Happy birthday Basecamp! Our flagship product celebrated its third anniversary yesterday. Here’s the original launch announcement made right here on Signal vs. Noise. And my, look how our baby has grown:
- Over 1,000,000 people have Basecamp accounts worldwide.
- 94% of customers surveyed said they would recommend Basecamp to a friend, client, or colleague.
- Great reviews from our customers and mentions in major publications.
- Integration with other great products like Blinksale, Harvest, Phonified, Project Recon for Windows XP, Dashboard widgets, and more.
- Big productivity boosts on Basecamp’s most popular feature: To-do lists.
- We just increased storage limits across the board (2x on the Personal, Basic, and Plus plan, 3x on the Premium plan, and 4x on the Max plan).
We’re constantly adding tweaks and improvements and have plans in 2007 to keep the improvements coming. Over 90% of all changes we make to Basecamp are based on customer requests so thanks for your feedback. And thanks to all our customers for helping make Basecamp’s success possible.
To help celebrate, here’s a coupon code for $10 off your next month when you upgrade: XYN58UA6F2.
In Oh, Sweet Revenge, an oldish Newsweek article, Dunkin’ Donuts’ chief Jon Luther says his company is helped by its rivalry with Starbucks: “[It’s] created an awareness for the category, and we’re benefiting.”
The chain’s success illustrates a little-advertised truth of business. Too often the financial pages read like the sports section, filled with winners and losers. Reality is more complex. In many markets, business is not a zero-sum game, and competitors create opportunities.
The article includes some lessons on playing “business defense”...
Markets Have More Niches Than You Think: Dunkin’ Donuts, Starbucks and Krispy Kreme all sell pastries and caffeinated beverages, so they’re obvious competitors. But beneath that similarity, they’re serving different markets. Krispy Kreme’s customers visit only occasionally but buy dozens of donuts; that chain is peddling a dietary splurge, not daily sustenance…Starbucks chief Howard Schultz has always seen his stores as neighborhood hangouts, a sort of nonalcoholic “Cheers” setting with comfy chairs, porcelain cups and, increasingly, wireless Internet access. Dunkin’ Donuts, in contrast, is increasingly built on speed. Most of its new stores feature drive-throughs, and the chain bills itself as a pit stop for harried commuters…
Grow at Your Own Speed: If Starbucks seems ubiquitous, that’s because national expansion was part of Schultz’s game plan when he began reinventing the coffeehouse in the mid-1980s. But that fast-growth strategy caused growing pains early on. Dunkin’ Donuts, by contrast, is still concentrated on the East Coast; it has just a few dozen locations west of the Mississippi. Instead of conquering new lands, Dunkin’s managers have spent much of their energy exploring how deeply the brand could penetrate existing markets. The result: in Massachusetts, where the quickest way to get someone lost is to give directions that include the phrase “Turn left at Dunkin’ Donuts,” there’s one store for every 7,389 residents, compared with one Starbucks for every 15,383 in its home state of Washington.
RailsConf ‘07 is going down in Portland, Oregon this May. But it’ll be without you in attendance, if you don’t hurry up and secure yourself a seat. We opened up for registrations on Friday afternoon and today, Monday morning, we’re sold more than half of the 1200 tickets!
This makes RailsConf ‘07 the fastest selling conference that O’Reilly have been involved with.
37signals will of course be there with yours truly doing a keynote on Rails 2.0 and Jamis Buck a tutorial on Capistrano (our cluster-deployment tool) and a live version of The Rails Way. If you’re into web development, we hope to see you there!
Cell phone sound quality was bad enough, but now we accept further degradation introduced by bluetooth headsets.
CD-quality sound is being replaced by further downsampled downloadable digital music.
Now you can buy TV shows and movies online that are lower quality than the ones you can see for free on an actual TV.
Text messaging is introducing new lexicon that eschews punctuation and sentence structure for simply getting the point across.
YouTube brings pixelated motion to the masses.
Judging by quality, these products are getting better by “getting worse.” Convenience trumping quality is nothing new, but its pace seems accelerated these days.
Which companies do you see bucking this trend? Who is competing by delivering higher quality goods and services? Who is saying convenience is important, but it’s not the most important thing? What opportunities are out there for companies looking to differentiate through quality? Who is excelling by raising the bar on both convenience and quality?
Three sites that restrict text by 1) number of words, 2) number of questions, or 3) amount of space.
Panopticist
Panopticist limits the word count on its sidebar link roll. Check out the haiku-like “five five-word links.”
Tull’s Ian Anderson loves cats!
The horror of overcompressed music.
Bronson Pinchot’s now a freemason.
The aesthetics of wind farms.
Mike Davis on “horrific mega-slums.”
SuprGlu
Instead of offering typical bios, SuprGlu conducts interviews with users customers in a “three questions, three answers” format (example).
3. 3 things you’d bring with you to an island, for a week?
That’s funny, I didn’t even know this Island question was next. For a week, let’s see. I think I’d definitely bring my wife. Now this is always the tricky part. If I bring my laptop or ipod does the battery magically stay charged for the week or am I just out of luck. If it stays charged then I bring my laptop as one item. If no magic batteries exist then I guess I bring my pet unicorn and a sci-fi anthology. The unicorn is cool right?
Similar: Guy Kawasaki’s “Ten Questions With…” interviews, the “5 Questions” bit Craig Kilborn used to do at The Daily Show, and FiveQs (the same five questions are asked to various “inspirational” people).
37signals
Columns present a challenge for online layouts when text runs too long or short. When we recently redesigned our marketing sites, we decided to embrace space restraints and shape our text so it shows up in matched columns which end at the same point (Basecamp shown below, you can also see at Backpack and Campfire sites).
It means shaving a few words here and there but that’s all part of the challenge. You’ve just got to make it work.
Related: Embrace Constraints [Getting Real]
We’re looking for Basecamp customers in the NYC or Chicagoland area interested in being interviewed for short on-site video vignettes demonstrating how you use Basecamp. We’ll be promoting these videos on our site.
We’re looking for customers from all walks of life and all industries. From educators to designers to writers to marketers to performers to lawyers to anyone who considers Basecamp an integral part of their business.
If you are interested in participating, or have any questions, send us an email. Thank you.
FordDirect.com has some interesting ideas about which features on a car are optional…
Optional brakes? That certainly is a Bold Move.
And if cash is really tight, you can also have ‘em leave off the wheels and pedals…
[tx RA]
Related: ‘06 Ford loss: $12.7 billion
A redesign usually implies a major overhaul. But it’s interesting to watch a site like Amazon keep its overall look and feel constant while continually testing new elements. Below are some examples relating to search, recommendations, shipping, etc.
Getting Real translations are underway. They are linked from the Getting Real Table of Contents page. Here are the languages so far (number of chapters translated in parentheses):
Thanks to all the volunteer translators. Obviously we still have a ways to go so, if you’d like to help, contact us via email.
