Peek is "a super thin and stylish device dedicated to your personal mobile email." Peek's Dan Morel wrote in to tell us how his team there uses Basecamp.
For a start-up like Peek back in the day, the decisions on how to project manage, how to communicate and the culture built around that was not an easy decision. While lots of us came from entrepreneurial backgrounds, many of us were used to pages and pages of MS Project Plans and the comfort/pain of status update meetings and issue lists.
But in the earliest days of founding Peek the first five of us were all over North America... not quite possible to do a status meeting sitting in the same room that way is it? Amol was in NY, Rob and John in the Bay area and Tom in San Diego. On top of that we were very quickly picking up vendors not only across the USA, but around the world. Finding a way to efficiently communicate to people living 12 or 14 hours away is a huge challenge. And, our funding was at various stages and we didn't want to pump a lot of money and commit to an expensive tool.
We were also building a tool, the Peek, built around simplicity, focus, and affordability... so in some senses using Basecamp just felt right as it promotes a similar philosophy.
We early on split into multiple projects. Peek had a lot of concurrent projects from building the Peek device, to nailing down our PR/marketing strategy, to building the email servers, the list went on and on. We built projects for many of the streams, particularly ones with different vendors... but we always kept a main Peek Launch project so we all knew what was going on, from the earliest sketches of the device to the final excel sheet of software bugs, Basecamp kept us in touch. The highs and lows of starting up Peek all live in our basecamp message history!
We used milestones to ensure visibility for all of us on key dates. Messaging and files have been the heaviest used features, keeping us all up to date and providing visibility across all the departments, vendors, clients and various projects. Most recently we've started using writeboards as living documents on how to do things, and for ongoing lists of activities. They have become essential now that we are live and operational.
Now almost 1.5 years later Peek has more projects than ever across more countries than ever and Basecamp is a vital part of our culture and daily life. It has helped Peek bring two of our biggest corporate values & goals together - "team first, second and last", as well as "value and affordability".
Do you use a 37signals product in an interesting or noteworthy way? Let us know.
