[jiggy2011]

Thanks for the answer.

I'm sort of curious how much of the growth of basecamp you attribute to the RoR community though? Do you think if you had instead just written it with PHP or something you would have had a similar level of success?

[ams6110]

Very few customers care anything at all about technology issues such as whether a SaaS product is built with RoR, ASP, PHP, Python, or whatever. They just care whether it solves their problem at a price that is a good value.

Unless you are specifically targeting some niche market of software engineers, the underlying technology just doesn't enter into the discussion. Basecamp was built for project managers.

[jiggy2011]

I mean for early exposure. If you have the attention of a bunch of developers because you are leading a popular project then they are more likely to check out your new product than if it was just launched by some random company.

If you do a good job impressing them, they will help spread the word.

[jasonfried]

The early exposure we got was from our audience on our blog, Signal vs. Noise. They were web design shops like us (that's what we did before we morphed into a product company). These were customers that were like us - small shops that needed a better way to collaborate, communicate, and present with their clients.

[nikcub]

Having followed 37signals since their very first blog posts, it was the screenshots of their upcoming app (basecamp) and its great new design that got them attention and a lot of buzz amongst bloggers.

Rails was assisted by 37signals' already established brand and name. The blog already had tens of thousands of subscribers at the point it was released.