“How did you decide what to put into your product’s first version?” I asked Jason Fried of 37 Signals when I interviewed him. See (or read) his answer below.

The clip

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The transcript

We built BaseCamp for us. We decided to build just what we needed. Originally, it didn’t even have to do lists. The first release did, but originally it just had Messages and Milestones.

What we found ourselves doing was adding basically, bullet points to Messages to make To Do Lists. And we realized, “OK. We probably need a To Do List thing. So let’s make a separate To Do.”

So BaseCamp when it launched, had Messages, To Do’s, and Milestones. And Milestones were like, you know, dates. Things were due on this date.

It didn’t have file sharing. It didn’t time tracking. It didn’t have write boards. It didn’t have a variety of things.

It was very, very simple, had three main features, and that was it. And that’s all it needed. And we realized that was all it needed because as we were using it. We realized that’s all we actually needed to solve the problems that we actually had.

We weren’t making up other people’s problems. We weren’t imagining other things that you could do because when go down that road. That’s where you need the ten million dollars. That’s where you have the big idea because I can imagine everyone’s problems, and I’m going to make this big thing that solves everybody’s problems.

We were just solving our own problems. And we put it out there, and other people started using it. And they told us their problems, and we slowly changed the product over time, based on a much wider customer base now than just us. But we started out very, very simple.

Continue to the full interview >>