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Comment by thescrewdriver | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one who had never heard of 37signals before?

Wow, as one of the "pioneers" of the SaaS model, and a highly successful bootstrapped startup for 10+ years, I would have to say... yes, I would imagine you are one of very few people in this community who would have never heard of 37signals.

It's weird how open-source encourages using something without really understanding how it originated. I bet less than 10% of the people who use Rails realize it came from a company, let alone which one. (The same will probably become true of dotCloud with Docker soon enough.)

Pioneer? web-mail is nothing else but SaaS in the end and it exists way longer than 37Signals...

SaaS as a business model, not as a technology. Webmail was a feature, not the entire business, for the most part. I'm sure you can find examples of SaaS before 37signals, but that doesn't detract from the fact that they were amongst the first to build an entire company from the business model.

Not really. Basecamp wasn't created until 2003, in the second wave of of web SaaS after the Salesforce wave (1999).

How can you be a "startup" for 10 years? Will they ever stop being a "startup"?

I suppose even Yahoo and Google were "startups" at one time. 37signals probably kept the moniker longer than other businesses because they were profitable early, and they didn't need or want to grow fast for growth's sake.

and they didn't need or want to grow fast for growth's sake.

The HN/YC model of a "startup" is something that is growing rapidly, as per http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html, so perhaps 37signals was never a startup in the HN use of the term ;-)

FWIW, I meet people all the time who don't know "37signals". They're in the tech world too.

But when I mention Basecamp, they say "Oh Basecamp!! Of course! We love Basecamp!"

World-wide, Basecamp is much bigger brand than 37signals.

They made basecamp, and write articles about how awesome they are.

What's basecamp?

Have you heard of Google? It's a service to help you find things.

If I can piggyback on the original question... Am I the only one who have never heard about basecamp before?

I couldn't possibly give you more upvotes for this snarky comment. While 37 Signals/Basecamp (whatever) has made some great products over the years, their self-righteous (IMHO) blog posts always turned me off to them and left me with the impression that they believed in their own bullshit.

Just because you've had success doesn't mean you know everything about even your success or why you achieved it. Be humble, even while educating and talking about your achievements.

I have heard about them. There is that guy there who invented RoR apparently, and likes to posts articles explaining how cool he is etc.

DHH co-founded a multi-million dollar business, created one of the most famous web-frameworks, races on Le Mans, and has one-of-a-kind sports car made specially for him [1]. He's fucking cool.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pagani_Zonda#HH

On HN? Yes. Definitely in a small minority. In the world, no, probably 99.9 majority

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