« The Science of Listener Attention | Main | A9: What Play is it? »

September 15, 2004

Basecamp - Eating Dogfood, Part II

Here's part two of our discussion with Jason Fried of BaseCamp, 37Signals and Signal vs. Noise (click here for part I) about his business, his playing field, his play and his marketing secrets....

Marketing Playbook:
What about target customers? How did you think about the market for
Basecamp?

Jason Fried:
We started out thinking of the market as other folks like us. If we needed a tool like this, surely plenty of others did as well. We talked with our colleagues, clients, and friends in the industry and they confirmed our assumptions.

Small firms like ours are often stuck with subpar software solutions because 1. The big expensive mature products that exist aren't tailored for their needs, 2. They couldn't afford a mature product anyway, and 3. They don't have the time to build their own tool. So, they were pretty psyched when we (one of their own) built a product for them. And so far the response has proven everyone right.

Marketing Playbook:
You know the phrase "eating your own dogfood?" It sounds like you were both the proverbial dog and the dog food maker.

Jason Fried:
Definitely. We even used Basecamp to develop Basecamp. It really helped us refine the product, and I think people can sense that by the attention to detail. We would have never caught and improved the little annoyances and weak spots if we hadn't used the product during its development. Today we use the exact same version as everyone else so we know what everyone else is going through. I know some companies that develop software are always using their own latest beta or alpha, but that makes it easy to ignore the actual version's shortcomings. We want to stay as close to what our customers are experiencing as possible.

Marketing Playbook: What's happened since then?

Jason Fried:
Well, Basecamp has been widely adopted by all sorts of companies. Web design firms, advertising agencies, management consultants, schools, non-profits and government agencies. And, most surprising to us is the adoption by individuals to manage their own personal projects, their weddings, their home improvement projects, and their lives.

We've also been pleasantly surprised by the uptake from educators. Teachers are using Basecamp to manage their classrooms. They're posting homework assignments on Basecamp and students are even setting up accounts to manage group research projects. We're very pleased with the response so far. I'll leave it at that ;)

Marketing Playbook:
In terms of marketing, how would you describe your play?

Jason Fried:
Definitely not a dragrace. We didn't want to attack anyone. We targeted a different segment of the market and we built the buzz virally. I guess that would be a Stealth play. And we'll continue to keep it that way.

There are others out there now but we see them trying to one up each other on a feature-by-feature basis. I'm sure they will find appeal but for our customers we're keeping things simple.

Marketing Playbook:
How did you reach so many people? How did you execute on this play so successfully?

Jason Fried:
We were lucky -- we already had an audience. We've been building an audience with our Signal vs. Noise blog since 1999. We use the blog to talk about design, usability, simplicity, business and more. So, when we released a product that demonstrated we practiced what we preached, the audience was very receptive.

We also built in a lot of features that were interesting to a variety of vocal special interest groups. Basecamp allows you to subscribe to your projects with RSS feeds so the RSS community embraced it and promoted it. Basecamp uses CSS extensively for layout purposes so the heavily trafficked CSS gurus talked it up. You can also subscribe to your milestones with Apple iCal so the Mac folks just loved it and spread the word.

We have done some Google Adwords runs, but most of our business and traffic still comes from word of mouth.

Marketing Playbook:
Any other things important to your success that you want to share.

Jason Fried:
We're big believers in staying as close to your customers as you can. Use what they use. I answer all support emails personally -- mostly because I like to know what's right, what's wrong with Basecamp. I want to hear the praises and I want to read the reasons why people cancelled. Being so close to the customer, and building these personal relationships is what allows you to think like the people who keep you in business. And, if you don't think like they think, you'll be out of business quickly.

Another thing we believe in is open and honest communication. If we go down, we let people know we went down -- even if they'd never know about it since it was at 3am for 20 minutes. Be honest and clear at all costs.

Marketing Playbook:
Well thanks much Jason. This was great. Best of luck in all your future projects. We will be staying tuned.

Jason Fried:
Thanks so much, and best success with your book. I know a lot of people who can certainly use your advice ;)

Posted by johnza at September 15, 2004 04:24 PM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.geekfishing.net/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/1136

Comments

Post a comment