Today we officially launch Basecamp Breeze, the simplest way for small groups to stay in touch via email. Check it out.
Breeze gives your group a permanent, easy to remember email address (like [email protected]) so anyone in the group can reach the entire group without having to remember a bunch of individual email addresses.
The Breeze backstory
Most people are part of a small group.
Maybe it’s a book club or a church group or a trivia team. Or maybe you’re on a softball team. Or maybe your kid plays little league.
Or maybe you have a team of mentors you often ask for advice. Or if you live in a condo, you’re part of a condo association.
Maybe your company has a board of directors. That board is a small group. Maybe you run a small company – your staff is a small group. Or if you’re a teacher, your classroom is a group.
And everyone has a family. Some larger than others, but all are small groups.
Small groups love email
Small groups usually use email to keep in touch. Email is the universal constant of communication. Everyone you communicate with has an email address. There’s no adoption curve, nothing complex. Even your grandmother has email.
But email has two flaws when it comes to groups
If you use email to communicate with your group, you’re probably intimately familiar with these two flaws:
- You have to remember each person’s email address every time you want to make an announcement or start a group discussion. This means people get left out by accident.
- If someone doesn’t “reply-all” when responding to a group email with multiple email addresses, then it all falls apart. People miss messages.
Something better, please
There’s got to be a better way. But it can’t be complicated. It can’t be “software”. It can’t be something people in your group have to sign up for or log in to. It can’t be hard to set up. And it can’t be hard to maintain.
Tools like Google Groups and Yahoo Groups are great on paper, but they’re often a hassle to set up and even messier to maintain. These tools are getting more complicated over time, not simpler. Check out this comparison.
This is why we built Basecamp Breeze
Breeze eliminates the two key flaws of group email. With Breeze, no one in the group has to remember everyone’s personal email address. And no one has to worry about someone forgetting to “reply-all” because any reply to the group email address automatically goes to everyone in the group. Simple. It always works. Nothing new to learn.
If you can use email, you can use Breeze. And that goes for everyone in your group.
A Breeze email address for your group only cost $10, one time. Pay once, and use it with your group of up to 50 people without ever having to pay again.
We think you’ll find Breeze incredibly useful. Let us know how you end up using it. Thanks!
Pavol
on 10 Jan 13Hi, how is it different from a mailing list?
Joël Cox
on 10 Jan 13What is the reason you decided to launch Breeze under the Basecamp umbrella, instead of a separate brand? I can imagine that more poeple know what Basecamp is, rather than what 37signals does.
I also noticed that the updated marketing website says “Now Basecamp brings you two great apps to help groups work better, together.” Not “Now 37signals brings…”
Jason Fried
on 10 Jan 13Joël, we’re saving that for another post.
Eric Anderson
on 10 Jan 13I know bandwidth is incredibly cheap and only getting cheaper. But I was still surprised at the pay once and never pay again. I would be interested to know how you determined it was sustainable. I would hate to pay my $10 only to see it go the way of Tada List, Writeboard and Backpack.
Amazing Rando
on 10 Jan 13Very elegant solution, however there are two features missing for an accurate comparison with Yahoo! and Google groups—archive access and the ability for a user (not account owner) to mange their own account.
For instance, what if a latecomer brings up an already discussed topic?
Some lists may be hyperactive and a user may desire once-a-day emails instead of receiving them as they come in. Can a user remove themselves from a list?
Jason Fried
on 10 Jan 13“Can a user remove themselves from a list” – yup, anyone can unsubscribe.
“Some lists may be hyperactive and a user may desire once-a-day emails instead of receiving them as they come in” – we agree. We’ll likely be adding that down the road. We built it, but pulled it for launch because we weren’t happy with how it was working.
Amazing Rando
on 10 Jan 13@Jason F: Thank you for the answers. The only other question that I have is will there be a message archive for new comers to the list to see previous discussions?
Colin Summers
on 10 Jan 13If they allow a user to manage the frequency of their messages that would violate patent 6816884, which some troll probably has ahold of.
I paid the $10 because I love seeing new products developed and I like supporting 37signals. But there’s no way this has enough features for my little groups. It is much more likely that MightyBell will find their way to email than Breeze will find their way to an email+feature set that works as well as MightyBell.
But I love competition in this space. Wave was a misstep for Google in a lot of ways and one of them was saying, “Email is over, no one every uses it anymore.”
twiz
on 10 Jan 13@Joël a funnel to convert those that still use email for project mgmt to eventually use Basecamp. Solid approach.
Pascal Laliberté
on 10 Jan 13We run some mailing lists internally at our company, and we’re wondering why people don’t post and share more.
One of the theories for why people don’t post is because they don’t know who will receive the email. Sure it’s a private list, but people still don’t know exactly who is receiving the email. They’re afraid their question or thought will be laughed at, dismissed, ignored (which is probably the worst for them). So instead they fire up an email to just one person they know, and from who they know they’ll get a reaction. This happens often.
Is it because people don’t know who will receive the email, or is it because they’re insecure? I’m not sure.
Either way, does Breeze let people know who the email will be sent to? Do emails get sent out with, much like Basecamp, a footer with a list of the people the email was distributed to?
Joël Cox
on 10 Jan 13@Jason Fried Looking forward to it.
@twiz Thanks for the link to your earlier comment, must have overlooked it at the time. Clever indeed.
Jan
on 10 Jan 13Amazingly simple and yet the first product like that out there, awesome! :)
Some messed up thoughts i have:
Say i were to sign up for 51 groups where group 1 has all other 50 groups as its members. Will i then be able to “manage” a group of 2500 people? In other words…can a Breeze group be subscribed to another group? Then i guess you would have to make sure the resulting graph is cycle free!!?
;)
Kurt
on 10 Jan 13I like the simplicity of this for teaching smaller online classes. Can a group be expanded beyond 50 people (maybe by paying more)?
Colin, I had not heard of MightyBell before. I have been using Minigroup which I also like very much.
Alejandro Moreno
on 10 Jan 13If you don’t see the difference, it’s probably not for you.
Most people don’t use mailing lists. The really organized ones might use a contact list, but those lists are stored on an individual account, so you’d still be susceptible to “email flaw #2” as mentioned in the post.
I agree it’s not a unique service, but I think the execution is probably the simplest and friendliest.
Aditya Rustgi
on 10 Jan 13Going through the comments posted here, I am seeing a lot of commentary on what Breeze is not.
However, what caught my attention.. is what Breeze does do and does do really well. When I read this post I found it to be “A straightforward way for a collection of people to communicate amongst each other”.
It may not apply in all situations. But for the situations where it does apply, there is a tremendous market.
Well done Jason & Team.
V. Arora
on 10 Jan 13Maybe I’m missing something but I can’t see how this is any different than Google Groups.
Stephen Vardy
on 10 Jan 13Purpose: Internal communications inside a distributed collaborative group – period. Solves the reply all issue. Peer to peer communication.
From my vantage point: Does not work with external groups/ clients. Does not work with control freaks. Nor marketers. A level playing field. Breeze is democratic communication rather than a manipulated tool of persuasion, advantage or marketing.
I can see how the need for this arises in the 37Signals internal organisation. Perfect fit.
Breeze is most definitely a niche product. It does not outcompete the “big2” left standing – G & Y!. It forces the big2 to compete with Breeze in a very small subset niche where they are the weakest and least willing to commit resources.
I have been searching for a product to replace the big2 for many years. Basically Breeze for 500-2000 people with optional digest, online and solo email formats. Peer to peer – female over 40 yrs. No social media etc just simple moderation for 2-3 admins. Several Y! groups currently scratch this itch but the overall performance is poor. Y! as a business model is unstable o by extrapolation so is Y!groups.
My business is too small to internally use breeze. However, a peer to peer network of a similar businesses with “gossip” as a motivation would be interesting. Thinking hard here.
Stephen
S
twiz
on 10 Jan 13@joël no problem, a little selfish though.
When I was 23 I signed up for an emailing lottery service called the list serve. Basically, the idea is 1 person wins a lottery (each day) and gets a chance to send an email out to X amount of people.
I think X is at 21k+ people in the lottery at this point. Some quick math will tell you I may be well into my 60’s before I get a chance say anything to this crowd!
I intend to make a [email protected] and send to all those from the listserve I have received emails from so far.
Well worth the $10. Thanks for thought put into this product.
listserve
GeeIWonder
on 10 Jan 13You’re likely to get some flack for this given the habit of retiring old things to work on cool new things.
Both are understandable, but they are really not compatible with each other and any degree of confidence from the consumers end.
Jake
on 11 Jan 13Unsolicited design critique… At first glance I thought the “Compare Basecamp Breeze” and “Make a group email list” calls to action were AdWords. Even though I trust 37signals my lizard brain refused to let me click the mouse.
Nicholas Perry
on 11 Jan 13We are using Facebook groups, they are great for this pupose. When google+’s groups matures, we’ll be using that instead.
I hate email, but Facebook is fun/rewarding, and everyone at http://praetorlabs.com is on there anyway. If we need to send files/collaborateor share docs, dropbox covers most of it and Googledocs meets the rest. Add in Skydrive+onenote and trello for design and project management, and everything is there. Sharing links is all we’d do with email any way, and its really easy to cross-post.
Basecamp etc. doesn’t meet our needs as an agile organization. It has too much crud targeting companies that are still stuck in the email era.
Its a noble thing to help these poor souls maintain there addiction to email, but eventually your demographic is going to evaporate as the facebook generation reaches maturity.
Do you have a place for organizations with looser cultural restrictions which don’t depend on email?
Anonymous Coward
on 14 Jan 13I’m with Jake, on initial page scan my brain told me those top “Compare…” and “Make…” blocks were Google AdWords. However, a half-second later my brain did quickly correct itself, “Whoops wait…never mind. It’s fine. My bad.”
This discussion is closed.