The itch for a new version

0:00Welcome to Rework, a podcast by 37signals, about the better way to work and run your business. I'm Kimberly Rhodes, joined by the co-founder and CEO of 37 Signals, Jason Freed. As you guys probably know, we are in the process of building a new version of Basecamp, Basecamp 5. And although we can't share a lot about that now, I did think it'd be interesting to talk a little bit about why we're making a new version. But not only this version, but why we choose to make new versions of our products versus just adding new features. So Jason, maybe we start a little bit with the history. Basecamp started as Basecamp back in the day.

0:35And then we made Basecamp 2 onto Basecamp 3, which then became 4. As you're doing this kind of process, what kind of things are you thinking about on making something completely brand new, a brand new version, a new number at the end versus just adding features? Yeah, I mean, when we started this, we didn't have any idea that we would be making big new versions, right? We just make Basecamp, which is now called Basecamp Classic, but just Basecamp. And we did everything we could to make it the best thing it could be. We added a bunch of features and refined it and updated the interface and all the things.

1:09And then there comes a point or there came a point. I shouldn't say there comes a point because this is not always the case. But in our case, there came a point where we had a new idea that would not fit on the chassis, let's say, of the existing product. It was a new interface idea. It was a radical departure from what we had done initially. And when we come up with that, you can't really graft that kind of thing on to what we had because it also came with new technology ideas, new structural ideas, infrastructure ideas on how to build some of this stuff. And I guess we could have technically grafted it on, but it would have been such a radical departure that it made sense for us to say, let's start from scratch here.

1:49Anyone who's like renovated an old house will maybe understand what I'm talking about. like it's actually easier to build a new house than it's built to renovate down to the studs and old house because you've got all sorts of things that you got to deal with versus starting over from scratch. So it was like, we'd done a bunch of renovations in the existing place and like that was enough. And then we're going to decide to build a new house. Now, part of that was leaving the original house standing. So Basecamp Classic still stands today and it's still used by thousands of customers today. So no one was forced to change from Classic to what became known as Basecamp 2.

2:21We've changed our mind on that over the years with future versions, which we can get into, but we built a new version. And it just felt like the right thing to do. It's similar to the way car manufacturers do things. They might have a model, a design Porsche 911. It's been around since 1963, but they have the original one, I think it's called the F body. Then after that came the G body. After that came the 964, then the 993, then the 997. They have these generations, it's still the 9-11, so it's still Basecamp, but they have these different generations because at some point you just can't bolt on what you want to do anymore to the old generation.

2:59It's time for something new. So that's how we approach it as well. Okay. Let's go back. Let's kind of like put this in terms of a timeframe. When did Basecamp, the original Basecamp come out? And then I'm asking, it's kind of a quiz. I don't know if you'll actually remember these dates, but Basecamp come out to Basecamp too. I'm just thinking how long in the process was it before the discussion kind of started of like, maybe it's time to build a new house? Basecamp came out in 2004, February 5th, I think it was 2004. So actually it was more like eight years, but it really didn't get rolling until we knew we had something about a year, year and a half later.

3:34So 2012, we did Basecamp 2. I don't remember how long that was out. And then we did Basecamp 3. And then from 3 went to 4, and now 4, we're going to 5. Now, the difference is that from one, from classic, from original to two, brand new version at two. From two to three, brand new version for three, meaning from scratch, brand new, nobody had to switch over from two to three unless they wanted to. And consequently, that means we're still supporting all of these different versions. That's right. We still run classic, we run two, and we run three, but three became four. So we didn't do a new version for four.

4:10We morphed three into four. So now we're running just to go through the running classic two and four and five is going to also be a more from four to five. So we'll be running classic two and five essentially. So if you're on base camp three, you're now on base camp four. If you're on base camp four, you'll now be on base camp five. And so part of the challenge with that is we want to make sure that these new versions are substantial enough that they feel like a new version. They're familiar enough because we are morphing them. So you will get them. There's not a choice of whether or not you want it or not.

4:44It's a transition to a new version. Between classic and two, we could be a lot more radical because we could say you could stay where you are. If you don't like this new thing, you stay where you are. We're not saying that anymore for now. Three, four, and five are all a transitional upgrade, basically. So it has to be familiar enough, but still fresh and new enough to be new and to do new things. And so this is always a delicate balance of how do you inject enough new, enough better, enough fresh utility, but not upset the apple cart or whatever the thing is, or pull the rug out from whatever metaphor you want to use or whatever analogy.

5:20So people don't totally freak out. Some people will because some people, whenever you change anything, they don't like it. Totally understand that. Fair. We're changing more than just a little few things. We're changing a lot of things, but we're also keeping it familiar enough that it It feels like, oh, okay, this is a new coat of paint, but the furniture is not that moved around. I still recognize this room. I know how this room works and how this house is set up. But, oh, I have to learn this new thing and I have to learn this new thing. And we expanded the kitchen a bit. So now the powder room that was over here is over here and things have moved around a bit, but still feeling familiar enough.

5:50That's the thread we're trying to pull here. Okay. So what's interesting about not making a completely new model, if you will, like morphing from one version to another, I would think there's also some financial implications to that. Meaning when you spin up a new version, like you have to opt in, you're also opting into a new price point. As it is now, you're not. You just stay on the same thing. So is that part of your decision-making process as well, or does that not really factor into it? I mean, look, if we have a radical, radical new idea that's really, really different that would not fit on the existing chassis.

6:26We will start over. Maybe Basecamp 6 is from ground up. I don't know. We're not thinking about that now. We're just working on 5, right? So in some cases, that'll dictate business model changes and other things. It is just easier to transition where people want to think about an economic decision. They just go, do I still like this? Do I want this? Do I like the new things? Do I like most of the new things? Am I going to be able to get used to the new things, all the things? Yeah, great. Okay. That's all they have to think about. Pricing models and change on them. They get to keep their existing price, the whole thing.

6:53Now, Now, we could also introduce a new pricing model for new customers. That's always an option, but that's also an option for an existing product. So it doesn't really mean that a new version requires a new business model, but it is a smoother situation. And there's also no migrations that have to happen. Sometimes, you know, between versions, we've always allowed people to move between two to three or classic to two or whatever. And features weren't in parity. So data didn't really transfer in the smoothest way because some things weren't the same and other things were new. And so it worked, but it was kind of a messy process.

7:23And so we're just finding that it's way more valuable for us at the current time just to deliver a whole bunch of new features where no one has to make any other major decisions. We dabbled with the pricing model over the years, even within versions. So we had no free version, then we had free version, then we had longer trials and shorter trials. We've tried a bunch of different things. What we try not to do, though, is change things for the most part on existing customers. You're not locked in for life at a certain price point, but we really try to respect the fact that you came in at this price and that's where we're going to keep you for the most part.

7:50There are situations where there's a long-term transition to a new price point, but for the most part, we keep everyone where they are. And if we're going to play with new prices, it'll be on new customers. They won't feel like anything's changed because they're coming from scratch, so it's new for them. Right. Okay, so you mentioned knowing that maybe some people won't like the changes. Talk me through that because I'm sure anytime you're making a new version, there's that risk. Like, how are you thinking about the risk reward? Or are you trying to hold on to customers who might want to leave?

8:20Like, what does that kind of look like for you guys? Well, I mean, anytime you change anything, there's a number of people who don't like it, understandably so. I think people are actually very comfortable with change in general. They're not comfortable with change being forced upon them. So that's always just something in the back of my mind, which is like, are we changing this too much? Okay. Let's say we are. Is it worth it? Sometimes it is worth it to go, we have a new idea here. It's going to take people a long time to get used to it. It's a short period of time. Who knows? But people are going to get used to this.

8:47But the tradeoff, we believe, is worth it. And there'll be some things in Basecamp 5 that are like that, where we're moving something around or changing the way something works or radically modifying a specific screen that will initially be jarring for people, understandably so, especially those who've been used to the way things have been and the way things are currently in Basecamp 4. But we believe that if we explain it clearly and we give people a chance and people give us a chance, they'll see why we made these changes and they'll feel good about them in the end. Not everyone will, though.

9:18Some people always want things the way they were. And it's always been interesting for me as being around this business for a long time to see the things that people would argue against then being the things that those same people will defend. So, for example, when people move from two to three, there was things in three that were radically different than two. Some people hated those changes in three, but then they finally got used to them in three. And then we changed them again in four. They were clinging on to the things in three that they initially hated when we moved from two to three, but now they love and they don't like the new thing we have in four.

9:48So it's totally natural, normal. And this is just a human condition. It feels evolutionarily accurate for a lot of different reasons. So I get it. Part of this is understanding that some people are going to react negatively to change. Some people are going to react negatively, very negatively, a little bit negatively. Some people are going to not like it for a few days and then see it and then dig it. Some people will never like it, whatever. The key to me is never to, when you launch something brand new, is actually not to pay attention to feedback for probably the first 30 days. Oh, wow. Unless there's something that's like busted.

10:20Sure. Like this doesn't work anymore. This is a bug, different story. But as far as like, I don't like this or I like the way it was or I don't like where this move or I don't like how this works or whatever. I get all that. I have the same reaction to new things too sometimes. And so I think it's just good to go. Yeah, I hear that. Let's see what the feedback looks like 30 days from now versus the, this is going to sound negative, sort of the knee jerk reaction. Initially I have them too. We all have them. So I want to ignore my own as well. Like when I was switching over to Amarchi, you know, David's thing, you know, on Linux, like this is a whole new world to me.

10:58It's totally awkward and strange. And I got to use the keyboard for everything. And I can immediately go, I don't like this. But I can also go, okay, there's something here. Probably other people seem to like it. Maybe I just need to get used to it. And so I recognize my knee jerk reactions as such and go, you know what? Okay. Yeah, this is awkward. This is weird. I got to get over this hump though. I've got to give myself a chance to get over this hump so I can see what's in the valley beyond. And if I don't give myself that chance. I'm just going to push back. So I try to give everybody that chance by not being reactionary and just hearing, but kind of ignoring in a pleasant way and go, let's see what this looks like in a few weeks.

11:42Yeah. I mean, as a previous customer who was on classic and moved to two and moved to three, I get it because there were times where I'm like, this is just hard. It becomes hard for a short period of time until you figure it out. And hopefully that period of time is very short. Yeah. And I also recognize that everybody's in the middle of things. So you're in the middle of a project, you're delivering a wedding for someone and eight days before the wedding, all of a sudden the interface is totally different. And you're like, well, my God, this is crunch time. It's the worst thing ever. The worst timing.

12:13The worst timing. It's always going to be the worst timing for somebody and for many people when you have a customer base as broad and large as we do. So I just recognize that that's the case. What we try to do with new releases is give people a really nice heads up. That said, it's never the same as things changing on you. But I mean, I will do probably some extensive video previews. I'll walk through some features. Maybe you'll make some stuff ahead of time, whatever it is. And this is what's coming. This is what's coming soon. Here's what we've done. Here's why we've done what we've done. Here's some great advantages to what we've done and why we did it.

12:47And this is the idea behind it. And this is how you can adjust to it. And so we want to give people all those heads up. But understanding still that not everyone's going to watch those, not everyone's paying attention to that. Everyone has their own life and their own things they're paying attention to. And at some point, someone's going to be in the middle of something and something's going to change on them. And I can't prevent that from happening unless we have a brand new version from the ground up, which introduces its own set of challenges. So it's all about trade-offs and recognizing that you can't make it right for everybody.

13:16Okay. So you said you kind of ignore feedback in the beginning. at some point, I assume you start looking at it. Have there been times in the company's history that you can think of where we've changed something because of negative feedback? Yeah. And I don't look at any feedback as negative. Oh, good perspective. I look at it as just like, this is what someone has to say. Yeah. It's like, they don't like it. Okay, great. I don't see it as negative actually. Don't like doesn't mean negative to me. It just means they don't like it. I try to remove the value judgments from it and go, what's actually happening here is something isn't jiving with them.

13:51Something doesn't work as well as they think it should. Or maybe they don't realize they could do this thing that we do have now and they just need to learn about it. Or maybe they simply just don't like it. Like there's things I don't like in the world that I use. You know, like nothing's perfect, you know, as they say, obviously. So I'm trying to remember, like, I think one of the things that we did, I can't quite remember what decisions we made around this, but with Basecamp 3, we introduced pings, which is direct messages. Didn't have that before. And we separated the ping menu from the hey menu.

14:18Hey menu is notifications for like new messages, comments, to-do assignments, that kind of thing, tasks, right? Schedule, eventually schedule stuff. And then pings were separate from that. And we made them separate even though they're both notifications because we felt like someone's trying to directly get in touch with you. And we want that to be something that is not hidden behind other notifications because people tend to leave a lot of notifications around in general. So we want to kind of separate these out. And I remember there was a lot of tension around that. even internally initially.

14:48And I can't quite remember if we made some fundamental changes to that after we launched, but I just remember that being a contentious thing. Some people like, I want one menu for notifications. Some people understood the reason why we separated out. We also had a separate menu for campfires. This is actually something we did do, I believe. Chat rooms were different. So we had like pings, hey, and then chat, I think. And then we had that for a little bit. And we then unified those under the Hey menu after, you know, and it's not just like customer feedback. That's part of it. It's also like, how do we feel about it?

15:20Because we're using it. Yeah, we're using it. We're not always sure ourselves. Like, you know, there's some things you just don't really quite know about. And after you use it for a while, you realize that, you know what, we could bring this over here and unify this and it actually be a better experience. And these things shouldn't be as precious as we're treating them. And, but in general, there's always little things. We've changed the notifications block at the bottom of messages and documents many, many times based on, not like, I hate this, because no one hates a notifications block. It's more like, it's hard for me to sub-select just a few people, not everybody.

15:54And then we eventually introduced groups and we had to rework that because the way we did that wasn't quite working right. So it's just a continuum of things. And products are living, breathing animals or or entities, or whatever you want to call them, really. And so some stuff just sort of piles up in the back of your head and then pushes forward. And you're like, it's time now. Some stuff you get annoyed with. But yeah, I don't recall a groundswell of negative feedback for something initially, and then us changing it radically fast. I think we may have done that in the past, and I realized that was not a good idea.

16:25So that's why we kind of wait on this stuff. Nice. Okay. And then tell me when we have a new version of a product, like we're building now. Feedback is coming in. You might not be looking at it. It's coming into support. At what point are you looking at it? I mean, I'm just getting it somehow. I'm not looking at all the email tickets, right? People find you. It just finds me. People email me, first of all. My email address is all over the product. It's public, so people send me notes. People write stuff up on LinkedIn. People write stuff up on X. When you post videos, people are going to comment.

16:59We put videos up, people comment. And then customer service has a really wonderful job categorizing things. And sometimes Chase, who runs customer service, will get in touch with me about some stuff or I'll look through some things. They log a bunch of really well-written complaints that are detailed in a project. I'll see those come through in the latest activity stream in Basecamp. I'll check those out. So you're not insulated from it if you're paying attention. I don't have to go out and seek it. It really just does bubble up in a variety of different ways in a variety of different places. And in our own and other folks who work here will bubble stuff up because they'll hear from somebody.

17:35So like, it's just around. And it's kind of nice to take the temperature that way, actually, as sort of a broad spectrum of feedback versus just looking at tickets. Because the people who write in tickets are people who directly express a frustration, praise, whatever it is, through official channels. But there's a lot of people who don't do that and they share it elsewhere and it's just as meaningful. So I'm just trying to pay attention broadly and not just go like digging into one type of source. It's always obvious. You just hear about it. Brian, who runs product strategy here, oversees the products in a big way, he talks to customers more frequently than I do.

18:15He's in touch with Chase more frequently than I am. He's paying attention at different levels. So there's a bunch of different people paying attention at different levels and it all filters up to who needs to hear it. And much of the feedback is right. It's like, yeah, this thing is a little clunky or should be better. Or yeah, that we should put a notification on that or we're not doing it here. Or this should have a preview or it doesn't. Like there's great ideas that come from all of this stuff. I just don't want to react in the first 30-ish days because it tends to be pressure-based feedback versus like once you get used to things and things settle in, that tends to be, to me, more accurate feedback of the state of the system than the pressure that's applied on a change.

18:58Okay. Last question before we wrap it up. And you don't have to tell me something specific because I know we're not sharing everything, but in general, like what are you most excited about with this new version? So with Basecamp 5, one of the things we're trying to aim for is, as I'm calling it, like a direct experience. For example, in Basecamp 4, if you want to see your assignments, you have to go to the homepage and scroll down to the bottom. They're down there. Or you go to a menu called My Stuff. Then you select Assignments. Then it's there. So there's like - A couple clicks. Yeah. It feels like it's at arm's length.

19:31It's not like right next to you. So in 5, there's this way to basically have your assignments always right there or have your upcoming events always right there. So like when you need them, they're right there. It's almost like you have four arms instead of two. It's like I can work and I can also see, or I can use this other arm I have to pull something up without leaving where I am. Like it's this sense of more things being surfaced in a way where they're not in your way, but they're right where you need them when you need them without having to leave to go do something else. As I mentioned with four, yeah, that's a couple of clicks away.

20:05It's not like a couple of clicks is a bunch, but like you have to leave what you're doing to go somewhere else. So we're trying to reduce that urge to have to leave. Same thing is true with pings. With pings where people direct message you, you go up to the pings menu, you select a ping, everything's gone, screens replaced with the ping. You say, cool, great. Now you got to go back to where you were, screen changes again. So in five, pings are like in a sidebar basically that you can open up and have conversations with people while you're working on something else. So you don't have to leave what you're doing.

20:35so you have that alongside so this is idea of like having things alongside and you can like check in on those things without leaving your place so that's one thing the other thing is we're trying to really highlight activity and progress more so trying to get rid of a more static feeling sometimes there's some screens in base camp that are kind of static and we're trying to make sure every screen is is kind of active and that it always has like here's the latest thing. Here's what's been happening. Here's who's actually working on stuff, not just who has access, but who's actually been working on things.

21:07So it's a little bit more current in that way as well. And also just slightly better use of screen real estate. And we're bringing a full-blown calendar back to Basecamp. So we had a great calendar in two. You're making all those Basecamp two people really happy. Yeah. We had a dot calendar kind of thing we called it. And we're coming back with a full-blown calendar in five. So that's another major change that's been primarily pushed from customers. They've been asking for that because we used to have a really great one. We went away from it and we're bringing that back. So there's a lot of big banner features, like big new things.

21:40There's a lot of things that are just a little bit closer at hand, more direct. Things are going to feel more active. So you feel more informed about what's actually going on and who's involved. And so it's a bunch of subtle things and a bunch of banner things. And we're very, very excited about it. What we're trying to do now is draw, actually talking with Brian a lot about this, where do we draw the line? So what makes it into five? And then what waits for what we call 5.1, which is like - Just regular feature releases. Yes. And that ties into like, when can we get this thing out? I mean, we could get it out much faster if we draw the line earlier.