CHAPTER INTRODUCTION

We have something new to say about building, running, and growing (or not).

growing a business.

This book isn't based on academic theories. It's based on our experience.

We've been in business for more than ten years. Along the way, we've seen two

recessions, one burst bubble, business-model shifts, and doom-and-gloom

predictions come and go, and we've remained profitable through it all.

We're an intentionally small company that makes software to help small

companies and groups get things done the easy way. More than 3 million people

around the world use our products.

We started out in 1999 as a three-person Web-design consulting firm. In 2004,

we weren't happy with the project-management software used by the rest of the

industry, so we created our own: Basecamp. When we showed the online tool to

clients and colleagues, they all said the same thing: "We need this for our

business too." Five years later, Basecamp generates millions of dollars a year in

profits.

We now sell other online tools too. Highrise, our contact manager and simple

CRM (customer relationship management) tool is used by tens of thousands of

small businesses to keep track of leads, deals, and more than 10 million contacts.

More than 500,000 people have signed up for Backpack, our intranet and

knowledge-sharing tool. And people have sent more than 100 million messages

using Campfire, our real-time business chat tool. We also invented and open-sourced a computer-programming framework called Ruby on Rails that powers

much of the Web 2.0 world.

Some people consider us an Internet company, but that makes us cringe.

Internet companies are known for hiring compulsively, spending wildly, and

failing spectacularly. That's not us. We're small—sixteen people, as this book goes

to press), frugal, and profitable.

A lot of people say we can't do what we do. They call us a fluke. They advise

others to ignore our advice. Some have even called us irresponsible, reckless,

and--gasp!--unprofessional.

These critics don't understand how a company can reject growth, meetings,

budgets, boards of directors, advertising, salespeople, and "the real world," yet

thrive. That's their problem, not ours. They say you need to sell to Fortune

500. Screw that. We sell to the Fortune 5,000,000.

They don't think you can have employees who almost never see each other

spread out across eight cities on two continents. They say you can't succeed

without making financial projections and five-year plans. They're wrong.

They say you need a PR firm to make it into the pages of Time and Business

Week, Inc., Fast Company, the New York Times, the Financial Times, the

Chicago Tribune, the Atlantic, Entrepreneur, and Wired. They're wrong. They

say you can't share your recipes and bare your secrets and still withstand the

competition. Wrong again.

They say you can't possibly compete with the big boys without a hefty

marketing and advertising budget. They say you can't succeed by building

products that do less than your competition's. They say you can't make it all up

as you go. But that's exactly what we've done.

They say a lot of things. We say they're wrong. We've proved it. And we wrote:

this book to show you how to prove them wrong too.

First, we'll start out by gutting business. We'll take it down to the studs and

explain why it's time to throw out the traditional notions of what it takes to run a

business. Then we'll rebuild it. You'll learn how to begin and why you need less than

you think, when to launch, how to get the word out, whom (and when) to hire,

and how to keep it all under control.

Now, let's get on with it.