Our 2023 marketing campaign for Basecamp kicked off on a ton of different channels at once. Web ads, search ads, podcast ads, and TV ads all blasted the message of JUST LET ME DO MY JOB. Our flagship commercial was a hit with the audience and the critics. But our attempt at out-of-home advertising, with billboards all over Boston, was ...

Amanda Perino had barely settled into the role as executive director of The Rails Foundation before she secured a venue, a date, and the full support of the board for Rails World. This 650-attendee conference will kick off the worldwide ambitions for The Rails Foundation to host a new series of ecosystem gatherings at incredibly afford...

It's been a long time since I last saw a physical piece of hardware used to run our services at 37signals. I vaguely remember doing a tour of our Chicago data center over a decade ago, but somewhere along the line, I just lost interest in the iron itself. Now the interest is back, because hardware is fun again, so let me share my excit...

Tim Urban's new book What's Our Problem? offers an excellent analysis of the current American political malaise. It breaks down the history of first how the Republican party got overrun by low-rung thinking from the mid-90s forward, then how equally low-rung thinking got the other side in the past decade or so. It's a light, humorous r...

One of the most important techniques I've embraced for managing my time is to direct related tasks to a bucket, let that bucket accumulate until full, then empty it all in one go. This in contrast to trying to catch every task the moment it lands from the myriad of interruption pipes that'll drip-drip-drip your day away if you let them...

It took moving back to Denmark to realize the folly of thinking America is ever going to "get there". Whether on guns or healthcare or taxes or any other major policy position that's so fiercely contested in the US. Despite growing up in this little Nordic country, I didn't fully appreciate the tremendous, underpinning power of a homog...

It'll soon cost $7/month to fully participate on Twitter. Musk has announced they'll start reserving presence in the For You tab solely for paying customers from April 15th, limit participation in polls to just those customers, and soon also give preferential showing in replies as well. Legacy blue-checks will not be spared, and will i...

Every week seems to offer fresh staff cuts at the big tech companies right now. Several of the giants are already on their second rounds, and few would probably bet against a third after those. But as hard as it is on an individual level – and it's always hard! – there's a silver lining for the economy as a whole: Releasing captive tal...

The majority of customers will never tell you why they stop buying on their own. In fact, even if pressed, most will just smile, nod, and give you some face-saving reason for how “now is just not the right time” or “we are just going in a different direction”. Because that’s what avoids conflict. Thus, the only time you’re truly allowe...

Last year, we hired a high-profile ad agency to work on our first-ever branding campaign for Basecamp. They were smart, funny... and entirely out of sync with our budget. So we ended up letting them go, hiring a new head of marketing, and doing it all ourselves. The problem was that our entire marketing budget for 2023 amounted to a "m...

You can't convince someone invested in their convictions to the contrary by arguments alone. Only actions can pry open a locked mind, and most minds remain locked most of the time. So if you wish to be persuasive, you ought to spend less time arguing and more time doing. This is as it should be. Talk is cheap, and others are right to k...

When the money flows freely, and there's a strong cachet to having tons of open positions, you can be forgiven to think that the individual productivity on a product team just doesn't matter. So much time is spent coordinating the work anyway. Who cares if the stack you're using takes twice the number of people to ship meaningful updat...

I'm a programming child of the agile software movement. Just as I was starting out, Kent Beck published Extreme Programming Explained in 2000. It was a revelation. I had just enough exposure to Big Upfront Design and waterfall methodologies to appreciate what a monumental shift this was. Beck's methodology x-rayed the ills of the tradi...

It's finally time to talk about the technology we've been building at 37signals to leave the cloud with HEY and many of our legacy applications. We already run Basecamp on our own hardware, but we deploy it using an old tool known as Capistrano. This is the deployment tool we originally wrote at 37signals all the way back in 2005, when...

Remember back in November, when seemingly every pious public persona and their coteries announced final farewells on Twitter? All in the clear expectation that the service would sink any moment? Like they had seen the iceberg, and was sure – just sure! – that impact was imminent. Except, there was no iceberg, no impact, no sinking ship...

Cloud aficionados love pinning the true promise of the cloud on serverless functions and services. Not getting the savings you thought you would with the cloud? It's because you didn't go serverless. Frustrated with the complexity of the cloud? Serverless! Performance questions? SERVERLESS! Serverless has become a mantra to chant becau...

It can take a long time and be tricky business to get a gaggle of humans rolling in the same, right direction. When it finally happens, you feel it. The pace is effortless. The interactions are easy. This is the moment when momentum asks you to get out of the way. The easiest way to mess up a good thing is to mess with it at all. Just ...

Revenue gets all the glory in the land of tech. The unlimited upside! Growth cures all! The next digit unlocks the next round! Don't get me wrong, without revenue, without paying customers, there's nothing. But once there's something, costs count just as well to the bottom line as does revenue – if you care about profits, and you shoul...

I've talked a lot about cost in our reasoning for leaving the cloud. But while cost is crucial, it is not the only motivating factor. Here are five values that have guided our decision, and that I recently articulated in an internal post at 37signals (so excuse the code names etc): 1. We value independence above all else. Being trapped...

Since declaring our intention to leave the cloud in October, we've been busy at work making it so. After a brief detour down a blind alley with an enterprise Kubernetes provider, we found our stride building our own tools, and successfully moved the first small application out of the cloud a few weeks ago. Now our sights are set on a t...

Whether you're a car lover or not, there's no denying the disarming enthusiasm of Doug DeMuro. He's an anti-influencer in a car world dominated by slick, status-conscious performers on YouTube. A reminder that being into cars doesn't have to be about showing off, and that you can enjoy the design, engineering, and driving experience of...

When we first started work on HEY, we didn't mean to build a general-purpose email service at all. We were looking to create Highrise 2. The successor to our beloved small-team CRM system from 2007. We had several skunkworks attempts at that in the past. One was nicknamed Glenn Gary. Another was Chestnut. But it was realizing that emai...

We all have ideas. Ideas are immortal. They last forever. What doesn’t last forever is inspiration. Inspiration is like fresh fruit or milk: It has an expiration date. If you want to do something, you’ve got to do it now. You can’t put it on a shelf and wait two months to get around to it. You can’t just say you’ll do it later. Later, ...

You know you're old when you can talk about stuff that happened twenty years ago with vivid recollection. I'm now that old. This week, it's been 19 years(!!) since we first launched Basecamp. Which means it's been well over twenty years that I've been working with Jason Fried at 37signals, and also more than twenty years since I first ...

A picture of my home office in Malibu went viral last week. Some two million people gawked at that lovely Catalina Island-facing view that forms the background for work when I'm there. Here's another shot of that same office from the early morning: It really is my dream office. But at the same time, it's also just an office, and the mo...

Disappointment occurs when expectations don’t match reality. And our expectations for software quality are profoundly unrealistic. Thus, lots of people are continuously disappointed — even enraged — by software bugs. They shouldn’t be. The only reliable, widely used way to ensure impeccable software quality is to write less software th...

Just a couple of months ago, I wrote an analysis of why I believed we were entering the waning days of DEI's dominance. I looked at four factors: 1) the likely judicial defeat of affirmative action in universities, 2) the disintegration and scandalization of BLM, 3) the loss of Twitter as an effective woke policing mechanism, and 4) fi...

This is to everyone who've ever been frustrated with the inability to find time at work to do their actual job. To those who've had to nod and smile at the VP of Wasting Everyone's Fucking Time. To whoever is sick of playing calendar tetris just to win the prize of zoom gloom. To people who actually like what they do, and would be ever...

I lost interest in computer hardware during the 2010s. It seemed years would pass with only meager, marginal improvements. Intel was stuck in a rut, so CPUs were barely improving. The only bright spot for me was Apple's progress with their A-series chips for phones. But that felt like a segregated reality from that of regular computers...

This is my favorite kind of day. An entirely empty schedule combined with a juicy, challenging project to dedicate it to. The perfect antidote to the dread that occasionally sets in when a whole week is devoured by #ExecutiveLife. Nothing invigorates the soul like seeing something come together out of nothing, and to do that, you need ...