If you’d prefer to simplify your billing, you can pay for 37signals products in one lump sum. We’ll then pull from that credit instead of charging your card every month. We’ll email you when your balance runs low so you can recharge it.
To set up lump sum payment, click the “Account” link at the top of any screen. Then click the link for lump sum payments.
You’ll still get an invoice each month. When your lump sum is running out, we’ll send you an email to let you know.
37signals is removing OpenID support. So how do you switch from using OpenID to a regular username and password? First, go to your “My info” page and click the “Edit your personal information” link.
Click the “normal username” link beneath your OpenId.
Then, just enter a username and password and save your changes. That's it!
"Manage Your To-Do List Without Getting Distracted" [MariaShriver.com] offers tips for helping you make the most of your time. One of the tips is to use 37signals tools reduce clutter.
The desk makeover: Make your environment conducive to working. Clear your desk of any distractions. Have the things you use on a regular basis at the ready. Everything else can go on a shelf. I use an online system by 37signals.com, which offers a virtual office management system so you can be paperless! I can access it anytime, anywhere. This is also a useful tool if you have clients whose progress you monitor.
Practical eCommerce offers 39 Online Productivity Tools to Go Officeless:
Don’t miss a beat managing and growing your business. Whether you are at an actual physical office space, at home, on a plane or in a hotel, all you need is a laptop and an Internet connection and you are ready to go.
Several 37signals tools (including Highrise and Basecamp) on the list along with lots of other helpful apps for those looking to go virtual.
Mohammed Faris, founder of ProductiveMuslim.com, shares his experience using 37signals products:
About a year ago, ProductiveMuslim.com was a one-man show, a simple blog where I shared some ideas connecting traditional Islamic philosophy to modern productivity techniques. I had a small readership base, and roughly 500 to 1000 fans on Facebook and the site was going no where. In one year, ProductiveMuslim.com grew exponentially, managing a global team of volunteers covering Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, India, Canada and UK and over 20,000 fans worldwide. Whilst there are many factors that contributed to this rise in numbers, throughout my journey the flexibility and productivity of 37signals.com products was one of the ingredients to this success story:
It all started at 'Camp...
When I started recruiting team members to help me with the site, we used Skype and e-mails for all sorts of discussions. My relationship with my team was mostly one-to-many, and it wasn’t ideal. I didn’t feel that I was making the most of the team’s synergy. I needed a system to bring the team together and get them to discuss ideas with each other.
In my search, I came across Campfire. It seemed ideal for providing us with a group-chat platform and what was great was it would save all our discussions in one central hub.
The same night I registered for Campfire, I sent a quick e-mail to my team inviting them to a special introductory meeting on Campfire. We ‘huddled’ (virtually) around Campfire that night and had one of the best team discussions ever! Campfire really facilitated that many-to-many communication we were lacking before.
A failed first attempt
After 2 months though, virtual camping wasn’t working for us anymore. Not a fault of Campfire’s, but it was the way we were using it. We tried to stretch Campfire beyond its means and used it as a project management tool. Of course, that didn’t work, there were far too many discussions in different rooms and people were losing track of who said what where. With the growth of our work, we needed a project management tool ideal for tracking our to-dos, sharing files, setting milestones…etc.
Then we all touched Base...
Thankfully, 37signal’s Basecamp was there with just the right tools to manage all our projects with optimal efficiency. The features of Basecamp rivaled anything else we had experienced.
The ease of use was a major selling point for us; any new team member who joins us can figure out Basecamp without any complex tutorials.
Currently, we manage multiple projects simultaneously with Basecamp including design projects and our recent relaunch of a brand new website. I love how we can invite people to certain projects then archive the projects for later reference. Everything seems to have been thought through with Basecamp, and meticulously designed so as to make any project management smooth running!
Time to go Backpacking!
Over the summer period, we had another website to maintain called ProductiveRamadan.com. By this time, I established an editorial team and wanted a platform to help the team easily collaborate on editing the content of our site and ensure accuracy of all articles published. Backpack became the ultimate back-end system for all our editorial work. With it’s checklist features, notifications, and Journal, Backpack greatly improved the quality of articles we published and helped us maintain consistency of style and format.
Over to Highrise...
By this time, I loved anything 37signals and decided to explore 37signals’ fourth flagship product: Highrise. I wasn’t sure how we were going to utilise it but decided to experiment with it anyway.
Admittedly, it was an uphill struggle at first with the team – trying to get them to adopt Highrise for all external communication with partners, sponsors, advertisers, fans, and writers. It seemed like an added element of work to them but I was certain that if we adopt this and used it to its advantage, it’d help us establish long standing relationships with all our contacts.
Thankfully, I was right. Once we got the hang of it (myself included), Highrise became an indispensable tool for our growing website especially with different team members speaking to different contacts.
Back to the camp?
So after our journey getting comfortable with Basecamp, Backpack and Highrise, I couldn’t believe that we failed using Campfire earlier, especially since 37signals itself (and thousands of others) use it everyday. Was it the way we used it?
I looked up articles on how 37signals.com staff work and read REWORK, then it hit me! We were using Campfire wrong the whole time! We were creating Campfire rooms for different projects, and my team members were discussing any project in any room making cross-project discussions inevitable, and people lost track.
What we should have done (and I’m currently trying to implement) is set up Campfire rooms for each team member, essentially setup ‘virtual offices’ for every team member. So if I need to speak to my IT guy, I just ‘pop’ into his office and ask him my question or start a discussion about a topic there. Also, other team members can pop by as well and add to the discussion/topic if needed. Organizing Campfire by person instead of topics/projects makes it far more intuitive and easier to follow.
In summary, I would recommend 37signals tools to any organisation who want to make their work more organised, efficient, and innovative. All their tools really help you become more productive in your work, and having used all four tools I can summarise their products in the following four sentences:
Campfire is for people.
Basecamp is for projects.
Backpack is for pages.
And Highrise is for the outside world.
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!
If you're not seeing what you expect in one of our applications, we've created this "browser trouble" page that should get you back on track.
The page explains the following fixes:
Isaac Grauke is CEO at Populi, a company that makes web-based College Management software. Below he describes how his team uses 37signals products.
We build software designed around a lot of the principles expounded in Getting Real and REWORK, principles which are all but absent in the college software market. Between our Sales and Development teams, our day-to-day work revolves around Basecamp, Highrise, and Campfire.
Basecamp
Basecamp does a lot of heavy lifting at Populi. We use it to keep track of development and customer implementation, and to germinate a lot of our web marketing & support documentation.
We group our development activities—whether tracking bugs & fixes, adding new features, improving old ones, and so on—into individual Projects. For instance, we have the “Dev General” project, into which we funnel a lot of the routine, across-the-board stuff (like bugfixes, optimization, etc.). Development projects that require special, focused attention get their own project—our recent Bookstore release was one such item.
Implementation for new customers generally follows a particular pattern, so projects are a natural fit for that. When we sign a new college, we set up a unique implementation project for them, and plug away at it using milestones and to-do’s.
The various writing projects at Populi fit in under Documentation (official stuff like Terms of Service, help documentation, internal company docs) or Website (marketing text for the external site, as well as look & feel code updates). Obviously, these projects are heavy on the Writeboards and To-do’s. Comparing different versions of copy in Writeboard makes it sooo simple to update website text or giant docs like the Terms of Service.
Highrise
Highrise manages our sales leads and correspondence of note with existing customers. It has been a tremendous help to our sales staff; previously they used a half-hearted combination of Salesforce and an internal Populi checkout. Salesforce had a zillion features that didn’t do anybody any good; Populi is built for colleges, not salesmen. Highrise handles everything we need it for with ease — even the guys here who only rarely need to look at it find what they’re after within a few seconds.
Campfire
Campfire is where we discuss a lot of the stuff that’s going on in Basecamp and Highrise. If someone has a question or issue or idea that’s worth the entire company’s feedback, it goes there first. Also, it has replaced internal email for sharing links (work-related and otherwise). For our internal discussions, it’s so much better than what we did before—reply-all emails, individual chats, meetings and mini-meetings—that it’s hardly worth comparing them.
The Populi team hunkers down with REWORK.
Fitting in with Populi
The 37signals apps are a great fit for Populi and how we like to do things. Being in the web-based software business ourselves, that aspect of the apps is just a no-brainer for us. Since we have a rather “informal” company culture, we have no need to chart how robustly we leverage synergies to get maximum ROI. The apps do pretty much what we need them to do. They replaced a lot of software — besides the stopgaps that Highrise replaced, Basecamp did away with an old TRAC system for development and a barfbag of shared folders and documents for our other uses, and Campfire has all but replaced the reply-all email noise that used to plague the office.
One surprising thing about the apps is how easily they let us tweak or adjust our workflows. As I write this, we’re considering some significant changes to how we organize Development projects, and one thing we’ve noticed is that Basecamp will make that process short and virtually painless.
Do you use a 37signals product in an interesting way? Let us know.
In a few weeks we'll be launching a completely new username and password system we're calling 37signals Accounts. This means that everyone who uses a 37signals product will need to pick a new username and password. You'll only have to do it once, and it will only take a few seconds.
We recently linked to the 37signals Accounts detail page and now there's also a letter to our customers explaining the rollout schedule, full list of benefits of the new system, and additional information. The information on these pages should answer any questions you have about the transition.
The new 37signals Accounts system lays the groundwork for a variety of enhancements you've been asking for. We'll be working on these in 2010. Thanks again for your continued support.
What the "pick a new username and password screen" will look like.
