Basecamp is a web based project management tool made by 37signals, the company known by that name before 2014 and again since 2022. It combines to do lists, messaging, file sharing and scheduling, and it is closely associated with a philosophy of calm, small, profitable companies.
What it is
The product organizes a team’s work into projects, each with message boards, tasks, documents and a schedule. It is meant to replace long email chains and scattered tools with one place for each project. The company has described its approach as favoring simplicity over a long list of features.
History
The company was co-founded in 1999 in Chicago by Jason Fried, Carlos Segura and Ernest Kim as a web design firm. Work on Basecamp began in 2003 and the product launched in 2004. David Heinemeier Hansson created the Ruby on Rails framework while building it, and released the framework as open source in 2004. By 2005 the company had stopped consulting to concentrate on its own products. In 2006 it announced that Jeff Bezos had bought a minority stake through Bezos Expeditions.
Later steps included Basecamp 3 in 2014, the year the company renamed itself Basecamp and focused on this one product, and the email service HEY in June 2020. In May 2022 the company went back to the name 37signals. In 2021 an internal dispute over a policy banning political discussion at work led about a third of the staff to leave, and in 2023 the company reported savings from moving off public cloud services.
Why it matters to founders
37signals is often cited as a model of a profitable, privately held software company that grew without large outside funding. Its books and essays have influenced many small founders. See Bootstrapping.
Related entries
See Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson, Ruby on Rails and Bootstrapping.
Basecamp is part of Tools and stack.
Sources
Wikipedia entry for 37signals. Reviewed October 2026.
