“I don’t think people tell the stories. I don’t think people ask the stories.” Illustration by Nate Otto Jewelry tells a story. For Kathy, the owner of a 90-year-old jewelry store in Berwyn, Illinois, every piece of her jewelry adds up to a larger, richer history about the business that she joined as a 16-year-old part-time… keep reading
These are the Android app updates you’re looking for. Basecamp to-dos are now faster and more fluid in the Android app. In previous versions, creating and re-ordering your to-dos was a little more clunky. Our Android team put in some hard work to make them easier to use and they did an incredible job. In… keep reading
You can win on your own terms even if you’re not all in. One of the most pervasive myths of startup life is that it has to be all consuming. That unless you can give your business all your thoughts and hours, you don’t deserve success. You are unworthy of the startup call. This myth neatly… keep reading
Basecamp’s “team data” recently doubled in size with Justin White joining us full-time as a programmer. We’ve been in the data business at Basecamp for over six years, but the occasion of hiring a second team member caused me to reflect on why Team Data exists, what it does, and how we work. A simple… keep reading
Any time we launch a new feature in Basecamp, the support team likes to keep track of what customers say about it after release. When we launched the new Home screen a few months ago, customers loved it, but missed the easy access to switching between projects they had with the previous Basecamps menu. Well,… keep reading
He knew how to work up a sweat for developers, I’ll give him that. But… Harvard Business Review studied what makes 35,000 employees from the US and Britain tick and found: The benefit of having a highly competent boss is easily the largest positive influence on a typical worker’s level of job satisfaction. Not the pay.… keep reading
Almost two decades ago, a young filmmaker landed on the scene with a movie that became a big deal, winning awards, and making princely sums at the box office. But after that debut, as many critics and fans would agree, every movie he made was worse than the one before it. Was this creative genius… keep reading
Interviewing for a new job is stressful as hell. It’s basically like taking an exam, except the results might well determine whether you make rent next month. So it doesn’t really matter how much the interviewer assures you that we’re just having a “friendly, no-pressure chat”. First of all, any “chat” that determines the future… keep reading
How often have you heard that one? “Whatever it takes”. It’s an iceberg. Steer clear. What starts out as an innocent turn of words, is actually a veiled attack on reasonable expectations. And when expectations aren’t reasonable, all bets are off. And when all bets are off, you’re usually the loser. Whatever it takes means… keep reading
If it’s just you say “I”, not “We”. There’s no need to put up a front. Before I started Basecamp back in 1999 (we were originally called 37signals), I had a software and Web design business called Spinfree. The Internet was a fairly new and exotic phenomenon back then, and it was pretty easy to drum… keep reading