37signals Product Blog

Plotters use Backpack to create "the greatest birthday scavenger hunt of all time!"

Tim Sullivan plotted out an elaborate alternate reality birthday game for his girlfriend using Backpack. He writes, "I don't think we'd have been able to even conceive of organizing this without Backpack. It's keeping us completely organized and allowing us to pull off what could be the greatest birthday scavenger hunt of all time!" Full details below, courtesy of Tim.

For my girlfriend Linda's 29th birthday, I've decided to upgrade her tired old frankenstein'd computer from 2002 to a powerhouse Alienware gaming rig. Additionally, I've set up an "alien conspiracy" theme for the entire birthday. In order to set the mood properly, I've enlisted a few friends and we've designed and are in the process of playing out an alternate reality game with her as the unwitting investigator. The whole thing ends with her old computer being abducted and replaced with the new Alienware machine.

There are a lot of moving parts to an alternate reality game, including some detailed scripts for the plot, a variety of props for everything from letters sent by email to pieces of the puzzle, phone messages that happen on specific days and people who need to be at certain places at certain times. We'd started by sending a few emails around, but it quickly became way too complex for that. So we set up an account on Backpack to help us keep everything in check.

Assembling the script on a single page using dividers to organize each stage helped a huge amount, especially during brainstorming sessions where several of us were on the phone talking and writing new notes.

The calendar helped us keep the dates things needed to be prepared by (coded in red), as well as the date of the actual launch of the event (coded in green).

Messages allowed us to note conflicts, scheduling problems (like being away for Thanksgiving here in Canada!) and ensure the people we were using for voicemails and in-person meetings were up to speed on any last-minute changes and general progress.

Versatility Skateboards: "Basecamp is the body of our business’s communications and Campfire is our brain"

Billy Putrino of Versatility Skateboards on his team's use of Basecamp and Campfire:

How do you use our products and why do you like them?
Versatility Skateboards is a new skateboard company founded in early 2008. Our company is headed up by three partners and our steadily expanding skate team has seven riders. When we’re not out skating, we virtually work from home. Basecamp and Campfire has enabled us to remain 100% connected with each other.

Basecamp is the body of our business’s communications. Every project, from designing a new skateboard to planning a contest sponsorship, is tracked in Basecamp.

Campfire is our brain. All three of us leave it up and running all day, which allows us the ability to brainstorm at the drop of a hat. The best feature of Campfire is that it’s logged and we can revisit the ideas we discussed 10 minutes, 10 days or 10 weeks later. Without Campfire, a lot of ideas would be lost!

Which features do you use most?
We use Basecamp’s files feature the most. It lets us share board designs, skate pictures, website art and even skate videos; the files feature creates a central location for all these files. It’s so much easier than emailing multiple copies of these files back and forth to each other.

Owner of Adam&Co. (a design firm): "Basecamp CHANGED my life for the better"

Adam Larson's Adam&Co. is a studio specializing in creative direction, branding, imaging, illustration and design. Adam loves Basecamp and wrote in to tell us why.

I run a design studio (Adam&Co.) and while I've used Basecamp via clients before, I never used it myself. I recently signed up and it has CHANGED my life for the better. It has made my work so much more manageable, has saved me incredible amounts of time, and has made my clients very impressed as well.

I not only use it for business projects, but I teach a class at MassArt and have used it with my students as well and they have responded VERY well to it.

The main reason I'm writing is that I've also used it to help organize during a family crisis. We recently had a major accident in the family, and my siblings and I live in different parts of the country. I put a project site together to manage everything and it is our one resource for keeping everything in check. It has been absolutely amazing!

So - A BIG THANK YOU! For such an incredible product with uninterrupted service. You guys are the best!

Adam even followed up with more praise:

It really has made my life sooooooo much more manageable and I have to say - I didnt think about how I could leverage it to deal with non-work things until this situation arised. We have a growing list of contacts on there so everyone has the most recent numbers, a constant to-do list that we each can knock stuff off of as we accomplish it rather than each of us doing the same things twice - as well as a journal of events so we all have the same story. It's truly been incredible.

Thanks Adam! Great to hear that Basecamp has helped you in so many ways.

Do you use a 37signals product in an interesting or noteworthy way? Let us know.

Basetwo Media: "Backpack's ease of use encourages collaboration from all of our employees."

Basetwo Media is a leading provider of Corporate Video Production services in Vancouver, BC Canada. Jeff Pelletier, Executive Producer and Owner there, writes in to tell us how his company uses Backpack (below).

Basetwo Media has been relying on Backpack to help in the systemization of our Video Production Company for the past year. As our Company Intranet, it serves as a central repository for all of our policies, procedures and important documents, and as a centralized means of communication.

The pages in our Backpack account are setup much like a book, broken out into chapters for different categories and departments, including a top-level index.

The formatting looks great on paper too, as we print a revised hard-copy every month or so for quick reference around the office. The RSS feed allows everyone to be notified of updates and facilitates quality control by management.

The shared calendars allow us to keep everyone in the loop with regards to our Production schedules, crews and equipment, as well as important administrative and office tasks such as team meetings. We use the 'Newsroom' as a message board for general, company-wide discussions.

Backpack has integrated perfectly into our own personal 'GTD' systems, and all of our employees now use it as a daily To-Do list and organizer.

After having tried a variety of other online tools, shared calendars and a Wiki, we've that found Backpack's ease of use encourages collaboration from all of our employees. Best of all, it's fun to use.

Custom Shadow Box keeps clients in the loop with Basecamp

Corrie Haffly writes in:

I've would like to thank you and the 37signals team for constantly trying to improve Basecamp without making it too complicated. Not only do I find Basecamp invaluable for working with clients in my web design/development business, but it's also been great for my small but growing side business, Custom Shadow Box. I thought you might like to see how a screenshot of Basecamp made its way into a set of illustrations I made for explaining how my process works.

Thanks Corrie!

Do you use a 37signals product in an interesting or noteworthy way? Let us know.

See your team's Twitter posts inside Campfire

Des Traynor works with Contrast, a web application development company. The team is geographically split (3 in Dublin, 1 in Northern Ireland), so they use Campfire for day to day chatting in order to "recreate the office atmosphere."

Recently they've begun including their twitter feeds in Campfire too. Des says, "This is really helpful as often a tweet by one of us will start a Campfire discussion, and conversely sometimes one of us will tweet the outcome of a Campfire chat."

At Contrast, we use Campfire extensively every day to keep in touch, share links, make plans and discuss projects. We also love Twitter, and often use it to have small public conversations viewable by anyone and everyone, but also to share ideas that often originate from discussions that we’ve had in Campfire.

Last week, Des suggested that it would be great if we could see things that team members were posting on Twitter from inside Campfire. I got the rationale straight away: I often have Campfire open all day, but turn off Twitter, which is often distracting while working on something else. It’s useful and fun to see what the other guys are talking about.

Twitter2Campfire

Anyway, I liked the idea and decided to do something about it. I was able to quickly create a feed on Twitter search that pulls in all tweets from @eoghanmccabe, @paulca, @davidjrice or @destraynor. A small script now runs every minute and pulls in the feed and posts new updates to Campfire. Now we can keep a track of the conversations we’re having outside Campfire, inside Campfire.

I’ve published the source code to the script on GitHub if you’d like to play with it yourself.

How More Riders magazine relies on Basecamp and Highrise

Magazine publisher Dan Johnson-Weinberger writes in:

I publish a magazine on how to improve and expand public transportation. It's called More Riders. And I rely on Highrise and Basecamp.

Highrise works very well to track and maintain all subscriber data. I looked at other magazine subscription and fulfillment software providers. They were both far more expensive than Highrise and seemed very bulky. We only have 50 subscribers (so far), and most of the other providers had user minimums in the low thousands. I can track what type of payment came in, their last paid issue and document when I shipped each issue to them.

I use lulu.com for printing and shipping. Each lulu order number gets logged in each subscriber's notes so I can easily and immediately track down any subscriber problems with receiving their magazine.

For producing the magazine, I use Basecamp. My Art Director is in Los Angeles, my two copy editors are also in Chicago (in their own home offices) and one of my main contributors is in Arcata, California. We develop each issue, share copy and post draft and finished layouts on Basecamp. I'm not sure how else we would be able to manage producing the magazine without it.

Finally, the magazine is an opportunity to earn trust and expertise with transit agency leaders and other advocates who want to expand public transportation, so all of my consulting and project proposal work is integrated into Highrise as I solicit work and try to convince subscribers to invest in more products and services that I and my team can provide.

The latest issue of More Riders went to print this week and we're on this week's best seller list on lulu (not quite as high as Getting Real!).

Thanks for writing Dan!

Do you use a 37signals product in an interesting or noteworthy way? Let us know.

2Large2Email: "Getting Real kick-started our commitment and drove us to finally get down to business"

James Mackay of 2large2email.com writes in about Getting Real, getting personal, and "getting on with it."

I read Getting Real during a three-hour plane trip, and the plane hadn’t landed before I knew I’d found something that could revolutionize my business plan. We had a “work-in-progress” product (www.2large2email.com) that was in danger of being kept on the back burner. 2Large2Email aims to make large file sending easier for small businesses and professionals. We knew we were on a winner but Getting Real’s focus on getting lean, getting personal and getting serious kick-started our commitment and drove us to finally get down to business.

At the time I was running a software publishing company that distributes products to retail. I stepped down from my position in the retail side of the company and, with two other guys, got serious about our web apps.

Starting Small
We’re part of a public company (Manaccom) but our little division remains cash-flow positive on its own. So, one decision we made early on was to reject funding from our parent company. That was an eye opener; without funding, big ideas can seem difficult to achieve. Getting Real’s philosophy about keeping it small made a lot of sense to us. We were three guys without a direct external cash pool, relying on each other to get our product right. In the end, our small numbers were one of the best things we had going for us. Our numbers helped us to stay true to the core of the product and be very clear on what those were. That meant once we got serious about our product, productivity was upped and the whole process was more fun.

Getting On With It
If fourteen years of working with software developers taught me anything, it’s that it doesn’t take much for an exciting idea to spin into an endless maze of pandering and dead-ends. Long-term plans might look nice, but too often, they stunt the growth of actual results. In the beginning, 2Large2Email was something we worked on sporadically, adding bits and pieces when we found the time. Getting Real’s belief about getting your product up and running convinced us that there was no use in trying to perfect our product before we’d actually created it. We realized our part-time attitude would never be enough to build something real. Getting Real gave us the push we needed to get off the fence and get serious about getting real about our goals, and our product, up and running. We shelved our other projects, and went for it.

How one student uses Backpack as a "digital notebook"

If you're a student wondering how Backpack can help you get organized, check out "Technology Focus: Backpack" over at Student Blogger.

Situation: Your student life is in disarray. Papers are here and there, deadlines and assignments are floating around in your head. Sure, a notebook could help. But you need something digital. What do you do?

Solution: Use the very flexible Backpack web application from 37signals. Best of all, it is just what you need for the price of zero.

Read the full article.

Home organization expert on Backpack: "It’s like magic! My respite of order in a chaotic world."

Crystal Dreisbach, Sparkleizer and home organization expert at Sparkleize the Way You Live, on why she loves Backpack:

Among the many reasons I use Backpack to organize my whole life is the remarkable ability it gives you to store files and share important information with other people.

Here are just a few examples of my everyday Backpack magic:

Meal planning. My husband and I are trying to eat dinner at home more frequently (to save money and eat healthier!) Of course, grocery shopping and meal planning take effort and organization. That is where collaborating on our meal planning page (in Writeboard!) on Backpack comes in handy.

How it works: I might volunteer to cook Monday and Saturday evenings of the upcoming week. So I log in to Backpack from home on Sunday and note on the Writeboard what I plan to cook for those evenings. I also list what ingredients we’ll need to buy at the Farmer’s Market or grocery store. I can even include a link to the recipe, if applicable. He can do the same for his cooking days. We can also make note of who will go to the grocery store, and whose turn it is to clean up the kitchen each night.

The end result is a comprehensive meal plan for the whole week, including menu and shopping reminder list, which we can either print out or access from work, home or on an iPhone! (Check out the screenshot, attached.)