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Comment by ams6110 | Hacker News Reader

I think most "other startups" would LOVE to be in the ballpark with BaseCamp in terms of usage. No BaseCamp is not big like Facebook, but you've heard of them right? Most "ordinary" business people who do project planning work have probably heard of BaseCamp too. Most people never hear about most startups, fewer try their services, fewer than that become regular users.

The point of the post is that in many/most cases, it's still easier and cheaper to throw hardware at a performance problem than to devote scarce engineering effort to optimization. And it's only getting more and more so. If you are a startup and you can throw $10,000 of hardware at a problem you can then keep your $100K engineers working on things that hardware alone can't solve.

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Most "ordinary" business people who do project planning work have probably heard of BaseCamp too.

I think this might be the tech bubble showing. I've never heard of any non-tech, non-startup companies using Basecamp. I'm not saying that they don't, of course, but I'd be interested to hear some case studies in its use outside of tech-savvy crowds.

Last I checked, I believe something like 20% of our customers were from the tech/startup scene. The vast majority of our customers are regular businesses.

But yes, we're still tiny compared to behemoths like Sharepoint. All the more reason to be excited about the next 20 years!

Fun example I heard of basecamp recently: for "Internet Marketing Masterminds" as an alternative to setting up a forum --- http://www.freedomocean.com/internet-marketing-podcasts-jame...

And there was a great press quote for you in the comments: "$50 is peanuts for what you get in Basecamp. Any business doing $1000 a month should find huge leverage from it."

Exactly. As horrible as it is, sharepoint rules this area and probably has an install base that dwarfs base camp. When the average corp person thinks project and file management they think sharepoint.

This is possibly another bubble.

Most programmers probably work at either BigCo enterprises (banks, insurance companies, telcos etc) or at "startup" type tech businesses or freelance agencies.

There are other industries that contain a lot of small businesses and probably employ very few programmers, think restaurants , local shops , small law or accountancy practices etc.

These guys probably aren't using sharepoint, most of them are probably using excel spreadsheets combined with paper.

I'm not sure how many of these guys are using things like basecamp but they a lot of them probably should be.

> I've never heard of any non-tech, non-startup companies using Basecamp.

They've got logos for a few non-tech, non-startup companies on the Basecamp homepage: http://basecamphq.com

Who doesn't have logos of random companies on their front page?

That doesn't always mean those companies actually use it. It just means someone with a @foocorp.com email address signed up.

I thought 37signals website has videos of "satisfied" users? and some of them don't seem to be "tech" and "startup". Probably small businesses, but I don't think we can lump all "small businesses" == "startups"

> Most "ordinary" business people who do project planning work have probably heard of BaseCamp too.

I don't think so. Maybe we just have a different opinion on ordinary, but I come across people all the time that would think Excel is the normal thing to use for this (and pretty much any other task...). Using web applications for day to day workflow is still alien to a lot of "ordinary" business types.

Granted. s/most/some/

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