Michel Elings of iPad magazine TRVL on how his team uses Basecamp:
What do you do?
Jochem Wijnands (my cofounder) and I publish TRVL, the world's first travel magazine especially designed for iPad. We have had over 500,000 pageviews since Dec 1st and we have a 5 star customer rating in the US App Store. There is no other magazine that can say that.
The last couple of weeks there has been a lot of talk about magazines "failing" on iPad. It's a one-sided story, really. Not all magazines are failing. What they forgot to mention is that the real change is coming from TRVL and other indie publishers. We are setting the standard and conventional magazines will need to let go of old their formats and pricing to also become a success.
Why do you need Basecamp?
TRVL is a community of writers and photographers. Basically, we are a community of travelers. Our contributors live far apart. We needed a tool that could synchronize our work, that could help us use our time efficiently.
Why do you like Basecamp?
We apporach each issue of TRVL, each story, as a project. Basecamp is perfect for that. Per project we have created a timeline and to-do lists, so that everybody is focussed and knows what is expected and when. Because we work with different time-zones, it is great to have one place on the web where meet and communicate. We use it to structure our internal communication. We don't send each other emails but messages using Basecamp. Email is for the outside world!
What did you use before?
We started out using Basecamp from the start. We all have experience with other (web-based) applications, such as Google Docs, Things and Dropbox, just to name a few. But we knew that, because of all the deadlines and complex communication, our organisation needed something more sophisticated. Basecamp was the answer.
Tell us about a situation where Basecamp helped you out.
We are working on at least four or five issues of TRVL at a time. That's a lot of deadlines. One of our first deadlines was deadlier than any other: getting our app approved by Apple. Obviously, this was critical. That's when Basecamp proved its value to us. Our whole organization was tuned into reaching that deadline and Basecamp was our core organizing tool. We never had any discussion about what needed to be done when, it was clear to everybody. It was wonderful.
Any tips for other customers?
Get everybody in, make sure email is killed and only run things through Basecamp. You will get a nice archive, peace of mind, and you will find everything in one place.
Top Test Prep's Chief Educational Developer Jack Byers (shown below) explains how his team uses Basecamp and Highrise:
Top Test Prep is an elite private tutoring company with headquarters in Washington, DC — a sort of test prep and admissions counseling boutique. Our advantage in the market has always been the level of personalization we bring to our programs: our entire team gets to know the clients, we write customized study plans for every student, etc. Personalization is great in that it makes our job more rewarding and it definitely helps students learn better, but it takes a lot of extra work, and certain things are difficult to scale. This is where 37signals products have come in for our academic team.
How we use Basecamp
Before 37signals, we used email to interact with our clients and manage the tutoring. When you're a tiny company, this works — sort of. When we started scaling out, it was clear we needed a separate platform. We were sending homework, lesson plans, and college essays back and forth constantly, losing track of versions and sometimes losing files altogether. One really cool thing we do for students is have the tutor write a comment after every session. It lets them and their parents know how they're doing, forces the tutor to reflect actively on how the program is going, and keeps our academic team constantly up to date. As you can imagine, with over 100 active tutors, this would be an absolute nightmare by email.
So now we use Basecamp instead. We set up a new project for each student, and give access to the students, parents, tutors, and obviously our entire academic team. One great thing about Basecamp is that it's simple enough that we can send parents a two sentence message explaining how to use it. We post the customized lesson plan in the Files tab, where everybody can download it if they lose their hard copy. We also use this to edit admissions clients' college essays and to upload supplemental homework and cheat sheets for our students. We schedule each meeting as a milestone. And tutors log their hours in the Time tab. This is nice because it makes the process transparent — parents can see the exact same hours we use for payroll when they're being billed. Finally, we assign homework and keep track of various deadlines in the To-Dos.
How we use Highrise Highrise is a nice sales tool, but we actually use it for a lot more than that. When we talk to prospects, we like to get a really good sense of the student before we recommend one of our tutoring programs. We find out about their academic history, testing experience, learning styles, and other interests. Then, if they sign up, our academic team needs all that information that the sales team already got.
In the course of signing up and starting a program, a student usually speaks to at least three people, and they all need to know everything about the student in order to bring the level of personalization we pride ourselves on. Being able to pass a student seamlessly from department to department (sales tells them about our program, admissions helps them set realistic goals, academics makes a recommendation for tutoring) has boosted our conversion rate substantially — we estimate it at a 44% increase. It's also huge for us that Highrise integrates with other web apps, including our form collector and chat feature on our website.
Again, our goal is to be able to scale the personalization that's helped us grow in the first place. We don't want to be an "education factory" like our competitors, and there's no way to fake knowing your students. Highrise and Basecamp organize things for us so we have more time to spend with our students and tutors, which is the core of our business and always will be.
Do you use a 37signals product in an interesting way? Let us know.
Trevor O'Sullivan, General Manager at DTS International, recently wrote us:
We have officially switched over to the 37signals Suite as of the last 3 weeks and we're loving it — thanks for building such an awesome product and taking the useless shit and clutter out of productivity solutions.
We followed up with Trevor to find out more about how his team is using the Suite. His response is below.
The search begins
We are a multifaceted company with several focuses all within the training and development market. Initially, we werte only looking for a CRM and I started looking at products around the place like Highrise and other online CRM tools - we were then using a product hosted on our own server. This search started in late 2009 during our Christmas holiday season in Australia but never went anywhere as I decided it was all too hard!
On initial review, I thought Highrise was too "entry level" and simply lacked features we needed like reporting and other common CRM features. This year we hired an absolute gun of a sales person and she has made a huge difference to our business. Since most of her time is spent telephone prospecting she came to me with her concerns/challenges with the CRM and how difficult it was making her job to fill in lots of fields or data we never used, the slow search capabilities (as we had around 20000 contacts) and the all around cumbersome nature of our existing CRM.
Hence I started looking again at CRM options and came back to Highrise. Still thinking it lacked key features without using third party applications and API function development from our end we decided to "try it out" it for a week. Once that week was over, our team was begging me to make the switch all the way. So we did!
Just after upgrading to a paid account 37signals came out with their new Suite offering and we had to have it — as we had started to play with the free version of Basecamp and Backpack and had fallen in love with them too!
Highrise
We have a database of around 10,000 customers and prospects (since making the switch we did a massive data clean and removed useless and duplicates from our CRM). For us, it is about tracking the interactions with customers and prospects, hence we use the notes and email dropbox heavily. We have started using the Tasks and Deals sections more and more to keep track of the deals we have in the pipeline and things we need to get done with different contacts.
Basecamp
We have just completed a business plan for our business (yes, I know plans are guesses!). But, for me, the business planning process is about the analysis and getting a feel for what we have to work with and then I can make better decisions in the moment. The plan/analysis produced around 8 pages of todos for us to work on to improve our business.
Every time I looked at the list is was so intimidated I stuck it back on the desk and looked for something else to keep me busy! One day I was watching the Basecamp videos and thought, "Let's set up a project." At that time, we only had the free version so had to use one project called "business plan todos" and divide up the list with our team, then create a rule in the business that at 4:30pm we stop what we are doing and spend 30 minutes to cross one thing of the list. It has been great we are so far in front of where I thought we would be. It is amazing and our team loves it because the can see how they are contributing to the business!
Below, author and investor Timothy Ferriss describes how he used Basecamp and Highrise to write his new book.
I am an angel investor based in San Francisco (Twitter, StumbleUpon, Evernote, Posterous, etc.), and am best known for my first book, “The 4-Hour Workweek,” which has been sold into 35 languages. For the last three years, I’ve been working on my new book, “The 4-Hour Body,” [Amazon link] which is a minimalist guide to hacking the human body. It covers everything: rapid fat-loss, better sex, better sleep, and I tested everything on myself with doctors and black-market scientists. The new book was a much, much bigger project than “The 4-Hour Workweek”, so I hired and trained an assistant (Charlie) to help me keep everything organized and actionable.
How we use Basecamp
At the end of 2009, I was sending Charlie chapters of the book to review. He’d track his changes in Word and email the files back to me. Within the first week, it became very clear that emailing back-and-forth was going to be a major time-suck and liability. Keeping things in order was hard, and we spent at least 20% of our time looking for the right versions of docs. In December of 2009, we started using Basecamp to keep track of all revised chapters. Right away, it made things 10 times easier, and I had Charlie start putting all of his other book-related work in Basecamp.
For instance, he would post useful “Tools and Tricks” that supplemented each chapter, and would have Basecamp send me a notification email whenever he posted something he wanted me to review. Every few days, I’d quickly look over all of the new posts from the Dashboard, and leave comments on a few of the messages. Basecamp became the war room for all things related to Project 4-Hour Body.
In 2010, I had a very sharp researcher and trained lab scientist (Alexandra Carmichael of CureTogether.com) help me with some of the technical science in the book. I wanted her to submit unusual findings and fact-check chapters, but I didn’t want to open up access to content in Basecamp that was irrelevant or that could be confusing. The solution was simple: we set up a new project, imported the few chapters she needed to work on, and gave her access to that one project. Having her work with us in Basecamp was simple, and we avoided confusion we'd experienced on every other platform.
Which features do you use most?
We limited our feature use to just ‘Projects’ and ‘Messages’ for a few reasons. First, we tried using ‘To-Dos’ for a few days, but found that we’d forgot about them almost immediately after posting. So we stuck to our usual ghetto ‘To-Do’ lists: writing on index cards or the back of our hands.
Some of the projects we currently have in our Basecamp are:
30-Second Science [This is the name we gave to the sidebars Alexandra was helping create.]
4HB Launch [All marketing plans and fun ideas related to the launch of the new book.]
4HB Photos [The book has more than 200 photos, and this is where we kept track of them.]
4HWW Marketing [One of the first projects we created, back in December 2009, when we released the expanded version of “The 4-Hour Workweek.” It contains all of our marketing ideas for that launch.]
Blog stuff [All of the high-level opportunities and promotions related to my blog, including: ways to monetize my existing content, short-list winners or finalists for the various contests I run, etc.]
Chapter revisions [The earliest drafts of each chapter, along with their revisions, are posted here as Word doc attachments.]
Miscellaneous [All of the random side projects and ideas we have related to the book. As is typical with anything labeled ‘Miscellaneous,’ is probably the most interesting section.]
Permissions – Graphics [Remember those 200+ photos we have in the book? Well, this is where we post all of the permissions we needed to get to use those pictures. Huge pain in the ass.]
Research & Resources [Each chapter in the new book has a “Tools and Tricks” section at the end, where I recommend cool practical stuff (resources, gadgets, etc.) for the reader that supplements the chapter text and makes it all actionable. This is where we posted everything we found, before I added the best ones into the manuscript.]
Picking Partners: Basecamp Becomes the Standard
Basecamp is now the standard when hiring or working with any team. Email might work with one freelancer, but what about when you have three designers and programmers in the mix? Familiarity with Basecamp became a prerequisite in those cases, and that's one of many reasons I ended up working with Digital Telepathy for the design of The 4-Hour Body book website.
They had previous experience with Basecamp, and within hours following our intro call, had posted all the milestones and deliverables for the program on a timeline (see "Overview" below). Here are some screenshots from our collaboration:
How we use Highrise
It’s no exaggeration when I say that we have a small army helping promote this book. We needed a place to keep track of all our conversations with everyone, and be able to quickly put each contact in appropriate groups. Highrise was the obvious solution. Charlie had used it before with a few of his previous clients, including New York Times bestselling authors Ramit Sethi and Tucker Max, so he already had a preferred tagging system he'd developed.
Here are some of the tags we use:
“.tim” – I use this to indicate people or companies I have strong connections with. They’re usually close friends of mine.
“@California”, “@NewYork”, etc. – Used to show where a person or company is located.
“company-in-book” – There are a ton of companies in “The 4-Hour Body.” We wanted to be sure we had them all listed out somewhere so we could easily reach out and open the door to help with the launch / give them free copies of the book.
“facebook”, “twitter”, and “youtube” – Some of our Highrise contacts have enormous followings online and have offered to help through their strongest channels.
“newsletter” – These are friends of mine with big email newsletters who had indicated interest in mailing to their lists.
“promotion” – Sometimes people and companies email me, saying they want to help promote the book. This tag helps us keep track of everyone who has committed to doing a promotion around the launch date.
How will we continue to use Basecamp and Highrise?
We have no plans to stop using Basecamp. It’s made our lives so much easier by completely removing the hassle of emailing documents back and forth. We’ll continue to use it to collect and organize our future ideas and projects.
Our contact list in Highrise is still growing, as we only just started using it about two months ago, but the more contacts and information we add, and the more specific our tags are, the more valuable it will become as an asset.
Our customers and their events are fascinating, from churches, to amateur mixed martial arts, to indie hip hop, to independent ski films, to even Indian pop stars coming to America. This year we will help our event hosts sell thousands of tickets and we will print and process over 40 million tickets.
We are a small and profitable company, just 25 employees, stretched across 3 continents and 6 locations, and, we grow organically — no venture funding. To grow however, we need scale and leverage beyond just our team. To grow and operate our four business units across three continents, we need powerful collaboration and execution tools. Basecamp is our tool for simply “getting things done.” It’s what we call our “Execution Engine.”
We use Basecamp across all of Ticket River. All global teams and all global functions at Ticket River use Basecamp. Other than our own operational management system (order processing and print management) Basecamp is the tool for the company. I will highlight four examples:
Product Management and Software Development. Working with our distributed TicketRiver.com software team, Basecamp is our product management tool for UI definition, use case discussion, and product launches and marketing. Defined features are cross-linked to Redmine, our agile software development tool.
Distributed Graphic Design. Each year we design and deploy hundreds of new and unique ticket templates, poster templates, invitation templates and event kit templates for our diverse customers. Using Basecamp, distributed independent graphic designers and our team collaborate and execute the new template designs.
Global Operations through our UK and Australia Partners. In the UK (which also serves Europe) and Australia, we operate the websites and our local partners print and process the orders. We use Basecamp to build our knowledgebase on operations. Partners can easily access this knowledgebase to resolve issues. When we expand to a new market/country, we simply replicate the project.
Customer Support. Phenomenal customer support is our #1 value, mission, and priority. Although we are small, the diversity of our customers and their challenges – planning and executing events and fundraisers – and our global reach – lead to complexity. Basecamp is the tool to cut through complexity. We use Basecamp to execute customer support initiatives and projects.
Dynamic Language is a Seattle-based localization, translation, and interpretation services provider that works in more than 150 languages and dialects. Below, Audrey Dubois-Boutet, Quality Control Lead at Dynamic Language, explains how the company uses Basecamp and Highrise.
We pride ourselves on our quality, accuracy and customer service. A lot of our current efficiency can be attributed to how we’ve integrated Basecamp into our processes. Basecamp has allowed us to both organize in-house operations and to effectively manage projects with our clients in a collaborative way.
Staying on the same page
Our Localization and Translation Departments use thorough processes to ensure all projects are delivered with the highest quality. To do that, we follow a series of Quality Assurance steps for each project, from verification and proofreading to graphic design to testing. We maintain a number of “To-Do List Templates” for our services, which allow our project managers to create projects very quickly, and because all projects are not created equal, they appreciate being able to customize their projects, as necessary. We’ve modified the structure of our projects to align with the Basecamp concepts of Milestones and To-Dos, so we can focus on high-quality and on-time delivery.
The ability to communicate via messages and comments in an organized, and “threaded”, manner is a great Basecamp component we could not do without. It not only keeps everyone accountable for their tasks and projects, but it also gives a helpful record of conversation history. New employees can jump in and get up to speed with ongoing projects or company practices simply by reading through past project communications.
Integration with existing systems
We have a custom internal database application that handles Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, Payroll and more, and we’ve been able to use the Basecamp API to link our internal database bi-directionally with Basecamp. Whether a task is marked as complete on the Basecamp side, or internally, it’s immediately reflected on both systems. Our developer has been extremely impressed with how reliable and useful this interface has been, and we keep finding new ways to use the API.
What was the story behind the magazine's creation? Initially, the magazine came out of my own personal desire to make something real, having grown tired of all web design work seeming so intangible. But I also took a look at the (very few) typography magazines out there and felt frustrated at their high cover price and highbrow stance: I wanted to create something that would be accessible to all sorts of type fans, from beginner to novice. We released the first issue in August and we sold out in under two hours!
How did you use Basecamp?
In the process of creating the first issue, I basically made it up as I went along, but the second issue has been a more 'mature' project from the very start. I had an idea of the work I needed to do myself and what needed to go out to other contributors, and I decided to use Basecamp so that I could manage these various different tasks.
Which features did you use most?
Most of the project management revolved around the assigning of to-dos. I used milestones to keep track of important dates, but really assigning to-dos to different contributors — and just being able to keep track of my own to-do list — was where Basecamp became indispensable.
Any specific situation where Basecamp helped you out?
The creative process of the magazine is basically about having to do a bit of everything at once, so that means having individual to-do lists for areas like 'production' (liaising with the printers and distributors), 'editorial' (organising transcriptions, commissioning articles, editing copy), 'partnerships' (obtaining ad creatives, chasing invoices), 'website' (commissioning the design, logging bugs, requesting new features from the developers), and 'art & design'. The 'art & design' list was mainly filled with tasks for me, but because I was also commissioning artwork from cover artist Jez Burrows, Basecamp allowed me to easily assign him to-dos (usually small tweaks) and give him detailed feedback (in the form of comments on each to-do), as well as allow him to upload new versions of the files directly into Basecamp. The same was true for the 'editorial' to-do list and the contributors using that.
Anything else you like about Basecamp?
Having everything in one central location — rather than scattered around various different emails — was wonderful. I had such a clear idea about where the project was at every given stage, and I'm pretty sure that without Basecamp, the whole project would have descended into chaos!
Stephanie, from Triad, and I are able to set calendar goals, create todo lists, message each other, and upload files. All in one spot! Sooooooo much better than having emails scattered here and there!
By using the project milestones, we were able to choose realistic goals and set due dates on a calendar we both use! No excuses for late content or work! Everyone is looking at the same thing! You can also integrate the milestones onto your iCal to make life even easier. The todo lists are great for keeping things moving and everyone on track. Or keep them private and make them for yourself! Instead of searching for various emails in my inbox, all my correspondence for this specific project are all together, making it so much easier to access. File sharing is organized and simple. Stephanie uploads content to me, and I upload proofs for her. All these features are in one place for each specific project! Love it!
Another great thing about Basecamp, you can download a few third party apps for your iPhone and iPad that integrate seamlessly with it! These are great for meetings and on-the-go, and keep things easily organized and accessible!
All in all, Basecamp has become an invaluable part of our everyday work flow, and we are using it with more and more of our clients with positive responses!
Agtel is an award-winning TV and video production company based in Dublin, Ireland. Below, Agtel's Alan Dargan explains why his team "loves using Basecamp and Highrise."
Agtel is recognised for the creativity and quality of its factual and documentary work for RTÉ and BBC, and we’re a market-leader in high quality videos that deliver results on-line for clients in the public and private sectors. As well as producing videos for clients like PricewaterhouseCoopers and the European Parliament, we also produce Ireland's longest running factual television series for state broadcaster RTÉ.
Basecamp is a great way for us to keep a track on projects from scripting straight through to post-production and delivery. It ensures that our clients have full visibility on every aspect of the process from asset management to deadlines.
Our clients love having a centralised hub for all project correspondence and can see where projects are at every moment. The main difference between corporate and TV work is that a corporate production (without a strict transmission date) can have ever-increasing amounts of amendments and changes. We recently had a job that spanned over two years and Basecamp was crucial in staying on top of all the changes over it's lifetime.
Highrise helps us keep a track of new business - we use Wufoo forms which integrate tightly with Highrise ensuring that all new business queries become a part of our project workflow from the off.
Our workflow usually starts with a query arriving from a Wufoo form on the Contact Us page on our website which immediately becomes a case or pending deal in Highrise. From here we can track initial correspondence with a potential client.
When a job is won we add a job to Basecamp, issue the client with a username and password and try to mediate all further correspondence through Basecamp. The starting point for any production is usually a script and a schedule and Basecamp allows us to keep track of important dates with Milestones and upload and track iterations of scripts. Confusion arising from versions mailed back and forth can cause headaches so knowing that everyone is working on the right one gives peace of mind. Tracking versions is also enormously helpful when it comes to posting up cuts of a production. We usually timecode these so clients can reference specific parts of an edit and we can then add the amendment to a To-Do list and action.
To-dos are hugely important and become even more so as a project comes to the end. It’s incredibly important that all changes received from a client are carried before a DVD duplication run is started or a production goes to air and it ensures that everyone can see what needs to be carried out to bring the production to completion. If there’s any ambiguity about a list item a query can be commented and sent as a message to the client.
The TimeTrack OSX Widget logs the time spent on particular parts of a project and send them straight to Basecamp which helps a lot with our timesheets.
Having access to archived projects is also hugely helpful allowing us to instantly retrieve old projects’ assets and messages.
Do you use a 37signals product in an interesting way? Let us know.
Jason Glaspey of Urban Airship (and previously of Bac'n) talks about using Basecamp in his various projects:
Been using Basecamp for years and years and been part of several startups, some small and failed, some medium and profitable, some large and funded. Throughout all of them we've used Basecamp.
Last year, we started and sold a company called Bac'n. The site sold real bacon online. We'd have about 600lbs of bacon at any given time in our freezers, and we had a fun project to work on during our full-time jobs. Since then we've sold the company and started Urban Airship, which is doing great and we're having a great time.
The interesting part of the story is that in 2009, while talking about our experience creating the company in three weeks, we were asked to write a book about our experience. So, we did: From Idea to Web Start-up in 21 Days: Creating bacn.com [Amazon].
I held the first copy in my hands last week. And in that book, we discuss using Basecamp and how it was critical to working with vendors and managing communication and tasks between us who all worked at different places. We also talk about how 37signals was inspiration to our methods and agile development.
Our current company, Urban Airship, is a young, 17-person startup with the vast majority of our team being engineers. They of course have all sorts of ways to communicate and keep track of their code. However, this has also meant that we have worked with a pretty strong list of vendors for everything from copywriting, design (print and web), and to a few other positions with contractors in other cities. Keeping track of us all has been a struggle at times. We use a variety of tools, such as Dropbox to keep some things easy to share and synced on the desktop; but when there are comments needed and versioning, Basecamp works wonders.
We're currently reconfiguring our website, as well as the backend admin interface for new features and updated messaging. So sending feedback to and from our designers and site developers, while also allowing our team on-site to communicate and provide feedback, while always keeping track of the current designs and workflows, has become super simple with Basecamp.
Also, Urban Airship was one of the first companies to join the Portland Incubator Experiment and Basecamp is how all the companies, past and present, communicate within that space. We've used it to plan and host events, sell vehicles used in the Chalkbot campaign during the Tour de France, and to remind each other when it's time to get a new keg.
There's pretty much no part of our business that Basecamp hasn't touched at least once.
Sorry if our tale is a bit non-linear, and involves a bunch of quasi-connected companies. But that's part of how today works, and it's a testament to Basecamp that it's one of the few threads that we've used in each situation.
Do you use a 37signals product in an interesting way? Let us know.