Basecamp turns 1,000,000

Basecamp turns 1,000,000 Jason Nov 13

44 comments Latest by offnyc

This afternoon, the 1,000,000th person will be added to Basecamp. The account that registers this 1,000,000th person will be given a $500 credit towards their account. If that person isn’t part of a paying account, we’ll give the credit to the closest paying account over the 1,000,000 mark.

Last year Dion Hinchcliffe predicted that “37signals Will Cross The 1,000,000 User Mark” in 2006. We’re thrilled that Basecamp alone has passed this mark. Add in a few hundred thousand from Backpack, over 100,000 from Campfire, and a few hundred thousand from Ta-da List and we’ve got 2,000,000 in our sights next year.

A few notes about these numbers: 1) They represent all accounts, not just active accounts. We’re just counting raw numbers right now. 2) Some people may be counted twice. One person with logins in multiple Basecamp accounts is counted for each separate account. 3) These numbers group together paying and free accounts. We don’t share the number of paying customers we have. 4) These numbers have not been audited—we’re just running some simple DB queries to pull these numbers out.

All that being said, we’d like to thank everyone that made this possible! Special thanks goes out to our paying customers—thanks for trusting us to provide you with simple, focused tools that help you make your own business or team more profitable and efficient.

We’ve got some great stuff planned in 2007. We’re hard at work on it right now. Stay tuned, we think you’ll like it!

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Over 1 million people use 37signals' simple web-based software to collaborate on projects, track contacts, and organize their business with an intranet.

44 comments so far

acw 13 Nov 06

congratulations, guys. basecamp is amazing.

Brian Breslin 13 Nov 06

Congrats guys! Are these users on accounts or accounts in general?I.e. are there a million http://mysite.basecamphq.com accounts?

JF 13 Nov 06

Brian: These are just people accounts. One Basecamp account can have 1, 5, 50, 100+ people.

Adam Lindsay 13 Nov 06

Hmmm, I read once that Rails doesn’t scale. I suppose that was completely inaccurate.

Congrats and best luck going forward, I know I am counted 4 times.

Bruno 13 Nov 06

Congratulations…

Basecamp is a very useful web application. Best of luck.

Martijn Engler 13 Nov 06

Congratulations! I’m still waiting for the day my webapp (which isn’t even public yet… ;-)) reaches this number of accounts.

Josh 13 Nov 06

Adam: I’m sure that the Robot Co-op people would disagree as well. ;)

Congrats, 37Signals.

John S. Rhodes 13 Nov 06

Did Bezos Expeditions help 37signals reach that mark faster than you would have without the involvement?

Scott Meade 13 Nov 06

Congrats! These kind of numbers put to rest critics of Rails scalability and strenghtens my decision to build my company around Rails development and consulting.

John: No, the Bezos Expeditions investment hasn’t had any discernible effect on signups. It’s not being used as a marketing tool and our fundamental business hasn’t changed since the investment. The investment was not about immediate change or new directions or new ideas right now. It’s about a long term approach.

These kind of numbers put to rest critics of Rails scalability and strenghtens my decision to build my company around Rails development and consulting.

We’ve had scaling issues. Everyone has scaling issues when you get to a certain level. The level could be total accounts or requests per second or bandwidth requirements, or a whole host of other pain points.

Ruby, PHP , Python, Perl, Java, .NET—you’ll still run into walls no matter which one you choose. Walls are natural. Some languages may scale better in certain places than others, but almost all scaling issues encountered in any of the above languages can be solved.

Ruby scales like everything else scales. Optimize the software where you spot bottlenecks, add some hardware, up the RAM in your machines, get some more processors, and repeat.

There’s no magic to it. Just be practical and you’ll be fine.

Paul 13 Nov 06

congrats, you guys really deserve it!

Cheshire Dave 13 Nov 06

Congrats, 37s!

J Phill 13 Nov 06

Keep up the good work! Basecamp is awesome and I recommend it to everyone I know that does work on the web and project management.

Looking forward to what ‘07 brings.

Chris Chen 13 Nov 06

Congrats 37signals! Great work.

Jens Meiert 13 Nov 06

What a “stub”: Congrats.

Glenn Davies 13 Nov 06

Great job! I wonder how that compares to users of MS Project ;-) Further, I can’t wait to see what is next. Considering how rainy it is here today, I sure hope it is a ray of ‘sun’shine!

Noah Winecoff 13 Nov 06

Congrats!

John Topley 13 Nov 06

Impressive figures. Congratulations.

Brandon 13 Nov 06

I’m impressed – I was waiting for the, “Hey thats good and all but where’s sunrise” post.

Seriously, congrats on the achievement. That really is remarkable.

I guess I spoke too soon. Glenn had to get it in while I was typing. 8(

"D" 13 Nov 06

Great Milestone – and I am certain that “we ain’t seen nothin’ yet!”

Darren Stuart 13 Nov 06

well deserved, great tools will always win through.

do you guys think that being the poster childs of web 2.0 has helped more than if you were just another start up?

MS 13 Nov 06

Wow, I don’t even know 1,000,000 people! Congrats!

Narendra 13 Nov 06

Congratulations to all of you. That is phenomenal.

random8r 13 Nov 06

I’m just curious… Why don’t you share the number of people who have paid for stuff? Don’t you want people to know how much money you’re making? Why would that be?

Hopeful 13 Nov 06

Any hopes on Sunrise being released before the end of ‘07?

Des Traynor 13 Nov 06

random8r: If a business gives away the size of its market, it can have the same effect as a child loudly declaring “look theres $20”, or a miner shouting “i’ve struck gold”. Soon you’ll find that you have lots more competitors to share your find with. Thats the reason why I wouldn’t do it anyways. 37Sigs were very open about the Getting Real figures you’ll remember.

Anyways, I just wanted to say congratulations, and maybe its time to update your homepage.

Also, a note on scaling taken from “How to Criticize a computer scientist”

“Am I missing something? Isn’t it obvious that there’s a bottleneck in the system that prevents scaling to arbitrary size”?

(This is always a safe insult because there’s a bottleneck in every system that prevents arbitrary scaling) I think the main point here is that Rubys scaling problem are no different to anyone elses when you’re into the hundreds-of-thousands of users domain, as opposed to the “ooh, my blog just got hit by reddit” domain

Scott Meade 14 Nov 06

Re: scaling – exactly right JF and Des. The point is not to say that using Ruby you will not have to work at designing for size and growth, but just to say that concerns with size should not keep one from choosing Ruby. Thanks.

Ryan 14 Nov 06

That’s awesome. Congratulations! You guys have really inspired a lot of people to create great, user-friendly applications. I think 37Signals should be rewarded for that, so congrats!

Just a note, I re-read Getting Real last week, just because it’s that good. Looking forward to 2007.

Anindya Mukherjee 14 Nov 06

Congratulations! You guys are great. You have made us think in a different way altogether.

forrestRain 14 Nov 06

Congratulations! Basecamp is really special in a lot of ways. Keep it up!

Mau 14 Nov 06

Congrats, guys.

Much deserved.

Don Schenck 14 Nov 06

Jason, there are over six billion people on this planet.

Quit blogging and get back to work.

wax 14 Nov 06

felicitaciones!!!!

Manny Hernandez 14 Nov 06

Congratulations on a well-deserved milestone! We have been using BaseCamp internally for a while and are beginning to incorporate it into our new projects with clients. It’s been a blessing!

Joel Mueller 14 Nov 06

I wonder if there was more than one 1,000,000th user. Meaning, if the millionth user account was created, but then other companies removed some of their employees from the system around the same time, and as a result it dropped below 1,000,000.

It seems like a possibility with this many employee accounts.

JF 14 Nov 06

Thanks for everyone’s thanks! It really made our day. We take a lot of heat in the comments here on SvN so it’s always nice to see some smiles.

The 1,000,000th person was part of a free account. The 1,000,002 was the first person created over 1MM in a paying account. The account was on the Max plan. We will be getting in touch with them shortly to award the $500 account credit.

Thanks again!

mattl 14 Nov 06

Jason,

I’d like to know how you guys will be celebrating this milestone?

Matt

Jason, thank YOU … I now have a good excuse for a cigar tonight!!! Opus X, no less.

Kris Tuttle 15 Nov 06

At a dinner last night there was a discussion about a hole in the CRM software market between mickey mouse and heavyweight solutions. The consensus that someone like 37Signals is one of the companies that could meet this need.

So add that to your list of items to make the world a better place!

Seth 15 Nov 06

Big ups! I wrote you up a bit here

JF 15 Nov 06

Seth: Thanks for the generous write up. We really appreciate it.

offnyc 26 Nov 06

Congratulations on this milestone!

The Basecamp product has been invaluable in our collaborative design projects.

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