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by jasonfried 5737 days ago
Basecamp was a side project for us.
4 comments

I didn't know basecamp and started looking at your site; I really love the presentation except for one thing: the bit about the basecamp competitor founder saying blabla basecamp is the best is the "who uses it" page. When I read the part between parenthesis the whole thing really sounded to me like a phony message, and made me have a more negative look on the page.

Just wanted to let you know.

Could the person who downvoted me tell me why ? I merely expressed my opinion, to me this quote looks like a flaw on an otherwise great presentation of his project. Or am I not supposed to criticize projects here (I'm new to hacker news) ?
He was probably outraged to discover that you don't know the legend that is Jason Fried (37 Signals).
You should get used to this attitude, too -- even though 37 Signals's founders and advice are highly overrated, there are a lot of people who idolize it and take criticism of the group pretty personally. There is a really weird dynamic going on with that, it's hard for me to understand.
I can see where you're coming from. For people that don't know the history of intranets.com it seems a little odd. FWIW, intranets.com pre-dates basecamp and was acquired by WebEx many years ago.
How long did it take for Basecamp to take off and become profitable?
Basecamp was profitable fast. We were doing about $5000/month after the first 6 weeks. We only had a few people at the company so our overhead was really low.
That was very impressive. Did you guys just spread the word through friends and do a lot of marketing at first?
I really like your product (being a customer). So, when are you going to host it in France :) ? Because the only problem with basecamp is the load time around here :) But congratulations for this product and wish you the best.
Isn't everything you ever made a byproduct of ruby on rails anyway?
Nope, RoR is a byproduct of building basecamp.