Maria Lourdes C. Capilitan

SysAnal(O0A)

July 15, 2008

Case Study

David Heinemeier Hansson

Partner, 37 Signals

            The 37 Signals is a consulting company, but lately by the help of David the company turn to a product company in 2004. Their product is Base Camp, it is an online project management tool.  David also wrote about products which are backpack, Ta-da list, and campfire.  The company was founded by Jason  Fried.  I learned that being simple will help you a lot.  Think of giving up is just a clue for someone to success.  I learned that even you are the only programmer in a company it doesn’t mean it will be a hindrance for you to be in success.

            The Basecamp was made to help the to manage their client project process.  Their idea is from Blogging because in terms of distribution in information people was good.  The company also have competition with noise so they think of something that will help them to be ahead to Noise.  David was the only programmer by that time and he spend 10 hrs to develop the software.  Their goal is to impressed everybody from their simple software but easy to use.  David says that the company only wants to refine simple elements.  They also added that the reason why their company is in success is because they just started to create a tool for creative services and businesses.  Most of their clients want their product because of their monthly basis which based on version that they want.

            Like other company they did have mistakes.  First, the banks didn’t agree to their billing system for a yearly payment, they changed it to a monthly billing system.  The second mistake is about technical’s.  The third one is the time zones because they didn’t care about time and they don’t have fix deadlines.

            David found ruby it help to build the Basecamp. He builds rails while building Basecamp.  He added it to the toolbox when rails were launched it was only a 1,000 lines of codes.  Being a public figure their company receives V calls.  They ignore all this calls because for them having little money is a great way of getting great product.  For the company they were able to stay true to their initial values which is to grow and not write a whole lot of software but still make a difference.