jasonfried's comments

Campfire and Highrise are not failures at all. They generate millions a year in profits. They just aren't our focus anymore. We want to focus all of our energy on one thing, not multiple things. Nothing more than that. No hidden agendas or hidden news.

Thanks. Glad it came through as clear in the end.

Yes, it will be fun to watch, but no VC money. Not our thing. We have all the money we need to do everything and anything we want to do.

FWIW, I meet people all the time who don't know "37signals". They're in the tech world too.

But when I mention Basecamp, they say "Oh Basecamp!! Of course! We love Basecamp!"

World-wide, Basecamp is much bigger brand than 37signals.

Anything is possible with software - especially horrible complexity. Rolling more things into something isn't the way forward. We're committed to getting simpler over time, not harder. Not more stuff, but the right stuff.

The number of people have nothing to do with it. We won't kill it off because we made a commitment not to. We're keeping our word. Simple as that.

No crisis. Business has never been better. The reasons are all honest and all clearly spelled out at http://37signals.com. We just don't want to hire a bunch more people and we don't want to have to spread ourselves too thin. Focus is where it's at and we want to regain it.

We didn't sell Know Your Company.

No one sold anything and no one bought anything. The piece of the company that Claire owns was a gift from us - and she can earn more as the company does better.

We moved it out into its own company, which Claire now runs.

Nothing at all like Sortfolio.

I'm not bummed at all -- I'm excited! I can't give Know Your Company my full attention forever.

The product is in great hands now with Claire fully-focused on making it better as her full time job.

I'm standing by as an advisor and eager to help when called upon.

We also still own a sizable piece of the company so it's in our best interest to see it succeed.

And we're customers - we use Know Your Company every week.

It's all very clearly explained when we talk to the customer. Remember, no one can buy Know Your Company without spending at least a half hour talking with us first. We go through every single thing about the product, the model, and how it all works in those 30 minutes.

Know Your Company was a big experiment from the start. A totally new kind of product for us, an entirely new kind of business model for us, etc. And now we're taking that to the next level with an entirely new strategy for us: Spinning it off into it's own autonomous company and letting it find its own direction.

As I mentioned in the original post, we wanted to hire Claire to run Know Your Company inside 37signals, but there was a fundamental conflict of interest: She had interviewed everyone at 37signals as part of a consulting project, and knew a lot of details about how everyone felt about the company. Everyone spoke to her in confidence as an outside consultant, not as a colleague. Bringing her into 37signals as an employee later would be a violation of that trust, so we weren't able to hire her.

You'd have to ask Claire how she plans on staffing the company, but initially it's just her with a little bit of our help during the transition. As far as I understand, soon she will be bringing someone on part time to help with product development until she's ready to make a full-time hire. Slow, steady, and prudent.

Hope that was helpful.

$100 per person one-time works exactly how it reads.

If you have 27 employees, it costs $2700 one time. If you hire 3 more people, it's an extra $300, one time. If you let someone go, and hire another person, it's an extra $100. We don't sell against seats, we sell against unique people.

No recurring monthly or annual fees.

Pick any three from New Glarus! http://www.newglarusbrewing.com

What did you want to know that we didn't share?

I agree. Sortfolio was a natural fit for a sale. Nice product, consistent revenue stream, easy to separate from the other products, not too expensive for a buyer so lots of potential buyers, etc.

I don't think there's an official definition anywhere, so I think it's fair for companies to call it whatever they want as long as they are clear about what it all means to their customers. The word doesn't really matter, what the word means is what matters.

Some clarification on a few of these...

Writeboard, Tada, and Backpack were not shut down, they were sunsetted. That's a fundamentally different thing. What it means is that anyone who used Tada, Writeboard, or Backpack can continue to use these products just as they always have. No one was kicked off, no one has to stop using them. We just aren't selling them anymore to new customers.

Answers... we've tried a variety of customer forums over the years, but we just didn't find them effective. We're no longer trying these.

The Product Blog was basically consolidated into Signal vs. Noise, our blog. We'll be making more changes to how, what, and where we publish next year. I imagine we'll continue to tweak the mix over time.

Breeze we did close down completely. We refunded every customer who paid (which was about 1000 customers) and sent them their subscriber lists.

The podcast wasn't "shut down", we just haven't had time to do another one. I'd like to do more of these when we have some spare time. Some of what was in the podcast has been absorbed by other channels (Twitter, more interviews on other people's podcasts and sites, etc).

Sortfolio was sold and is alive and well at http://sortfolio.com. No one was left hanging here. From what we hear, revenue is up since the sale.

Basecamp Classic was absolutely not shut down. It remains a huge product for us - a significant number of our Basecamp customers happily remain on Classic and we'll support those customers forever. However, we don't sell it anymore - the flavor of Basecamp we sell today is the all new generation of Basecamp at basecamp.com.

Hope that helps clear a few things up.

1. This is part of the point. Maybe $20/month isn't the right model. Maybe there's a different model you can consider where you'd have fewer customers, but those customers would be at a much higher price point. Who knows. Point is, it's your call and it's all possible depending on how you approach it.

2. Importing the spreadsheet of customer names will likely be one of the first things we automate. It's less insightful than the other things on the list, but I still believe doing it manually is teaching us something right now.

Anyone who's signed up at the concierge-level of service will always get that level of service. And if we ultimately go self-service, I'd still keep the concierge-level of service around, just at a premium. We might even consider adding a concierge-level of service tier to Basecamp.

As I mentioned in my post, high-touch, full-service doesn't have to be the permanent model. Our plan isn't to do it this way forever. Our plan is to do it this way for a while so we can learn everything we can. Then later on we can automate this and make it self-service. The product will be a lot better off because of it. This was pg's point in his original post as well.