SEASON 2 - EPISODE 140 - JANUARY 29, 2025

Building a Community

There is a way to bring your customers together in a meaningful way. In this episode of The REWORK Podcast, host Kimberly Rhodes welcomes 37signals’ Support Team members Merissa Dawson and Ashley Bowe to discuss how the Basecamp Community came to life. They describe how they’ve connected with Basecamp customers and how they’ve connected customers with each other. They also offer a few tips for anyone looking to start their own community of customers and company enthusiasts.

Watch the full video episode on YouTube

Key Takeaways

00:40 - Meet Merissa and Ashley from Basecamp Support
01:54 - The Basecamp Community origin story
05:03 - The Community as a place for sharing and collaboration
07:20 - The 37signals team role within the Community
09:08 - Starting a community without fear of failure
13:27 - Tips for starting your own community of users and fans

Links & Resources

Transcript

Kimberly (00:00): Welcome to Rework, a podcast by 37signals about the better way to work and run your business. I’m your host, Kimberly Rhodes, and this week we’re talking all about building a community around your business or product. We recently did this at 37signals and have a group of Basecamp enthusiasts and users who are part of a Basecamp community. Here to talk about that group and what we’ve learned from doing it and how you might set up something similar for yourself are two people from our customer support team, Merissa Dawson and Ashley Bowe. You guys, welcome to the podcast. Before we get started with our topic, you guys do a little intro. Merissa, start with you, tell me how long you’ve been with the company and then Ashley, we’ll go to you.

Merissa (00:40): My name’s Merissa. I live in Austin, Texas, and I joined 37signals in February of 2011, so just about ready to start my 14th year.

Kimberly (00:52): My gosh

Merissa (00:54): Which is amazing. I love it. I’m so happy to be here. I started out on the support team and I’m now currently one of the customer support managers on the team, and I am here to talk about the community. I helped start that up with one of our other colleagues.

Kimberly (01:08): Perfect. And Ashley, you’ve also been around for a while and now you head up the Community. Tell us a little bit about your start and tenure at Basecamp.

Ashley (01:17): Yeah, I’m coming on year eight, so not quite at 13-14, but I will get there with you. And I am currently a customer engagement specialist, so slightly different role than when we started or when I started on the support team. So it’s really more about initiatives to help engage customers in any ways, and so the community is just such a prime example of that. We’ll get into it.

Kimberly (01:43): Okay, amazing. And you might recognize Ashley who co-hosts some of our live Office hours sessions with us as well. So, before we talk about the Community now, Ashley, I’ll have you take that portion. Merissa, let’s go back to the beginning of when the Community started and why we decided to do something like this. I actually don’t even know the origin story.

Merissa (02:03): So a community for me is something that I had thought about for a really long time. We just didn’t really have the bandwidth for years and years and years to kind of get that started and do that. I’ll kind of rewind even further. In January of 2010, 37signals introduced, 37 Answers, and 37 Answers was basically like a Q & A forum where customers would ask a question but anyone could answer it, that might be somebody from 37signals that might just be another person. I remember once the questions were answered, there was a cute little answered stamp that would be next to the question that somebody from 37signals would tag it if the question was answered.

(02:47): That had always stuck with me because that was around and I think we got rid of it or retired it, I should say in 2013 maybe. So I got to work with that for a couple of years and I just really liked it. It was a cool place to see customers, a cool place for me who at that time was still super new, to maybe find an answer, maybe a customer wrote in, but I could find the answer on 37 Answers instead, you know? So I really loved that and that 37 Answers was in the back of my mind. Basically since we retired it. We had kind of talked about it. Chase, who’s our head of support, we talked about it over the years, again, didn’t have the bandwidth to really do it. Then sometime probably in 2020 or so, one of our customers was basically using Basecamp as a community forum for their company.

(03:36): Shout out to Decent Espresso. They basically invite people to their Basecamp account to show them how to use their espresso machines or whatnot, which was super neat. And so kind of thought, oh wow, yeah, they’re using Basecamp for their community, maybe we can do it. So we started thinking about how we could do it, and at that point in time, we were a little bit less reactive with customers and had time to do other project work. So we thought, let’s go ahead and see if we can start a community up in Basecamp. And so we really started trying, I think putting things together in December of 2021, started thinking about the ideas. Then February, 2022, got super serious about it. Took about three months to put the ideas out there to seed the account with the information that we needed, and then eventually invited people to the account, some beta testers, I guess you could say in May.

Kimberly (04:31): Okay, so this is a fun fact. I don’t know if you guys actually know this, but I was a Basecamp user at the time the Community started, and I was one of those beta testers.

Merissa (04:40): Yes,

Kimberly (04:42): I was one of the original small group that became part of that account. I was kind of a lurker all of that time until I actually joined the company.

Merissa (04:50): Yeah, that’s super cool. I think a lot of the community members are lurkers even today, just a great place to scroll through and check out what’s happening and lurk around and see what people are using Basecamp for.

Kimberly (05:03): So Ashley, kind of talk us through what the Community looks like. Marissa mentioned it is a Basecamp project or it’s in Basecamp, but tell me if someone were going to start a similar community project, what kind of information is being shared? How many people are in it? Give me the lowdown of the current Basecamp community.

Ashley (05:22): Yeah, I think one of the best things about the Community and just generally all Basecamp users is that they’re so creative with what they do and how they do it. So if you and I both work at our different marketing agencies, our approach to accomplishing very similar work could be wildly different. So it really is a wonderful place to see what those examples look like as there’s a space called Inspiration Exchange where people will post, you know what? This is really cool. I did something pretty interesting and I think you all would like it. And the response is generally delightful. And the other side of the response is just curious. So you end up with a lot of people who are interested in sharing or asking questions about how they can accomplish something. Have you ever done this? Is this a possibility? How would you approach this situation? And then as often as we can, we try to get people from the 37signals team to share not only just as much as possible, but columns is what they used to be called. This one feature, it’s called Card Table now it is are take on a Kanban board. When Jason Fried our CEO posted that the response was humongous. Merissa, do you remember that?

Merissa (06:35): I do. The response was very large. It’s a big deal. It’s a big deal anytime Jason wants to be in the Community. Same with David or even Brian, hearing from a signal is a big deal over there.

Ashley (06:48): So I think that’s probably one of the nicer features for the people who have been with Basecamp for 20 years. So they get something other than just always giving, and I think just the general closeness that you can generate from it. A lot of people have no way to contact anyone’s CEO. They’re deliberately far apart, very far removed. So the fact that we are welcoming folks into being near is just a different style than what you typically see today.

Kimberly (07:19): Okay. So I’m curious about how you see your role in the Community, because when I observe it, as I poke in and out of the Community, it seems like it’s self-managed a lot. Tell me your thoughts about when you’re providing information, when you’re jumping in versus letting people in the Community answer each other’s questions. How do you see your role in that?

Ashley (07:42): Yeah, I think event hosting is probably the closest thing you can make it. Where we are inviting people in, we’re welcoming them in. We might offer them a virtual canapé or something to be able to, I going to say, this is what’s here, please enjoy. Also, if you feel like making something, making a speech for everyone else, we’d love to hear it. So a good part of it is just like people are sharing out of their own willingness, but as much as we can fostering that conversation. When to comment and when not to comment is a situation, case by case basis is kind of a thing because I really want other people to be able to get a chance to respond, but you also don’t want someone to go unnoticed. That doesn’t feel great. So it’s a fine line.

Kimberly (08:28): Yeah. Merissa, anything to add?

Merissa (08:30): No, I think that one of the goals for the Community was to create a safe and a fun space for customers to trade secrets and their workarounds to learn from each other. And also a place for us at 37signals to gain knowledge about what customers might like and dislike and sort of almost a Job To Be Done fashion. So as far as how much we comment or boost them or answer is kind of how Ashley mentioned. We do our best there, but a lot of times sometimes the community members don’t even want to hear from us. They would rather hear from somebody who works in their same industry. So we kind of wait for somebody to chime in there.

Kimberly (09:08): This is kind of an origin story question, but Ashley of course feel free to jump in as well. I would imagine when starting something like this, you have to really be open to how it’s going to go, not knowing exactly you’re built, putting all of these people together in a room not knowing exactly what that’s going to look like. Was there anything you guys were nervous about when starting something like this from scratch?

Merissa (09:32): So one of my favorite parts about working at 37signals is that we’re not really afraid to try something and to know that even if it fails or is kind of a bust, that there’s something to be learned from that, and it’s not necessarily going to be taken as a failure if it doesn’t work out. So I kept all of that in my back pocket and didn’t get too many nerves about starting it. I just kind of thought this will either be super cool, which I think it will be, or it’ll just be all right. And well, we tried, you know that sort of a feeling. But it has grown to, I guess so we’re coming up on three years and we have I think about 2100 users or community members in there basically. But yeah, I wasn’t too nervous to start. I just thought of it as more of an experiment type thing.

Kimberly (10:21): And then Ashley, tell me a little bit about the Community now. I know since you’ve jumped in as being in charge of it, you’ve been wanting to reorganize some things. Kind of tell me what your new vision is for the Community.

Ashley (10:34): Yeah. It comes from having countless, upwards of 500 calls with individual people and hearing how they are using Basecamp and knowing that it’s always very unique when they invite them into the Community, they want to be able to just find things as quickly as possible, so there’ll be some light remapping, but most of it is just very solid, like a very, very solid foundation. I just want to make it a little bit easier for folks to be like, you know what? I do work in the restaurant industry and here are all the examples. They bubble up naturally, but I think we just need to make that organic growing into a more tailored bouquet so that they can find it and metaphors today, but just so that they can get in and get out if that’s what they need to do. But it’s so different from some of the original members because they are dedicated to being in that space and assisting, they so much from helping. I have a question. How many people were really a part of that core group at the beginning?

Merissa (11:34): I want to say probably eight to 10 I would consider a really core…

Kimberly (11:40): Oh. I wasn’t in that group.

Merissa (11:43): There’s some honorable mentions in there for sure, but I think that we had about, we have probably 10, maybe even a dozen, and they’re still around. At least half of them are still very, very active in the Community as well. But I think the folks that we kind of invited in before we officially, officially launched the Community are a large part of why the Community is as successful as it is. So if they’re listening, I truly appreciate them. And another favorite part of my job is our customers. I say that to everybody as well. We’re really lucky to have such incredibly thoughtful, intentional and kind customers who just generally want to help each other. So it’s nice to be a part of that. So I’m really grateful to the folks who have been around in the Community since the beginning.

Kimberly (12:37): Okay. I said I was in there from the beginning, but I totally lied because I was there when there was maybe a couple, maybe 200 people, the first big group.

Ashley (12:47): An early adopter.

Merissa (12:48): That was probably when we officially launched it. We started inviting people, like I said, I think in May of 2022, but then launched it after that kind of after the summer officially to see how it would go.

Ashley (13:02): Yeah. Ashley, go ahead. It’s a question for you, Kimberly. As a early adopter of this group, do you also have a hat? I actually don’t have a hat.

(13:09): Kimberly. We must correct this.

Kimberly (13:11): I do not have a Basecamp Community hat. For those of you who are listening and not watching, Merissa has a Basecamp Community hat, and I feel like I need to get one of those.

Merissa (13:25): We’ll have to send you one. We don’t want you to be left out.

Kimberly (13:28): So you guys tell me this. I could imagine someone who’s listening who has their own product or service or business might be thinking, what are the things I should consider if I want to start something like this? Are there things that we’ve learned from like, oh, we should never do that again. That was a mistake. Are there anything like that that you can share that maybe we’ve learned over time about how the Basecamp Community works?

Ashley (13:50): I have an important thing to start with that really just hearkens back to what was already said, and it’s about the culture of it. And if you start with a basis of it’s okay to try things, then it makes it literally significantly easier to have fewer nerves about what it is you want to try. As long as you figure out what good measurement looks like, and that can truly just be qualitative or a feeling, but more than anything else, whatever the company values, however you can kind of prove that something is working, and again, it could just be a feeling. I think that is an important place to start.

Merissa (14:26): Definitely agree with that. I don’t think that there’s anything along the way that we were like, ooh, we wouldn’t do that again or we wouldn’t try it. We’ve definitely kind of removed some things that we tried at the beginning that maybe just didn’t get that much… they weren’t worth the effort that we were putting into it. We didn’t really think that folks had liked that. We did put out some surveys a couple of times and asked folks, hey, what are your favorite parts? Hey, what are your least favorite parts? That type of thing, and kind of chose some things to maybe remove from there, but there’s literally nothing I can think of where we’re like, we won’t do that again.

Kimberly (15:00): Okay. Is there anything that we did well that you would recommend if someone’s going to start something like this again, you’d be like, yes, you absolutely should do this.

Merissa (15:10): In that case, I’m going to say yes. What I think that we did do very well is to seed the Basecamp account or the Community before inviting people in, and that included things like already including different messages with tips, writing out our Community guidelines, creating a path to invite users into the account, how we would do that with a little survey link, and then we would manually invite people in with a, hey, you’re just going to follow this project here and introduce yourself. That was a big thing. We did create a few fake users where that gave introductions that weren’t real people at first, so you could kind of see what we were looking for there and different folders and docs and files and things that people could already find, so we weren’t just tossing brand new what we hope to be long-term Community members into an account with nothing in it or just nothing there. So I think that that was something that we did do well and we did very intentionally, and it’s why the success at the beginning I think was pretty strong. One of the reasons why.

Kimberly (16:18): What do people say are some of their favorite parts?

Merissa (16:22): I know that there’s a new survey going on now that Ashley could probably touch on recently, but I would say probably mainly just hearing from other members or about workarounds or tips that they can use and hearing from a signal. If a signal answers a question or boosts, that’s fun. Also, being able to be involved in beta testing, which we’ve grabbed some beta testers for the Card Table, a.k.a. Columns at that time to test it to see what they thought, you know, being involved. Ashley can probably say a little bit more.

Ashley (16:51): No, those are the main ones, being involved, and it just is a little bit different for each person because for someone who is just one of the 10 or the several hundred, those people, they have given a lot already in the past few years, and so what they get back, we want it to be really high value for them. So as long as we are making sure that we are rewarding the people for collaborating and joining and just existing, then we hit the people who are just, they need something really quickly. And then we also hit the people who have a little bit more time to give and to see how they can assist us. It’s kind of a really delightful symbiotic relationship.

Kimberly (17:30): I mean, I feel like everyone just in life likes to feel like they’re a part of something. Community is such a, if you look at the Blue Zones, people that live to be a hundred is like having a community is part of that. And even if it’s related to a work tool, I think it’s nice to give people an option if they want to opt in. We’ve created this group of people, like-minded people who are all using the same tool you’re using. I think it’s just kind of a nice option as a company.

Merissa (17:58): I think it’s great. And like I said, the people that are amazing, so I encourage every customer to join the Community as even a spot to lurk in the evenings, whatever. Lurkers are welcome. You can learn all kinds of fun stuff as you’re scrolling through that you may not have thought of to use. So yeah, highly encouraged.

Kimberly (18:18): Amazing. Well, if you are a Basecamp customer, you can find that at basecamp.com/community, and Ashley will be the one to Ashley or Robert, I guess, to welcome you into that Basecamp group. So check that out. Until then, REWORK is production 37signals. You can find show notes and transcripts on our website at 37signals.com/podcast. Full video episodes are on YouTube, and if you have a question for Jason or David or our community team here, you can leave us a voicemail at 7 0 8 6 2 8 7 8 5 0. You can also text that number or send us an email to rework@37signals.com.

(18:58): Boom. Thanks ladies.