Founders at Work.pdf

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
the other stuff.” There wasn’t time for us to say, “Wouldn’t it be cool to do this
and that?”
It turns out that when you build only software that you absolutely need, you
don’t get more software than you’ll actually use. And that’s why we didn’t fear
competition from the big guys. If Microsoft decided to go after Basecamp,
they’d say, “Get a team of 20 people to do this and we’ll give them 6 months to
come up with something.” Because when you’re in a big corporate environment,
you throw a lot of resources at projects. You just could never arrive at the
type of product that Basecamp is when you don’t work under constraints like
we did. It’s just too tempting to try to do it all, or at least do too much.
It wasn’t necessarily that we were great programmers and designers, but
because we embraced the constraints that forced that upon us. If we took the
same people and put them in an environment where we had all the money and
time we wanted, we couldn’t even make Basecamp again.
Livingston: Did you worry about any competitive products?
David Heinemeier Hansson 311
Heinemeier Hansson: There have been a few businesses that have tried to do
similar things, but most of them try to do the full management of projects:
billing, time tracking, and other things that we’ve never tried to solve.
We picked a few simple things: a project weblog, milestones tracking, file
and to-do list sharing. And we haven’t really expanded beyond that; we’ve just
tried to refine those few simple elements.
The funny thing is that another reason Basecamp is a success is because it’s
not more focused. We started out wanting to make a tool for creative services
businesses, like us. But we never actually wound up including things that were
specific to creative services, like billing, time tracking, etc. So people use
Basecamp for all kinds of projects, like managing weddings, home improvement
projects, and student collaboration. The only reason that we’re attracting
all those people who just need help with project management is because we’re
not trying to be more specific.
And that’s why I think that if we had had more money and time to add features
specific to creative services businesses, we would have shut off our entire
market to all these other people who are using Basecamp for types of projects
that we didn’t even imagine.
Livingston: So you built this new project and didn’t have a marketing budget.
What happened next?
Heinemeier Hansson: We didn’t spend a dollar on advertising when it
launched. Though Basecamp is a monthly service, you don’t need to pay