable company of it.

Oh, absolutely not. It's just that, like, we looked at the eggs that were in our basket. Right? That's what you gotta do. You gotta look at what you have.

And out of the eggs in in our basket, I mean, there was Basecamp shining very bright to to to a point where where nothing else was really shining in comparison. We could have been a happy company. I could have been a happy developer if if Campfire had turned out to be our best idea. And instead of being the company we are, we were significantly smaller company, but we would still we could still run it in the same way. We still talk about things and and so forth.

It just so happens to be that our best idea was was a little brighter than that. And and and we we went with that. And Yeah. And we're happy with that.

Yeah. We have I think it's Vegas kid. And he wants you to go back to the beginning when you had all those constraints and it was gritty and it was hard. And what was it like to make that first 10 k a month? Once Base Camp hit 10 k a month, can you talk us through like just those initial feelings of having built something and I I don't know what's significant about 10 k.

Maybe that's like, oh, this is there's something here. Maybe bring us back to that moment there.

Sure. So for us, it was actually it wasn't even 10 k. It was four k. So our initial goal for Basecamp was that after one year, if Basecamp could make us 4 k a month, that would feel like that was great. That was our goal.

I don't know how the hell we pick four k. I think maybe it was something like it was it was two or three thirty seven signals expresses or something like that that we were counting it in. But we sort of we we had that as as the goal. Right? And and it was the goal that after one year that that would be it.

Well, we hit that goal after three or four weeks. Three or four weeks we had four ks of recurring revenue and we were like, holy shit. Like we thought this was gonna take a year and it took closer to just three or four weeks. This is amazing. Right?

Yeah. And yet amazing would be so pathetically laughable for any other sort of company today, especially if it's a VC backed company. Could you imagine like 4 k a month? Yeah. People would be laughing and laughing and laughing for you to have that as a goal.

Yeah. That was our goal. That was where we started. And it didn't exactly go hockey stick from there either. Like it took more than a year before base game was just making enough money that our tiny group of what were we three or four people at the time, four people, five people.

Yeah. We could say, okay. I think we're confident enough that we cannot do client work anymore. It would just pay the bills. Nobody's fucking getting rich of anything at this point, right?

Yeah. If you look at the runways of most companies like they need far, far, far faster growth than that. Our growth was pathetically slow. Yeah. And yet that's I think again is one of those informing things.

We are where we are today because of that. Because we didn't have any fucking hockey stick. There were not millions of people knocking on our door after after just a few months. In fact, if you looked at our audience at the time, was even more pathetic. People talk about like today, what, a 100,000 people on Twitter like that.

That's a fair following. Like like how many people have 2,000 people on following them on Twitter or other block? Fair number of people, right? We have 2,000 people following SVN on RSS at the time. Like that was the size of our audience.

We really did not start with a lot. And that was okay. Like, we took our sweet effing time. Basecamp just celebrated ten years. Ten years.

I think that's a long fucking time. And we spent a lot of that time just slowly but surely building like a few more customers, a few more customers, and then the power of compound interest and compound growth sort of finally at some point kicked in and things were doing really well.

Yeah. Now a lot of people are wondering if specifically if Campfire like features might make their way into Basecamp.

So in general, we don't comment a lot on future features, but what we have actually said in the perspectives when we talk to people about Campfire and possibly acquiring it is that under no circumstances will we sign a noncompete. That as I said, Campfire is the functionality of Campfire is very important to how we run our business. In this specific implementation of Campfire, we have not gotten the same traction as we did with something like Basecamp, but there could very well be other implementations of of chat and real time collaboration that that could great get that greater traction. And we still need something. Right?

So it's actually funny because we tried a we tried a competitor's product for a month. Like, we had not worked on base camp or on camper for a long time. Right? Yeah. And there are people getting a little restless and like, well, there might be something better out there.

So we tried a competitive product for a month. We switched the entire company to use that to teach us about what that would what that would be like. And it talked on a lot of very interesting things. But it remained that we just care deeply about real time collaboration. It's a huge part of how we run things.

And and then at the end of that time, we we were very well informed about all the things we didn't like about that other product, and we realized that we're just we are incessantly not invented here when it comes to those kind of things, our core tools of collaboration. And we felt like, well, we can fucking do this so much better. Even if we haven't so far invested a whole lot of stuff in Campfire up until that point. So Yeah. Yeah.

That's a very roundabout way of saying, yes, we're exploring all sorts of things for future versions of Basecamp, including ways to do chat real time or whatever. Alright. Alright. That's good.

Maybe we'll close with something like this. You know, for a long time you built products based on this idea of scratching your own itch. So, you know, Campfire came out because you were scratching your own itch. You had other products like ta da lists and, you know, your job board, all these other things. So are you guys going to just ignore those itches now when something comes up?

Or do you think in the future there might be other things? Mean, I technically, you're still running WeWork remotely as well. So and you just kind of spun off

Know your company.

Know your company. So is that something that you might do in the future or are you guys saying, Nope, this is it. Basecamp forever.

We're pretty much saying, Nope, this is it. And we're saying, we're gonna say no to more itches. And we might say that some of the itches that we have will find their way into Basecamp in ways where before we might have said, oh, let's start a new product for it. Maybe there are ways that Basecamp can can scratch some of these itches. But we're also just getting more confident in saying no.

There are lots of things that I all the time, especially when I use other people's products, think, goddamn it, we could build this much better. And resisting that urge is a big part of sort of the maturity I think that come with with being content with what you have and the direction that you're going. And that it can't just be more and more, yes. So what if we could write a better, I don't fucking know, help desk system or something. Help desk is one of the things we can look at right now because since the acquisition from salesforce.com, desk.com has gone down to fucking two.

Right? So we're like, could we write something better ourselves? And it's very hard to resist that urge when you were a builder and you knew how to build things. Right? But you have to at least at the grand scale, you have to resist the vast, vast, vast majority of those urges.

And that's part of like focusing on your best idea. Like, you have a million ideas. Everybody has a million ideas. You try to work on all of them, like, none of them are gonna be great. None of them are really gonna pay off big.

So we've we've just said, well, we've also been there. Like, we've tried that. Right? We've sort of I I think in in some ways, it's kind of like, you get married at 18, like, you have a limited amount of life experience to sort of base that decision off. Yeah.

And if you look at divorce rates from people who get married at 18 versus people who get married at 30, I actually haven't looked at these, but I'm theorizing that they would be worse at 18. Right? Yeah. And I think that that's that's there's some maturity. There's some just seeing the world and seeing what else is out there, but that makes it makes you more confident in the choices that you then do end up making.

Like I've seen what the world has to offer. I've tried a lot of things. We've had fun with a lot of different other products and product ideas, but we're finally at a stage in our life as a company and as as people work at that company where we're content saying, alright. We're married to Basecamp. This is it.

Until death do us part. And and feeling great about the decision. Not feeling like, oh, shit. What else is out there? Right?

What else could could we have or could we do or or whatever? Which I think is that inevitable sensation you're gonna have when you haven't seen the world. When you haven't tried a lot of things. When you haven't, in our case, launched a bunch of different products. We've now launched all the products that we need to launch to figure out and know who we are and what we want to be and where we're going in life.

Yeah. Yeah. That's good. Let's leave it there, David. Thanks so much for your time today.

My pleasure. Absolutely. This is fun.

And that is the show for this week. Thanks so much to David from Base Camp for coming on and sharing all those thoughts with us. Just a reminder, if you want to check out the book I'm writing, Marketing for Developers, it's at justinjackson.camarketingforedevelopers. You can go there and download some sample chapters about 26 pages up there right now. And I'll also keep you up to date with the progress of the book, ask you for feedback, ask you what you're struggling with, all that kind of stuff.

Justinjackson.camarketingforedevelopers. And thanks so much for listening to the show. If you can, go to iTunes and give us a five star rating. Just search for the show, Product People, and, leave a rating. It really helps other people find the show.

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