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.
That's a really interesting distinction you make between shutting down and sunsetting. Google tends to call their shutdowns as sunsetting their products -- do you think they are abusing the term?
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.
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.
"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."
Another model to consider would be to have different private label companies (that you control) serving up essentially the same product, priced differently, and offered through a different company name.
For example you have basecamp where you can manage unlimited projects at $3000 per year.
But it's possible that Boeing might pay $50,000 per year if they got even a higher level of service and a personal account manager. [1]
Now you could do this by adding a tier to basecamp but you could also be your own competition with basecamp just for the bespoke offering.
Figures arbitrary to make a point.
[1] Sold by a professional sales force or some other higher cost method than adwords.
For example I'm helping to investigate, as a favor, solutions for Physician scheduling. I'm amazed at how cheap the service is. I know that the group that wants this would easily pay much more to solve the problem in a turnkey fashion. But the current offerings are being sold on price only as a way to get attention. (And not doing a good job at it for that matter.)
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.
As a data point from another SaaS company owner, we thought this would be temporary too, but we found out it was so valuable in increasing customer retention and engagement that we are now planning to make it permanent (see my post above--we're hiring a FT person for this now.) The cost-effectiveness of this is off the charts. Patrick found out about this from me when I spoke about it at Microconf and I already have people from there telling me it's made them $500/hr+ (I believe it, as I've seen similar numbers in my own SaaS company.)
Oh, I should add: If you want people to rave about your company, there's nothing better than this onboarding process to do so. People become sort of religious about your business after a first-touch customer experience like this one. Probably preaching to the choir if you are Jason Fried, but this goes double for everyone else reading this who's building a software company.
I'm glad to hear that companies such as yours that are doing this are not necessarily considering making it permanent. I read PG's original article, and although you make reference to it, I felt he was addressing a different sort of issue than it sounds like you are. In your case, you actually went out of your way to engineer internal systems that let you do things manually, and you probably could have spent the same time and engineering resources you used to do that to instead develop the automation you don't have yet.
I may be in the minority, but let me give you some perspective as a potential customer who has experienced this kind of hands-on "service" from other SaaS-y outfits: I WANT automation from your service. I have worked with 2 companies that made me jump through all kinds of hoops to get an account set up with them when I could have had a usable account provisioned and active in 5 minutes had they automated their processes. As a result, it took days, because (surprise) their employees have their hands full, and I also have better things to do (you know, actual work responsibilities and customers of my own to respond to) than to have my hands held jumping through all of your contrived and artificial hoops just to use your service. That's just a waste of my time and yours and something that only ends up causing unnecessary delays to service turn-up, and in both cases, it seriously soured my taste for the service and almost made me contemplate throwing in the towel and going with a different solution.
This isn't the feeling that you want to leave your new customers with who are trying very hard to give you their money. You mean every time we need to make a change to service parameters, I need to submit a spreadsheet with my change request to somebody that's going to plug it in on your side by hand? MAYBE 24 hours later, if I'm lucky? Forget that: I'll go with somebody that gives me an API or a web portal that I can use to make the changes myself in a matter of minutes.
But what about "post-sale"? I think there will always be customer demand for concierge-level of service. Some SaaS models do lend themselves to self-service, but others don't. Knowing that distinction is key.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'll pay more for something that is better documented. If I can see better pictures, maybe a video of the owner using the item itself, more details, a more complete story of ownership. Goods can be commodities, but stories, presentation, and trust are unique.
I was expecting someone to give some standard "value is what people pay for it" or "making the product more visible adds value". But the things you listed actually do add value and seem like a win-win for the reseller and the customer. Thank you for a great response to that question.
I'd love to take credit for a brilliant strategy, but this isn't one of them. The story is very simple. We released an iPhone app for the all new version of Basecamp. Nothing more, nothing less.
But do you see it an issue (i.e. costs) supporting two different systems? Why doesn't it support the old system? Surely that had to come up in conversation.
I'd be curious about this topic, not because I'm pro or against this approach. I've worked on both sides of the spectrum (web app wrappers, full native and lately a hybrid, which is more complex than Basecamp) and it seems like a fine balance needs to be reached. You're "fortunate" that you keep the UI pretty slick and simple. And I say "fortunate", because I know this is actually a choice.
These will be very helpful to the mobile community. It's great to read about larger scale services and how they tackled mobile. It was great when LinkedIn shared about their new mobile app and the development efforts.
The app is the best experience. If you don't have the app or it's not supported on your platform, then you have the regular mobile web views to fall back on.
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.