companies to manage...
companies to manage projects. Microsoft Project and the other heavyweight
approaches to this relied on critical path management and things that might
work fine for a 200-person project on a construction site, but not well for 3 people
trying to deliver a web application.
So we started out just thinking, “This is going to help us solve our consultancy
needs.” And as we got more feedback, we realized it was a good time to
start thinking about how we could make this 37signals’s product.
Livingston: Do you remember the moment?
Heinemeier Hansson: It was more just a flow of the application coming
together and the feedback we started to get from people we respected saying,
“I want this too!” We thought, “This is something that it would be selfish to
keep to ourselves.”
Livingston: What were the features that people liked most when they saw it?
Heinemeier Hansson: The funny thing is that most people were impressed by
all the stuff Basecamp didn’t do. They were used to these big, honking products
that tried to do everything, where they just needed something simple.
We had this dilemma that either you had MS Project or you had email, and
there’s a huge gap between them. Managing a project by sending emails back
and forth is messy and doesn’t work, but otherwise you had to adapt your
process to what’s mandated from these other heavyweight applications.
Basecamp was basically just trying to be one step above email. And by setting
such a humble goal, we had to make a lot of decisions about how simple we
could make things. We tried to make less software from the very beginning. It’s
one of the mantras we have. It’s a win whenever we can get away with just a
simple model, since we have to do less programming. I was the only programmer
and I was dedicating 10 hours a week to this, while we were developing it.
37signals was paying me to do this out of its consultancy revenue, since we
didn’t have funds to fund it. So we had only a quarter of a programmer dedicated
to the development and no funds really for doing this. The designers
were giving it a third of their time at most. And we realized through this process
that those constraints—which sound negative—were actually the greatest gift
to the development of Basecamp.
That whole constrained development model really focused our view on
what we needed, and it forced us to make tough decisions about making less
software all the time. And we keep getting feedback from customers that say,
“I love this, it’s just so simple to use. It’s got just the features I need and not all
| ← David Heinemeier Hansson | the other stuff.” → |