Basecamp

“And especially in the early days of Basecamp, for example, we built the entire first version on me having 10 hours per week, not per day, per week. To build it. That is an enormous constraint on how you could do anything because you can waste 10 hours really q…”

“By, I think, 2007, we had four major projects or products. We were launching one a year while we were also running Basecamp, while we were seven people at the company.”

“The version we launched in 2004, we stopped selling in 2010. 16 years ago. We still have customers on it. As an individual business, it's still making millions of dollars.”

“We're not going to outspend them on a marketing campaign. That was never going to happen, but we could outteach them. We could have better insights, and we could share them, and people could resonate with that and then reciprocate by buying our products, at le…”

“If you want to tell me ill-considered feedback on anything I make, you gotta pay me. And you can do that with Basecamp, and you can tell me.”

“No, we've never disclosed the full revenues nor full profits. I think we've said tens of millions or something. I don't even know.”

“It certainly served us well for many, many years when we had the entire project management space in SaaS to ourselves, and we were laughing all the way to the bank because clearly someone else must have realized this was a highly profitable, not even niche, bu…”

“All of those constraints apply themselves to our situation and then just produces an explosion of creativity because that's what very often happens. When you are deprived in all the right ways, you will find out Oh, there's a better way to do this. You will fi…”

“If we had raised, I don't know, twenty million dollars and hired a hundred people, we would just use the same shit as everyone else, and we would never have come up with Ruby on Rails.”

“Because we know you can build a CRUD app, we know you can build Basecamp, we know you can build Drip, we know you can build MailChimp, right? It might take you a while, These are certain things that will happen. There's no technology risk.”

“Whenever you sign up for Basecamp, the first thing you see is a letter from me with my email address and my signature and my email address, and I want my customers to email me. I don't want to hide from anybody. There's no AI. There's no assistant. There's no …”

“I don't, we don't use email inside our company. We use Basecamp. But for the outside world, we use email.”

“I wouldn't want to try to do this again, because I don't think I could. I don't think I could. And I think it's totally fair to admit, like, I don't think I'm good enough again to do what I did before. I don't have the stamina. I don't have the drive. I don't …”

“So with Basecamp, for example, nobody can pay us more than two 99 a month. Okay. It doesn't matter how many users you have. So you could be a big enterprise, and two nine a month is the most you can possibly. Our prices go way, way low, but that's the most we …”

“What you don't want are a bunch of outlier companies that you cannot afford to lose. You don't want customers that you cannot afford to lose. And so by equalizing our pricing and not letting anyone pay us more than anybody else, we create a bunch of small unit…”

“I think that was a really important thing that happened this week that 37 signals saw this thing happen on the internet and instantly vibe coded it into their larger scale SaaS app.”

“Everyone sells eventually except for Basecamp. That's the, that's probably the, you know, the one that, that may never sell.”

“Basecamp throws off tens of millions of dollars a year in net profit. And for all intents, it's basically Jason Fried and DHH. Those dudes are raking an eight million, I'm sorry, 8,000,008 figures a year of net profit.”

“Honestly, there are so few teams that are structured just like base camp that there are a lot of gaps in the book of like, well, what about this? And what about that? And how do we do that in our situation?”

“Even when we were building V one, David wasn't actually full-time as the, as our only technical person. He was programming 10 hours a week.”

“We had this principle at base camp, which was this notion of the circuit breaker. Like if a project is not on track to actually finish after the six weeks, we're just going to cancel it and rethink, you know, almost no teams have the stomach for that.”

“Every designer codes. Imagine if every designer codes and not, and I don't just mean HTML. I mean, like running the app locally, going into the place where that view is rendered to make that thing look the way that they want it to look or whatever. Right. I me…”

“Imagine you have no sales org. You have no marketing. That all of sales, sales, selling and marketing is happening by the unicorn founders. So it means that there isn't contention for engineering time, that there isn't kind of like all these different sources …”

“Because every year Basecamp has made the founders like twenty million dollars a year for 20 years.”

“We actually just moved from using Slack, Asana, and Notion back to using Basecamp after a four year break, and it is honestly refreshing.”

“Everyone sells, like I say this, everyone sells eventually. I never thought MailChimp would sell and they eventually sold, you know, I mean, really, I had all these examples and they've all sold except for I think Basecamp is probably the one that I think abou…”

“They can do stuff like not market, like not sell, because they're in a luxurious position and good for them. You know, the luck and timing were one and two. Jason Fried told me that for their success. Unless I can replicate luck and timing, I can't. Then I nee…”

“We don't charge any of our customers more than 299 dollars a month period flat. So with Basecamp, you can have 6000 users at just two 99 flat unlimited users at that point. So we don't offer the same thing where people could be spending 50, 60 grand or 10 gran…”

“Jason Freed on the MicroConf stage said it throws off tens of millions a year in net profit, and that was six, seven, eight years ago, and you know it's probably grown since then.”

“That's why I don't like it when people use Basecamp as an example, because usually it's to justify an opinion or justify an approach to business that I just don't see working for anyone else.”

“Jason Fried and DHH are tiny seed mentors. They invested in our first fund. So I'm not throwing shade at them, but I'm saying they often give advice that fits them really well and worked for them that I think it won't work for 999 out of the next thousand star…”

“We were one of the first SAS, SAS tools, and also first freemium tools, actually, in fact.”

“So we've got a 100,000 or so paying customers across base camp and hay, and also high rise.”

“And we ran them in parallel for about a year. And the idea wasn't that Basecamp was going to replace that. It just happened to do that. It happened to become so popular so quickly that we're like, you know, what do we rather do? We have limited time. We'd rath…”

“We don't have any salespeople. You know, we don't have 15 different versions of Basecamp. You know, we're not after enterprise.”

“We build products with two people at a time. So every feature we work on in Basecamp or Hay or whatever we're building is two people, one programmer, one designer, and they have a maximum of six weeks to deliver the feature that they're working on. Most of the…”

“I would not trade Basecamp for Monday's business any day of the week, because I love what we're doing. We're profitable. We're happy. We don't have to deal with the things they have to deal with.”

“Look, hey, we have the same number of customers roughly than they do.”

“Airbnb is a physical product. Uber is a physical product. Basecamp, Monday, Asana, they're available everywhere instantly anyway. I don't know what you need the money for other than marketing.”

“We bought a business about almost 10 years ago called weworkremotely.com. And it's very simple. It's a job board... We buy the business. We pay three or four times earnings or something, which was, you know, a fair price given what it was doing. We immediately…”

“When you see a business where they're just not, they're myopic on something, they're not doing the best practices. And often it's because they have other priorities. I mean, The base camp guys had a hundred million dollar ARR SaaS business. The last thing they…”

“If you let customers guide you, most of the time, they'll just have you rebuild MailChimp, or Basecamp, or HubSpot. They'll just have you replicate that, because that's what they've used, and that's what they know, and they'll just keep suggesting those featur…”

“And if you follow, this is the other part, if you follow your best users, they'll take you up to this world that then actually destroys the lower end of the world of why people are there. And so if Basecamp would have added all those things, one of the reasons…”

“I think that rigor, like the rigor they applied to that across the board, you need to do it all the way. You can't adopt the process halfway, I think is the challenge. Otherwise you end up with people shipping like milestone one and then moving on, which is no…”

“If you put your heads together and kind of hashed out things and got on the same page in front of a whiteboard, you'd save a lot of time over trying to do that overriding. Like the alternative is go asynchronous and just write, write a lot and provide a lot of…”

“Put some prices on it, put it out in the market in February of 2004. And about a year later or so, it was doing more, generating more revenue for us than our website design business.”

“I don't want to be bigger and have much lower margins. I don't want to be bigger and lose money per customer. I don't want to be bigger and have to take a bunch of money to support that growth.”

“When we hire people, we actually hire them first for a week, ah, on a contract basis, one week, not in every position, but in some, to actually do a project for us.”

“Ultimately about a third of the company quit in a matter of is it a week or two.”

“If I had to make it again today, I would make the same decision.”

“I can tell you the company's in a significantly better place.”

“We, we've actually grown significantly bigger than we've ever been. So we rehired a bunch of people and then have hired more since. At the time that happened, we were about 60, now we're about 80, biggest we've ever been.”

“So Jeff Bezos bought a small piece of my shares and David shares. None of his money went into the business. The money went into my bank account and David's bank account.”

“I'm certain I'm not here in 10 years but I don't know where I will be.”

“Okay, so, you know, I, I'm very inspired with the case of Basecamp, so I don't want to grow a really huge team, but I understand that I need to hire, like, several more engineers, maybe two to three, and anyway, we got to the point where we found our product m…”

“So we ended up going with the base camp motto of ShapeUp with a six-week sprint, and that's worked out really well for us so far in terms of getting into a rhythm of building out feature requests and having the engineers also feel that it's a short enough peri…”

“I think they may have long-term done some damage. I think by making it such a religious thing, like they, you know, they used to say like, well, bootstrap will never take funding. Anyone who takes funding is XYZ. They also would say like, we don't split tests.…”

“Basecamp only has 55 employees because they've grown so slow over so many years, and they have so much net profit coming off that they pay all of their people no matter where they live. It's like 90th percentile of a San Francisco salary for the role, and they…”

“So, I'm very, very conservative when it comes to investing. All my risk is tied up in my own business, and my own business is a machine that makes me the money. When I invest in something, it's because I want to support the thing, and if there's a return in th…”

“I don't do anything that could end me. I would never bet the company on something. I would never Bet the farm on something.”