Something I've always been curious about with 37s.
What % of their first (say) 100 customers were RoR developers?
What % of their first (say) 100 customers were RoR developers?
I'm sort of curious how much of the growth of basecamp you attribute to the RoR community though? Do you think if you had instead just written it with PHP or something you would have had a similar level of success?
Unless you are specifically targeting some niche market of software engineers, the underlying technology just doesn't enter into the discussion. Basecamp was built for project managers.
If you do a good job impressing them, they will help spread the word.
Rails was assisted by 37signals' already established brand and name. The blog already had tens of thousands of subscribers at the point it was released.
In fact I'd make a guess that most of the 'beta testers'/first users of Basecamp were probably former clients that had projects to manage.
Rails developers probably helped with the explosive growth of the products, but not as much with the initial investments. Keep in mind the entire idea of Basecamp was that it was to be an internal tool.
It's kind of like wondering how many customer Fog Creek software got because of joelonsoftware.com or indeed how often YC gets first pick of the best startups because of HN.