Jason Dainter sent us an email about Basecamp:
As a start-up business (growing from nothing last year to being now one of the leading online martial arts communities) our team of 4 constantly sing the praises of Basecamp. The fact we are not yet office based and are all working remotely (often odd hours) has made Basecamp a complete necessity for us. The days of a disorganised million emails flying back and forth are gone thankfully!
We followed up to learn more about how Jason and his team use Basecamp:
Who are you and what do you do?
My name is Jason Dainter and I help to run a business (alongside my business partners Pete Mills, Ian Hales, and Sham Norsham) called Martial Edge, found at www.martialedge.net. We launched the site last year and our aim is to become the largest resource for all martial artists throughout the globe, by offering free forums, articles, reviews, school directories, and a full online store selling martial arts products.
How did we find out about Basecamp?
As a start-up business, we are currently not office based and our entrepreneurial and mixed team of 4 people all currently work remotely from different locations, often at different hours of the day. After a few months of development, our todo list grew bigger and bigger and suddenly a plethora of emails were being exchanged back and fourth (between all four of us). Before we knew it we were in a complete mess, nothing was getting done,important tasks/bugs on the site were being lost and forgotton about, and it became obvious we needed a good, reliable, and most importantly easy to use project management tool... then we found Basecamp!
How do you use Basecamp and why do you like it?
Currrently we use Basecamp for organising and managing everyones various tasks in the business. For example Pete Mills, fellow Managing Director and black belt in martial arts handles the editorial side, so whether he's conducting interviews, or creating business relationships with core people in the industry, it all gets logged into Basecamp. Similarly, Ian and Sham, our developers, use Basecamp for organising all the coding tasks on the site into various phases (priority and non priority items) which makes my job of project managing the development a hell of a lot easier!
Which features do you use most?
The todo list is a personal favourite. The ability to easily create and assign tasks for people is invaluable. The recent addition of being able to make comments/upload files for particular tasks is a huge timesaver for us too, as this allows us to have multiple email sessions going on about various tasks without things getting confusing. Finally (I could go on for a while), the ability to reply to tasks via email is again a huge time saver, its quick, easy, and never seems to break (unlike other more complicated project management tools on the market!).
Get specific. Tell us a story about a project or situation where Basecamp helped you out.
There are so many stories it is hard to choose one, but let's use today as an example. All four of us were working remotely on the site. We were all slowly going through working on areas that had been assigned to us based on our skillsets. Being fairly handy with graphics, Pete had posted a message asking for a feature that was much needed on the site. Being a visual person (and fairly handy with graphics) I knocked up some visuals to demonstrate this concept, and posted these in Basecamp. Ian and Sham our developers then logged in (from different locationd within their own time), and took all comments on board and started to think about the code and how it was all going to be implemented, and again posted their thoughts back as commnts in Basecamp. This was not the only task being worked on, so many other tasks were going through a similar process. Without Basecamp, the alternative would have been many many emails being sent back and forth, with no logical structure or organisation with the result being a mass of confusion for all parties! Using Basecamp today (as with every other day!) we were able to manage multiple issues at the same time, with various people in the business contributing on different tasks, at different times, in completely different locations!
Any tips or tricks for other customers?
The main thing we have found essential is keeping your todo lists up to date and manageable. Its one thing having a system capable of being organised, but its another actually keeping it organised! We routinely go through all todo items and messages, and tick off or delete any old or redundant ones. No-one wants to log in and see 5000 tasks allocated to them, especially when half of them are out of date, so we've found this "pruning" process a pretty vital part of the business.
Do you use a 37signals product in an interesting or noteworthy way? Let us know.
