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We have something new to say about building, running, and growing (or not growing) a business.
This book isn’t based on academic theories. It’s based on our experience. We’ve been in business for more than ten years. Along the way, we’ve seen two recessions, one burst bubble, business-model shifts, and doom-and-gloom predictions come and go—and we’ve remained profitable through it all.
We’re an intentionally small company that makes software to help small companies and groups get things done the easy way. More than 3 million people around the world use our products.
We started out in 1999 as a three-person Web-design consulting firm called 37signals. In 2004, we weren’t happy with the project-management software used by the rest of the industry, so we created our own: Basecamp. When we showed the online tool to clients and colleagues, they all said the same thing: “We need this for our business too.” Basecamp became our main product, generating tens of millions of dollars a year in profits. In 2014, we decided to go all-in on making that software tool and renamed the company Basecamp.
Before focusing on making Basecamp, we built and sold other online tools. We created Highrise, a contact manager and simple CRM (customer relationship management) tool. We spun off Highrise as its own company in 2014, but it continues to be used by tens of thousands of small businesses to keep track of leads, deals, and more than 10 million contacts. More than 500,000 people signed up for Backpack, an intranet and knowledge-sharing tool we launched in 2005 and retired in 2012. And people have sent more than 100 million messages using Campfire, a real-time business chat tool that is now a feature within Basecamp.
Some people consider us an Internet company, but that makes us cringe. Internet companies are known for hiring compulsively, spending wildly, and failing spectacularly. That’s not us. We’re small (fifty-five people as of 2017), frugal, and profitable.
A lot of people say we can’t do what we do. They call us a fluke. They advise others to ignore our advice. Some have even called us irresponsible, reckless, and—gasp!—unprofessional.
These critics don’t understand how a company can reject growth, meetings, budgets, boards of directors, advertising, salespeople, and “the real world,” yet thrive. That’s their problem, not ours. They say you need to sell to the Fortune 500. Screw that. We sell to the Fortune 5,000,000.
They don’t think you can have employees who almost never see each other spread out across eight cities on two continents. They say you can’t succeed without making financial projections and five-year plans. They’re wrong.
They say you need a PR firm to make it into the pages of Time, Business Week, Inc., Fast Company , the New York Times , the Financial Times , the Chicago Tribune , the Atlantic, Entrepreneur , and Wired . They’re wrong. They say you can’t share your recipes and bare your secrets and still withstand the competition. Wrong again.
They say you can’t possibly compete with the big boys without a hefty marketing and advertising budget. They say you can’t succeed by building products that do less than your competition’s. They say you can’t make it all up as you go. But that’s exactly what we’ve done.
They say a lot of things. We say they’re wrong. We’ve proved it. And we wrote this book to show you how to prove them wrong too.
First, we’ll start out by gutting business. We’ll take it down to the studs and explain why it’s time to throw out the traditional notions of what it takes to run a business. Then we’ll rebuild it. You’ll learn how to begin, why you need less than you think, when to launch, how to get the word out, whom (and when) to hire, and how to keep it all under control.
Now, let’s get on with it.