This is Signal vs. Noise, a weblog by 37signals about design, business, experience, simplicity, the web, culture, and more. Established 1999 in Chicago. Visit the Product Blog for more information on our products.

Unbelievable! I love how quickly you were made a decision to change your plans and improved the service overall. Excellent!

Niiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiice. I can see me working with that Solo plan, alright.

Excellent job, guys. Both on the original app and on being so greatly flexible.

I’m impressed.

Again.

amazing response guys. You really proved how agile and customer oriented you are.

Brilliant.

Mad, mad props to you guys for treating your customers like this. You didn’t have to, and you did. Well done, guys.

Can’t wait to check out Highrise myself.

Awesome news, I thought about posting some of my thoughts before but decided against it – but the new SOLO plan addresses all my concerns – now I will go back and give it a go!

Cheers, Ben

You rule! You are the best boy band of the world.

Thank you!

Thank you is not enough. You deserve a lot of linklove. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Very impressive. You run with the ball well, and make cuts in the face of an oncoming obstacle. Walter Payton would be proud of these Chicago Boys.

You guys are absolutely amazing! I have been using Highrise a little bit over the last 24, and I can say I absolutely love it! And this just made it better. I may even consider purchasing a Personal Plan soon. Thanks guys!

A commendable response. Great move.

Cool that you listen to your customers :-) I should be obvious but its far from that in reality.

One feature i would like to see is the ability to link a contact to another sunrise user so that when he updates his information my contact does to. In that way you can have an always updated contact list of those people who have another sunrise account.

Maybe our company have a customer witch uses sunrise it would be really cool to add them as a linked company in my account and get there coworkers/information in a ‘alwayes-updated-state’..... or something like that…..

Cheers!

Wow.

“All things considered, the launch of Highrise has been our most successful product launch ever. Thank you!”

Don’t thank us, thank yourselves. You’ve basically put on a clinic for “How to launch a product” over the last month or so.

You built the suspense, had people on the edge of their seats, launched, heard a few complaints, and immediately tweaked the product to be more successful.

Those are some great business skills, and I’m sure you’ll be rewarded for it. I continue to find it fascinating that for all the kudos you guys get for your products, you are much more adapt at running a business than you are at writing software.

And being familiar with your software, I’m sure everyone knows how high of a compliment that is.

You ZIG when you have to ZIG and ZAG when you have to ZAG – THAT ’S SWEETNESS IN MOTION !!

Wow. Fantastic! BTW , I love the Open ID integration.

Please consider letting a group (“managers”, or whatever), see all tasks that have been assigned to someone else.

Spot-on perfect changes! This just made Highrise a lot more do-able for my small business.

Excellent! I love how quickly you responded to feedback and tweaked the plans. I’ve been using the $12 plan, but I may just have to upgrade to Solo now.

I also really appreciate your quick response. I was likely going to cancel without the use of cases, but the Solo plan is very appropriate and will be highly useful for many types of businesses. I’m staying! Thanks!

As I mentioned in the forum, the plan upgrades are great. You guys rock.

Thanks for taking that negative feedback into account and making these changes so quickly – it’s a good testament to agility and being small.

Big props on the new Solo plan – just what I was looking for!

You guys need to stop rolling out the great products! You’re making the rest of us look like slackers. :)

Right decision re: cases. Thank you!

Thanks! That’s even better than what I’d hoped for originally. Now I can go ahead with my plan to fork over more money to you every month!

Des

Thanks for bringing in the cases! We pretty much didn’t go past the sign up phase once we realized they weren’t available…

Interesting, the 9% Open ID users. Great that you support it.

Wonderful! I was just trying to decide if I should forward emails with client PDFs to Highrise – with fear of using up too much space. But now I can use the system as it was meant to be used. Thank you!

I hope Highrise will end up offering constant storage increases, like Gmail. And/Or maybe there will be a way in the future to purge notes and contacts that have not been accessed in a certain amount of time.

I’m blown away with the speed and breath of your response! Totally unexpected. Greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Thank you for listening.

Great move on the plan change. A typical software company might’ve taken months to reach that conclusion.

You guys are Hawesome. Ninja-like response time, classy, professional, crisp, and just . . . awesome.

I have been evangelizing you to all of my friends, co-workers, and neighbors. Keep up the amazing work.

Yeah! I quickly fell in love with Campfire but the pricing and contact limits were going to be a bit much. Now the plans are a perfect fit for what I need. Nice work identifying the need for the Solo plan in particular.

Congratulations on a successful launch.

Woohoo! I was going to whine and complain when Highrise launched, but luckily I held off and y’all addressed all the issues I had with signing up for a pay account we can afford

Count us in and as dependent as ever on the good stuff from 37signals!

Thanks for listening to early feedback. 37Signals ROCKS ! Thanks for showing the competition how business should be done.

Thanks.

I’m a big advocate of OpenID, and wrote a plugin for symfony to use it.

Also, the free plan does allow me to nicely put in most of my business contacts and actually get a decent go at this whole thing to see if it works. :)

Wow,... nice quick response to your customers. It’s amazing how the tone of this thread is different from the launch post. I also got hung up on the restrictions the first time around, but finally signed up this morning and I must say it’s a very nice app. for small organizations.

Any plans for marketing/email campaigns?

This is so exciting. As a freelancer/single user, I signed up for the free Highrise plan (the other plans are just way more than I need). I was initially concerned that I wouldn’t be able to get the most out of it without upgrading, but the changes to the free plan have now made it a much more satisfying product—and I’m sure I’ll swiftly upgrade to the Soho plan! Perfect. Thanks!!

You guys certainly walk your talk. Well done!

To quote a recent Sunspots post from SWA :

“Under Promise, Over Deliver”

Nice job guys.

Yes, thank you for listening and making these changes!

Awww, now I feel all important after sending you that e-mail yesterday Jason. I’m sure that my weighing in tipped the scales :-)

Thanks a bunch 37signals.

Props for actually listening to customer feedback. Good work!

Smart move Guys!

Excellent Work.

Thank you for fixing the wrapping of text from emails sent to the dropbox. It looks a lot cleaner now.

Well, one could say it was a fairly significant blunder to overlook the need for a Solo plan. I personally was enthused about Highrise pre-release but decided to move on when I saw the original plans. With Solo, that changes. So, fair is fair, nice save.

Hi, You definitly HAVE to add Highrise to your right-column-list-of-products, WHY is it still missing here ?

Kudos for your amazing work, I love it.

Smart = logical + obvious. Nice work!

Very neat. Been waiting a long time for this.

Great information and help. Since I know nada about a vCard, can you tell me again…. where to go in your forum or help area to get 5000 records in an Excel (.csv) file into HighRise? And since those 5000 all have group affiliations, where is that in HighRise. Not Groups—that’s users. Not tags, that’s just identifiers.

Please redirect so I can get this off the ground. So far it’s a lot of fun buzzing around the airport on the ground, but I’m ready to take off and fly.

Just when I was concerned about your response to customers, you do this! Thanks! I’m about to give it a whirl right now.

Awesome!!! You guys rock! Thanks for the improvements!

Already a paying customer, looks great!

Would love to see those print style sheets come up soon for the Task List. Be sure to include the phone numbers of the assigned contacts to be able to make the calls while on the road.

Thanks!

Another thumbs-up for the agility displayed here. I echo Dave P’s sentiments: this is how it should be done.

Really, really good. I love it how fast 37Signals reacts to user feedback. This makes Highrise the absolute Tool of Choice when it comes to CRM :-)

Thank you. I logged off last night after reading your launch post and signing up with a clenched jaw. Your expediency and your quality of response is commendable. Very agile.

Thank you. You have just made a happily paying Basecamp customer a happily paying Highrise customer.

Again, thank you.

Georgina:

A quick Google turned up

http://homepage.mac.com/phrogz/CSV2vCard_v2.html

I haven’t tried it as I keep my contact in the address book as opposed to Excel, but it may be what you’re looking for.

Re. groups—I know there’s built in support for “Companies” in the vCard spec, not sure about an arbitrary “group” though.

Awesome – thanks for the updates so fast – this is part of the reason 37 makes me smile! Been waiting for this CRM for a long time.

Great marketing. Under promise and over deliver (in 36 hours). Nice move.

Thanks folks. This makes Highrise a lot more interesting.

Hmmmm … I bet the conspiracy gang will say this is your “New Coke” marketing blunder/ploy!

:)

Well, I was signed up for the plus plan, but it looks like you’ve just saved me $20/month by introducing the solo plan. Thanks! :-)

I’m really looking forward to tighter integration with Basecamp…

Thanks for upping the number of contacts for the free version. This will allow me to see if this works for my company. At 25, I signed up for a solution by a competitor that posted a comment on your blog. Now I will settle in and see if HR works for me.

Thanks again.

Yep. You hear us!! Thanks a lot

Ace!!! This is exactly the kind of response I like! I’m going to see how I get on with the free account for now, but I’ve got my eye on that Solo account – it seems perfect for me.

Amazing, maybe we should complain more ;)

Why do I have the sneaking suspicion that you held these improvements back so you could put some icing on the cake post-launch?

Fantastic, guys. Glad to hear the launch went well!

You rock!

Very excited about HIGHRISE . Already we are tracking and closing deals with our new prospects.

My first impression looking at the plans:

«They talked about the cases, but where are they?»

Now WE ALL know.

BizExperts U are, oh yes U are.

Wow, simply wow. I’m very surprised that you guys have made that many increases/improvements in just over a day and a half. Simply, wow.

Awesome job guys!

Well done. Now, if we could sort the cases in an order other than chronological, I will be a happy man. I need to organize and bring the important cases to the top of immediate view.

Thanks for the speedy change, I hoped it was coming. It did. Now you guys get to enjoy more customer love since you proved you listen to us.

Thank you for responding, so quick! I was really disapointed that I couldn’t afford Highrise at the start. Now you made me happy again: you really lisend to me and al the other people, pricing is now good for me as a soloworker, and I get more diskspace!!! You made a lot of people happy today, because now it makes sence to me to tell al the soloworkers I know about Highrise.

Wilco

Well.. I’m not going to say thank you, but I do say Congrats to you, this was an excellent marketing move!

Instead of releasing the application, with the features that people would surely want you did it with fewer, then (48 hours later) switched to the original set of features, everybody is happy and you are giving the same, pure genius :D.

You guys always seem to deliver the goods.

I’m curious to see how the future progresses for you. Seems with all of these neat tools floating around that more and more users like myself are going to integrate more then one of them into a normal routine and will begin to wish they’d all talk to each other.

I have seen comments from the 37 signals folks that their philosophy is simple tools for specific uses, but eventually you may come to the point (and you’re getting close now) where folks are really going to want one swiss army knife of a product from you.

I look forward to this day.

I’m also hoping that a time will come around that I can sync products like this one with my blackberry and take my projects and contacts on the go. (Short of using the web browser on the device)

Spectacular.

Wow.

You guys are making it hard for us to stay with our clunky, outdated network software … keep up the good work.

To me this is a prime example of how your “Just say no to new features, and the real problems will still bubble through” philosophy has worked tremendously well.

Congratulations on a spectacular first 36 hours.

That’s what I call customer orientation.

Love love love the solo plan, any chance of it showing up in basecamp?

Also, when is Highrise gonna show up in the “37signals products” sidebar on SvN? :)

Wow!!! Now this is called quick decision making and customer service. Kudos

Absolutely Great decision, from you guys after long period.

While it’s not for me (yet) the Solo plan IS very cool and a great example of being creative with your plans. I can see myself going from free to Solo.

gwg

Jason,

I think the improvements you made make sense, but I feel you are overlooking the most important issue which is the number of users per account.

If I sign up for a free account I get two users with 250 contacts. If I want to add just 1 more user I have to pay $12 per month which is $144 a year? If I want to add just two more users on top of the free account I have to spend $24 a month, which is $288 a year?

What if a family want’s to use Highrise for a family address book and task list? Mom and dad are free, but if you want to add son and daughter you have to pay $300 a year? I know your answer: Highrise is a CRM tool for business not personal, but I think you are overlooking a huge market.

I think you should leave the free account as is and make the personal $5 a month and Basic plan $12. If you do I would sign up for Basic at $12. There is just no way I am going to pay you $288 a year so I can add two people to my account who probably will barely use it.

Basecamp gives you unlimited users for $12 a month. I think Highrise prices are way to high for users.

“When we launched we only offered Cases on Plus, Premium, and Max plans. There was a fair bit of negative reaction to that decision.”

Looks like the squeaky wheel finally got oiled by 37s! Yay!

But there’s another axle with a wheel (called “Backpack”) that’s been promised an oiling for a loooooong time, too… __

Guys, appreciated. Thanx for listening to your customers!

Perfect decisions for a really nice product!

Dudes, thanks for listening to us!

Very impressive response to the customer feedback.

Gotta love the new free upgrades. Great work fellas.

Once again, you guys are Getting Real. and I love it. Thanks!

Jason, I think the limitation on users is there to ensure this doesn’t hurt Basecamp and perhaps takeup of the higher charging Highrise plans. After all Contacts could be viewed as Projects and there’s alot more here to play with than in Basecamp.

Basecamp’s main unit of currency is projects, so limiting users makes no sense. In order to have as many Contacts/Projects and users as you require you are going to have to pay unless 37Signals ever considered per user pricing for some products.

Also you say they are barely going to use it anyway. I don’t quite understand.

Oh and well done on the changes by the way, that email was a pleasant surprise.

JF, if you guys can support OpenID on Basecamp I can get my colleagues to try Highrise – the barrier is me advocating another web app which requires a another login.

Now I’m getting my account. Very Good!!!

It’s probably superfluous to add to the mass of comments above, but thank you for your flexibility in response to early feedback.

@Jason (not F)

I think you should leave the free account as is and make the personal $5 a month and Basic plan $12. If you do I would sign up for Basic at $12. There is just no way I am going to pay you $288 a year so I can add two people to my account who probably will barely use it

Why would you add people who will barely use it at any cost? Stick with the telephone!

Congratulations on the success! I think I echo most if not everyone that has posted here in saying the quick changes and improvements have greatly increased the value of this product!

Hats off. Nice round of tweaks and response to your customers.

Deano & Mathew,

My girlfriend and I have a startup business. I have two people working with us part time and I would like to collaborate with them through Highrise. I already have a Basecamp account and Backpack account I pay for. We have been using Basecamp as our main collaborative tool so far.

I want to use Highrise for sharing contact info and so we can assign tasks to each other. The reason I said that I don’t want to spend $300 a year for people who will barely use Highrise is because the two other people I collaborate with are not very computer savvy.

I showed Highrise to one of my goto people and they said, looks great, but will it sync with my Treo? I said no, and they said forget it. My other goto person is a person who does not like using computers very much and I don’t think they will get much use out of it except they might occasionally use the address book.

JF,

what is the reasoning behind not letting certain people see what other user’s tasks are ?

just two things:

would love to see a birthday reminder….. and an apple adressbook like Zoom function on a telefon-number.

gratulations for highrise! nice greetings from vienna

Nice work guys. Great to see such early improvements. It feels good knowing you guys are already shaping the system as you gather feedback. Keep up the good work.

Fantabulous.

What a lot of nonsense, they’re all mad.

Just kidding, well done 37.

Excellent.

I can’t believe you guys can make changes that quick!

Well done for using OpenID too.

Jason,

what a smart move. I remember your “say no by default” in your talk in Copenhagen in 2005 and i was in fear that you guys would ignore the critics. But you didn’t, thats great. So i’ll sign up for the solo plan soon, highrise arrived just in time for me:)

btw, i found a bug in the vcard export, Umlaut characters get destroyed. I use Firefox and Outlook2003. Import works fine.

Yes!! One place for all my contacts. PM (Basecamp), CRM (Highrise) and PIM (Backpack) all from one source. Talk about streamlining your software tools! I wonder whats next?

You are a life saver :)

37s guys: This page appears to be bugged somehow. When the window loses focus, Firebug spits out a stream of “too much recursion” errors. Not sure why.

Wow ….. now thats what i call TAT to VOC !!1 In my parlance that is Turn Around Time to Voice of Customer…my organisation could learn a few tricks from you guys! ....Free makes imminent and even better sense for me now ….Thank you

Way to go 37S; moving the free plan up to 250 people makes it powerful enough to be worth testing out.

Thanks.

Rocks!

Impressively fast response to the reaction. The pricing strategy still looks like “don’t cannibalize Basecamp,” but that’s understandable. Thanks again for OpenID. Any chance of its being used on the HR forum as well? It seems that your servers stood up well to the load, despite the success of the launch.

JF- you mentioned that OpenID might propagate across your product line… is there any chance of making Backpack a multiuser application?

I know you can share pages between two users, but frankly the workflow would be much smoother if there were “Backpack Pro” accounts with the ability to have more (unlimited?) users, with the accounts still metered by pages and space, although at an understandable premium.

(Ideally the “Max” account would have unlimited pages, but frankly I’m not going to be needing more than a few hundred regardless of how many users can interact w/ my account, so it’s not a matter that’s relevant to me…)

Thanks -RS

Great marketing. Under promise and over deliver (in 36 hours).

That almost seems too close to the truth.

Is it too cynical to think this was just a marketing ploy, and a way to show 37s is listening to its customers?

Either way, a smart move.

I have a personal Backpack a/c and use a Basecamp a/c to run my freelance projects.

I signed up for the free Highrise a/c to try it out and I seriously think this tool would go hand in hand with Basecamp as one application (my personal opinion).

Keeping track of who I talk to, what was said, and what to do next always relates to a project. At the moment I keep this type of information in my basecamp project Messages. Also Basecamp is what I use to keep track of the people involved in my projects.

Am I missing the point?

PS: I heart Backpack and Basecamp. Just a little confused.

Wow, just wow.

I was disappointed when I saw the original plans – none of them suited my needs. The new solo plan is perfect for me. I can’t believe how quickly you responded to your customers – probably just one more benefit of good design. You definitely need to post an article elaborating on what design decisions allowed for you to achieve this.

Now, since I won’t waste my money on your paid plans, I’ll code and use my own Highrise clone ;-) Thanks for explaining everything so deeply.

What do you guys do with all this ‘love’ and ‘thanks’? Pile-up for future use? :-D

Thanks for the case in the free plan…

jb

Not to be cynical, but was this intentional? An under-promise, over-deliver thing.

As usual I was right: There are several “New Coke” marketing-type comments above.

Sheesh … the cynics are out.

Not to be cynical…

Sounds cynical to me.

For the unbelievers, I don’t think this was a marketing ploy.

If you know your product and your team are flexible, it’s oh so easy to say “launch now, tweak later.”

@eduardo, user tasks are meant for the user, not for the organization. The 37s guys are all pretty much self-directed (that’s my impression), so they don’t need to keep an eye on each other’s tasks.

If you really need to make a task public, I guess you make it into a note on a Case. Everybody, feel free to correct me on this one.

Wow.

Talk about “listening to community/customer feedback”! Within 36 hours you’ve listened and adapted—very nimble :)

If it was a marketing plan, still being great. And it’s something to learn.

I have been trying to login to Highrise using an OpenID from myopenid.com server. Although I can log in to the myopenid.com server, Highrise is not accepting the approval from myopenid.com. Logging into myopenid.com, I see that it is sending approvals to Highrise; but Highrise must be rejecting the approval and not letting me log on.

Any ideas? Thanks.

Ok, will do,

Thanks for the changes guys! Excellent work, as always.

Great decision to expose cases in the free account. I was curious about it in practice, but not enough yet to commit to a pay account (I know I know you will refund, but it was still a commitment).

I do have a suggestion for the Cases feature though. It is too hard and too manual to associate items to cases. You have to ‘Edit the item first. It would be loads better if you could associate an item to a case when looking at the item in a list (like the dashboard).

For Automatic, perhaps you could designate the case on a person/company level. i.e. a I have a project for a company, one small part of that project is an integration which involves another company. I am thinking that integration subproject would be a case and I’d want to see all correspondence on the integration grouped together under the case. If the partner company was auto-associated to the case it would half the manual tagging needed.

BTW , I also think tagging should be greatly expanded to all entities (tasks etc.) Really there is lots of overlap in the concept of a tag and a case.

Anyway, I like the concept and the ‘feel’ of Highrise is great from both an ajaxy responsiveness, to the freedom of the concepts! Good work!

-Steve

Regarding my comments above about “too much recursion” I don’t think it was 37s—seems to have been a google maps page open in another window. Sorry about that!

Rhetorical Q: Is voicemail broke worse than email? A: Yes!

Future development question: Can we get VOIP call recording integrated into a HighRise case? I realize that this is probably a tall order. But being able to track and share verbal interactions with prospects easily would be compelling.

Ahem. The phone still matters more than email. For most sales.

@JF “Basecamp is about collaborating on projects with other people. Solo wouldn’t make sense there.”

I doubt I’m the only one that used Basecamp to manage just my personal and freelance projects. I recently switched to Goplan because Basecamp doesn’t fulfill my needs though (nested task lists and bug/issue tracker primarily).

I appreciate the increases on the Highrise plans and the introduction of the Solo plan on Highrise. I’m going to try it out later because I am in desperate need of organizing my personal/professional contacts and Highrise does it so elegantly.

great product!

Funny how I just posted that Highrise is a great product and I was labeled an “Anonymous Coward” for doing it. Not such a great experience for a paying customer (we use Basecamp as well) and for a first time SvN commenter. I skipped the name and email forms so I could post a quick compliment. You guys are great, but I must admit that it was a bit off putting to see that.

Well this time I posted my name and email. It might be a good idea to let folks know that they’ll be labeled a coward if they don’t post their name in your little Note/Disclaimer below.

I haven’t looked, but I’m sure this has been discussed on SvN at some point in the past.

They stole the anonymous coward thing from slashdot :) Don’t take it so seriously.

I understand. I wasn’t upset – I was just surprised, that’s all. I get the tongue-in-cheek aspect of the whole thing:)