Matthew Egan is the President of San Antonio Search Engine Optimization (SEO) firm Image Freedom. He wrote to tell us how his team uses Basecamp.
It was December of 2009. I was just one guy, working from home. I was like so many web freelancers, I did a little bit of everything, web design, HTML, "general web marketing" or what have you. I was calling myself an SEO, but when you're poor you don't turn down work right? I wrote to you about a meeting I had where a client signed with us (and I use the term "us" loosely) and said he was convinced about us because we had our own Project Management software through Basecamp. That was enough for him to feel he'd be in the loop and he was convinced.
Here we are now, February of 2011, and we experienced 800% growth comparing our 2010 numbers to 2009. Paid off every dollar of credit card debt I had, every medical bill, and committed not to spend another dollar of "other peoples money". For the first time in my life I brought home a six figure income.
Still every day, we log into Basecamp. My SEO team uses Basecamp to upload records of the backlinks they've built for our clients, and the clients can then log in and see what we're doing. Something we have come to understand is extremely rare in the SEO business. That transparency. Customers want to know what we're doing with their money, so we use Basecamp to get out of their way, to give them a straight path to that data. They love it.
Recently we upgraded Basecamp and begun using it for Time Tracking. It is a tribute to a software that a year after using it, you can start using a new feature and have something that seems so simple and clean suddenly be so much more robust. All of our staff now track their hours in Basecamp, and I myself record all of my activities in Basecamp for my whole team to see. I use Basecamp to be as accountable for my time as I require my team to be.
Do you use a 37signals product in an interesting way? Let us know.
