money if we...
money if we went out of business a few months into a $500 agreement. They
wouldn’t allow that because we didn’t have a long history with them.
So now we had this extensive billing system focused on billing once a year
and we couldn’t use it. We had to go back and make it monthly instead. But this
turned out also to be a blessing. So we pushed back the launch about a month,
and now we charged monthly, but we charged twice as much. The plan that was
before $99 a year is now $19 a month, $224 a year instead. So we actually got to
raise the prices and at the same time create a less risky offer for small companies
since they didn’t have to buy a whole year.
One of the technical mistakes that we made early on was that we had this
notion that Basecamp was for creative services firms. Set up like that, you have
a firm and you have a client, so it’s a one-to-one relationship. That assumption
went very deep. For instance, in the database there’s a client ID and firm ID,
and now that people were using it, you’d have setups where people wanted two
firms. So now what did we do? Basecamp simply couldn’t do that. And that
assumption was so deep at the roots of the system that it took us about a year
and a half to fix, which was not a good thing.
Another interesting mistake was that we didn’t consider time zones.
Basecamp ran with the assumption for the longest time that everybody is in
Central Standard Time, even though I was in Copenhagen, which is a 7-hour
time difference from Chicago. So people in Australia would get their milestones
one day late. We didn’t really care about time, because we didn’t usually
have fixed deadlines. We had stuff we wanted to do, but it didn’t really matter
whether it was 2 hours later or 2 hours earlier. Of course, not every firm works
like that.
And it was also disguised by the fact that Basecamp didn’t use a lot of time.
The only place where we displayed the time itself was on the comments. On the
posts themselves, it just said the date and the milestone. So you wouldn’t be
able to discover that, unless you were in that central time zone, it was off. In
Denmark, for 7 hours after midnight, the system would say it was yesterday. So
it was a big deal for the firms that needed specific times. And it was always a big
deal to people in Australia. Half of the time they would be off by one day. We’ve
gone back to fix that problem too.
Livingston: Were you the only programmer?
Heinemeier Hansson: I was until February 2005 when we brought on our
second programmer. Yes, for well over a year, I was the only programmer and
| ← David Heinemeier Hansson | systems administrator on → |