My Visit to Basecamp in Chicago This Week

Today’s post is more of a jour­nal entry about my vis­it to Base­camp: My cus­tomers know how big of a fan I am of the pop­u­lar project man­age­ment soft­ware, Base­camp. They know I use it and push them to use it all the time. It is sim­ply an excel­lent tool for con­trac­tors to use to com­mu­ni­cate with each oth­er and for man­age­ment and staff to check in on their teams.  This week, I flew to Chica­go to attend a busi­ness con­sult­ing con­fer­ence for home improve­ment con­trac­tors. Before the con­fer­ence, I spent a day in down­town Chica­go as a tourist. While I was grab­bing a cup of cof­fee and catch­ing up on my emails, I real­ized that the Base­camp head­quar­ters was locat­ed in down­town Chica­go. For many years now, one of my goals has been to vis­it Base­camp. I did not have a phone num­ber, but I emailed one of my con­tacts who helps run the iOS devel­op­ment team. I am one of their beta testers, so I fig­ured that it could­n’t hurt to ask if I could pop in for a vis­it. I was sur­prised to hear right back, ​“Absolute­ly. Come on over!” The major­i­ty of Base­camp employ­ees actu­al­ly live all over the U.S. and in a few oth­er coun­tries, as well. I was sur­prised to learn that they were hav­ing an all-com­pa­ny meet­ing the week I was in town. That after­noon, I walked to the head­quar­ters to ful­fill one of my busi­ness goals: get­ting a tour of Base­camp, meet­ing the staff and their founder, Jason Fried. In some cir­cles, Base­camp has a cult fol­low­ing sim­i­lar to Apple’s. I’m one of those fan­boys. The prod­uct has helped me man­age over 35 ongo­ing projects and hun­dreds of thou­sands of tasks with­out stress­ing out. So obvi­ous­ly I was like a kid in a can­dy shop when I got to meet their team. [cap­tion id=“attachment_3641” align=“alignright” width=“400”] Pro­mo­tion­al item — a Base­camp client made for them.[/caption]

Great Place to Work

The tour only last­ed 10 min­utes. There real­ly was not too much to see. The archi­tec­ture and lay­out of the offices and spaces were great. You can it check it out here. It was a very chill place to work for sure! What was most impres­sive was just see­ing the employ­ees and how they real­ly seemed to love work­ing there. Twice a year, Base­camp flies their employ­ees into Chica­go for a week-long vis­it. They are required to work dur­ing this vis­it. It is sort of a manda­to­ry ​“vaca­tion” if you will but it’s also a way for them to con­nect with their team in per­son. They were not accom­mo­dat­ing vis­i­tors when I popped in for my vis­it. So they were not putting on a show for me. The Base­camp staff was hard at work. They were all in meet­ings, brain­storm­ing, col­lab­o­rat­ing, tak­ing notes, etc. to make their prod­uct bet­ter. Yet they did not have to do this! It was impres­sive to see employ­ees work­ing when they were not required to do so to make their com­pa­ny bet­ter.

A 90 Minute Meeting

The iOS devel­op­er asked if I mind­ed sit­ting down with his team while I was there to dis­cuss how I use Base­camp and how my paint­ing clients do as well. They were real­ly inter­est­ed in learn­ing how they could improve their prod­uct. I found out too that I was one of the top mobile users of their prod­uct (and there are mil­lions of users — not sure if that is a good thing that I’m using it so much or not!). Any­way, before our meet­ing, I was intro­duced to Jason Fried, their founder. He was just as I expect­ed him to be: friend­ly, pro­fes­sion­al yet super chill and a good con­ver­sa­tion­al­ist. I have such respect for how he has built Base­camp and not been dis­tract­ed try­ing to build a pro­gram that does every­thing. Instead, it sim­ply does project and inter­nal com­mu­ni­ca­tions beau­ti­ful­ly. What I thought would be a 10 – 15 minute meet­ing with the iOS team last­ed close to 90 min­utes. I was able to screen­cast my iPhone and walk them through how I use Base­camp. I then shared a cou­ple of paint­ing cus­tomer’s projects and how they use it. We had some great dia­logue about improve­ments and obvi­ous­ly my wish­list. Base­camp is not per­fect. I want it to do more, so I was able to share some of those things with the team and why I thought mobile users would ben­e­fit.

Base­camp for Painters

2017 has been the biggest year for me in terms of con­vinc­ing many painters over to sign up and use Base­camp. They are begin­ning to use it with their field employ­ees to post pic­tures, check-in, chat, man­age job tasks and much more. My goal for 2018 is to get these painters and oth­er con­trac­tors to use it for all their com­mu­ni­ca­tions and task man­age­ment. It will save them time and help keep them more orga­nized. I loved see­ing a few of my clients and attend­ing the con­fer­ence. But going to Base­camp and get­ting an inside look into the way they oper­ate just made me more of a Base­camp evan­ge­list. If your orga­ni­za­tion is stuck using tex­ting, email or an even more com­plex sys­tem, check out Base­camp. It is sim­ple and easy to use! You’ll be glad you did.