How To-Do list due dates saved the day for a Singapore company

Anol Bhattacharya, CEO of GetIT | Comms, a boutique outfit, based in Singapore providing interactive digital media solutions to hi-tech and telco companies, writes in:

Recently Basecamp's To-Do list added in a new feature of mentioning due dates, and coincidentally just at the right time for us.

Last Friday one of the project managers of our team had to rush to Seattle to attend to a Family emergency within 5 hours of notice. There are multiple very important projects ongoing and there was not enough time for a proper handover. Basecamp came to rescue! Quickly we jotted down all the To-Do's with due dates and comments. Since then, for the whole of this last week we have been using that To-Do page as a dashboard, with comments, counter-comments, adding & checking off 'to-do' items. So far we managed it well and most of the things are DONE! Thanks to Basecamp and my great team!

A screenshot of the page is attached, I had to strike out most of the texts due to confidentiality, sorry about that.

Inc. magazine looks at how an organic produce farm in Indiana uses Basecamp

"How to Choose the Right Collaboration Software" [Inc.] discusses the emerging breed of low-cost tools, including Basecamp, that are making project collaboration much easier.

"Companies have been looking for ways to make up for the overreliance on e-mail as a collaborative tool," says Jeffrey Mann, an analyst with Gartner. "Now we're seeing the evolution of tools that tackle everything e-mail is bad at -- like allowing users to follow a discussion, share files, monitor workflow, and get the latest status on tasks and projects."

The article discusses Stranger's Hill Organics (see above photo), an 81-acre farm in Bloomington, Indiana, that uses Basecamp to help its business of growing organic produce and selling it to Whole Foods Market, food co-ops, and farmers' markets.

Almost two years ago, the farm's founders, Dale and Lee Jones, brought on four new partners to help fund an expansion. That created some problems. The founders continued to work at the farm, but the new partners held jobs elsewhere and could make it out there only a few hours a week. That made it difficult for the owners to discuss topics such as tax planning, marketing budgets, and which crops were ready for harvest. "It was almost impossible to get everyone together on a regular basis," says Rick Dietz, one of the new partners.

Things changed last summer, when the owners began using Web-based collaboration software that allows them to create a central repository for information. The farmers now post updates using a laptop in the farmhouse. Each day, the farm's manager, Vanessa Caruso, logs in to see which tasks, such as fixing a barn's leaky roof, the partners have assigned. "We now have a way for everyone to communicate regardless of where we are," says Dietz...

Dietz, who is the IT director for the city of Bloomington, thought it would be less of a hassle to set up and maintain. "I didn't have the time to be the farm's system administrator as well," he says. He also wanted a tool that was inexpensive and easy to use. His choice: Basecamp, a Web-based collaboration program he had used before. For $24 a month, it offers to-do lists, a wiki, a chatroom, 3GB of file storage, and a function that lets users set milestones and track due dates. Dietz was able to set everything up in a few hours...

Now the partners use Basecamp to discuss strategic decisions and keep up to date on marketing efforts, crop conditions, and chores. Through Basecamp, the partners also check a daily log from Caruso, the farm's manager, who documents what happens in the fields. Among her recent posts: "Fixed a little wind damage on the field. Not too bad, though. Much warmer and windy. Mice seem to be eating squash seeds, so I moved all trays up to the cloche." Entries like that help all the partners sleep a little easier.

Do you use a 37signals product in an interesting or noteworthy way? Let us know.

Basecamp connects myows.com team members in Singapore and Cape Town

11 months ago, Max Guedy wrote to us detailing how Getting Real helped him create a new app. Recently, he wrote us again with details on how Basecamp helped him launch that app, myows.com. The tool is dedicated to providing a full suite of copyright solutions for designers, photographers, musicians, and anyone else who creates copyrightable work.

Just like 37signals, we're a small team (4 people), but we all have our own agencies or practice to run. To make matters even better, one of our team member lives in Singapore (the developer), whereas the 3 others are in Cape Town, South Africa.

Communication is of prime importance for a project the size of ours, and after a couple of emails went missing in action, I insisted that all communications be made through my agency's Basecamp account.

I put up a catchy name for the project ("the road to success") and my partners got to grip very easily with the Basecamp interface.

Documents are uploaded for approval, bugs are tracked through to-do lists and general messages go on a Writeboard.

Somehow it worked, and I'm proud to announce that myows.com went live yesterday with a minimal amount of bugs that we'll address during the BETA phase.

Do you use a 37signals product in an interesting or noteworthy way? Let us know.

[Case study] How Basecamp unites web agency Freshout's offices in San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Guadalajara

Chris Anderson, General Manager & Principal at full-service web agency Freshout, wrote to tell us what a great job Basecamp does for his team:

Basecamp is hands down the best project management app on the market. We use Basecamp for managing client and internal projects alike, and it's been an amazing tool for storing and organizing conversations, files, milestones, and tasks. From initial kick-off conversations through the design and development phase and quality assurance process, it helps everyone on the project stay on the same page and on track, without getting lost in an endless slew of emails and files.

Simply put, Basecamp just works...which is more than I can say for many web apps I've used. Thanks for continuing to enhance such a great application, you guys kick ass!

SF, Philly, and Guadalajara
We asked Chris to give us an in-depth look at how his team uses Basecamp and he wrote up the following:

Freshout is a full-service web agency providing product strategy, design, development, and marketing consultation services – in other words, we build and launch web applications that provide real business results for clients. With offices in San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Guadalajara, having streamlined communication among our team is extremely important in our ability to collaborate effectively and deliver finished projects on time.

The Freshout team at work.

From project brief to post-launch
From the initial project brief to the design, development, and QA processes, and onto the rollout and post-launch feature enhancement phases, we use Basecamp for all project correspondence, file sharing, task delegation, milestone management, and time management for each and every project we work on, both internally and for clients. When a new project signs, the first step is always setting up a Basecamp project, adding the team members that will be involved, uploading the initial specs, and posting a message introducing the team to the project.

[Case study] How Basecamp helped Design Extensions grow from a 1 man shop doing under $50k/year to a 5 man shop doing over $250k/year

Jay Owen started Design Extensions 10 years ago (1999), while he was still in high school (17 yrs old). The company focus on small to medium sized businesses with web site design and graphic design services. Below he details how Basecamp has helped him grow his business.

How do you use Basecamp?
Before Basecamp, I did most of the work myself and could only juggle a few projects at a time.

With Basecamp, we are currently maxing out the 35 project account level (about to upgrade). We went from a 1 man shop doing under 50k/year to a 5 man shop doing over 250k/year. Basecamp allows us such flexibility and ease of communication, that we don't even have a physical office. Myself and my team work from home (or anywhere with a good wifi connection) and are able to seamlessly communicate with Basecamp and Campfire all day. Basecamp has become a key part of our business and helped us grow to where we are today.

Which features do you use most?
Milestones and Time are the two features we use the most. Milestones help us map out major assignments each day of the week for various members of our team. Using the Milestones overview page, we can easily take a glance at the company as a whole or individuals to see who is assigned what and we are on our schedule. The time tab lets us keep an eye on how much time is being spent on each project and account for it at the end of the week.

Tell us a story about a specific project/situation where Basecamp helped you out.
When I started Design Extensions over 10 years ago,  our projects were managed via e-mail. This worked for a while but only allowed for so many projects to be managed at once. Even with a good calendar and organized network files, it wasn't ideal. 

When we signed up for Basecamp, 5 years ago, we had no idea how much it would revolutionize our workflow and allow us to grow. With Basecamp, we are able to easily work with clients, employees, and contractors all over the world with ease. It's easy enough for newbies to pick-up quickly and has just the right feature combination to get things done - on time and in order.

Any tips or tricks for other customers?
Once a project moves from a production status to more of a maintenance/on-going project that may not be accessed on a regular basis, but we still want to leave active, we move them to the company "ZZ Maintenance." This helps separate the projects we are in and out of every day from accounts we might only be in once a month.

We are in Basecamp, Highrise, and Campfire every day. Highrise is for pre-sale or individual communications outside of an active project, Basecamp is for active projects, and Campfire keeps our team together in multiple locations.

Anything else?
We are often approached by other sites and services that claim to offer "more features" than Basecamp. What each of these companies fails to understand is that the joy of Basecamp is not that it offers more features than anyone out there, but that it does what we need to get the job done and nothing more. 

The joy of Basecamp is in its simplicity and focus. Features for features sake are not a bonus, they are a burden. 37signals understands this extremely well and it shines in each every product produced.

McSweeney's iPhone app creator says Getting Real and Basecamp made it possible

Russell Quinn and McSweeney's — an American indie publishing house — officially announced their joint iPhone app last Tuesday. Within three hours it had surged to number 1 in the U.S. iTunes book category, broke the top 50 in the all-category Highest Grossing chart, and created a storm of excitement on Twitter.

Below, Russell details how Getting Real inspired the effort and how the team used Basecamp to manage the project.

The collaboration started over the summer. I had been thinking about writing my own iPhone app for a while, but knew that to make something really compelling, I needed great content and a known name that would be prepared to take the risk with me.

I've been a fan of McSweeney's for a long time, and creating an app for them seemed like the perfect match. I had an iPhone. I read their books and watched their DVDs. I would really like to see their content on my iPhone. I was to be my own target audience.

I fired off an email to them proposing that we work together on such project. They replied within 30 minutes and an hour later we were Skyping and formulating the first strategies.

As McSweeney's are based on the west coast of America and I'm currently living in Zürich, Switzerland we had a major time difference to contend with. We started using Basecamp that same day, and have used it ever since for everything from reviewing screen designs, to hammering the copy into shape in Writeboards, to keeping track of deadlines and development to-do lists. A second project also served as an excellent platform for our closed beta stage, giving our testers a place to collect the new binaries and leave feedback.

The whole process from start to finish felt very agile and focussed on just creating the best product we could. The timezone mismatch meant that we were effectively a 24-hour team. I would work all day in peace, then send some previews or questions as I left my workspace for home. Eli, from McSweeney's, would then collect opinions, plus any necessary material and upload it before I awoke in the morning.

This "Getting Real" ideology, combined with an extensive use of Basecamp for all our communication and project management needs, means we really have 37signals to thank for making the logistics of this project possible in such a short timeframe. Hey, even our server-side system is running on Ruby on Rails.

Congrats on the success Russell!

Peanut Media: "Basecamp cuts out the chaos and provides a project management tool that just works"

Peanut Media is a Leeds based digital media agency that provides a range of creative services including branding, SEO, web design and website development. Jason Dainter of Peanut recently wrote us to tell us about how the company uses Basecamp.

Here at Peanut Media HQ we refer to Basecamp as 'our bible!' and we'd struggle to manage all our day to day operations without it. Having a project management tool that takes no time to learn and is quick, easy and intuitive is vital to us. We've explored other project management systems in the past, but most of them offer very over-worked solutions, that are a nightmare when trying to train staff how to use. Basecamp cuts out all the chaos and provides a project management tool that, put simply, just works!

Basecamp is a big contributor in allowing us to meet deadlines. Firstly, its simple milestone system is a doddle to use and makes it very easy for us to communicate important deadlines to our external developers and designers. Secondly, Basecamp encourages assigning one task to one person, which makes it very clear in any organisation who is responsible for the delivery of that task and when.

Basecamp seems to have hit the nail on the head with functionality. Rather than doing lots of things, very badly.. It does just the important stuff, very well!

Third Wave Lawyer: "Basecamp Is The Best Marketing Tool!"

Chuck Newton works at a "Third Wave Law Firm" and considers Basecamp "the best marketing tool."

The critical information in your office needs to be available online so you do not have to haul files all over kingdom come, like we use to do. Instead of a complicated and expensive VPN, we tried Basecamp instead. It obviously will not do everything for us that a VPN might, but it will do 70%-80% of what we want and it is considerably cheaper (only a small fraction of a dedicated server, collocation rent and the purchasing of software and bandwidth)...

Basecamp allows you to set up companies or organizations that will receive key notes, documents and messages other than your core team. (You can restrict these organizations from particular information and messages if you need to). From our perspective, these are the bankruptcy attorneys, their staff and law firms. We added each bankruptcy law firm, and the attorneys and staff of each firm, to each case they referred. We were not thinking marketing. We were thinking of how to more easily communicate with our referral source as to the cases they referred. In the past they would not necessarily be privy to our emails in which as a group we discussed the case, or the questions we had. As for each document, it had to be separately emailed to each bankruptcy attorney with a note. Basecamp managed to bring the referring attorney, staff and firm into the loop as an integral part of each referred case.

But, then a funny thing happened, or at least something we had not planned or anticipated. By bringing the bankruptcy attorney, staff and firm into the loop on one case in such a dynamic fashion, it resulted in more frequent referrals from these bankruptcy law firms. We actually got received more case referrals from those attorneys participating with us on each case through Basecamp...

If yours is a referral practice, and that is the type of practice you should have, Basecamp should be one of your primary marketing tools. Try it.

Read the full piece for more details.

An indie game developer explains why Basecamp beats emails and plain notes

An indie game developer explains some of the advantages of using Basecamp over emails and plain notes.

Keep track

A common workflow for us looks like this: I assign a to-do to Martin to compose a music loop for our next game. We discuss some ideas (style and atmosphere of the music, length of the tracks, what file format to use) on the message thread of the actual to-do. Once Martin has composed something, he uploads an mp3 on the same thread. In this way the complete discussion happens in one place and does not get mixed up with other discussions...

History of communication

When you do your team discussions on Basecamp, it’s really easy to go back and see what you actually agreed on. Can’t remember if it was BF-SUCC.mp3 or BF-SUCC2.mp3 that sounded better? You won’t need to browse through all your emails. Just look into the according message thread.

Work asynchronous

We don’t have an office and we work from different cities in different countries. We have other jobs and freelancer gigs on the side, so we seldom work at the same time. Having all important information about our projects on Basecamp frees us from the necessaries of asking each other in real-time how something was supposed to be done.

For small indie teams Basecamp can feel a bit costly (paid plans start at $24/month) but from our experience the improved team communication makes this investment worth it.

Read the full piece.

Do you use a 37signals product in an interesting or noteworthy way? Let us know.

Basecamp is the "glue" at iSeatz

Companies like Air Canada, Amtrak, CitiBank, and MasterCard all rely on iSeatz, a global provider of customized online travel solutions. In turn, iSeatz relies on Basecamp to keep everything organized. COO Allen Darnell tells us more below.

As the COO of iSeatz, I’m constantly challenged to simultaneously juggle a few time-sensitive projects for some of the biggest names in travel and financial services. These companies rely on iSeatz to create and launch highly customized booking engines that tap into our exclusive network of almost 200,000 suppliers across the globe like OpenTable, Avis-Budget Group and TicketNetwork Direct. Inevitably, the multiple players involved in each project have diverse work styles, may speak different languages, and typically aren’t used to agile product development — a cornerstone of iSeatz’ solution development process.

Basecamp is the “glue” that helps to hold all of these moving parts together. It provides a powerful, efficient, and secure framework that enables the full team — including iSeatz’ executive and development teams and our clients and partners — to collaborate, track deadlines and easily communicate.

iSeatz started using Basecamp three years ago for client engagements such as Amtrak, Delta, Air Canada, Northwest Airlines, MasterCard and Citi, as well as internal development projects.

But we realized its value to the ‘nth degree’ during our recent, high-stakes engagement with KLM:

There we were… a small New Orleans-based company taking on a massive international project with Europe’s largest airline. The project involved working with over 70 international points of sale, handling six different language translations, seven new currencies, extending our global customer care capabilities, and coordinating with dozens of players, from design agencies and vendors to translation providers and (of course) our overseas client. The development process to create KLM’s enhanced online booking engine was intricate, extensive and intense—but much more manageable because of Basecamp’s ability to enhance visibility and foster streamlined communications.

Tips of the Trade…Based on my experience using Basecamp, I’ve found that most new users need minimal training to get up and running. However, when working with new users – especially those who work for big companies-- it’s critical to reinforce the fact that it MUST be used for all communications. If someone responds via email, I make a point to reply via Basecamp or post their comment on the Basecamp site. A little push goes a long way.

Basecamp continues to play a large role in our day-to-day work and is hands-down, a HUGE contributor to our ongoing success — and the success of our clients.