Talk directly to your customers

Welcome to Rework, a podcast by thirty seven Signals about the better way to work and run your business. I'm your host, Kimberly Rhodes, joined by cofounders of thirty seven Signals, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hanssen. This week, I thought we'd talk a little bit about the importance of talking directly to your customers with the approaching release of Basecamp five. Jason recently sent a message to all of our Basecamp three and four customers and got some great responses. So I thought we'd start there. Jason, tell us a little bit first why you decided to reach out to customers directly. Normally, when we're sending announcements, it's kind of on behalf of the company, but this time, you wrote it directly, coming directly from you. Tell us a little bit about why you decided to do that. Yeah. I try to really pay attention to, like, the feeling of things these days. Like, I had this feeling that, like, our customers have not heard of from us for a while, which is not just, like, a feeling. There's some truth in that. But there's also, like, there's this feeling of, like, there's a lot going on in the world right now in the software world. Things are changing very rapidly. We haven't updated Basecamp in a bit because we've been heads down working on this brand new version of Basecamp, which is a massive new version of Basecamp. So we've been working like crazy, but no one can see it. And I just had this sense, like, people should hear from us and should probably hear from me. They're like, everything's okay, and we're making something great for you and, like, stay tuned. It's coming soon. We're working on it right now. So I wanted to do that, and I also wanted to wait till we had enough that I could share that I knew we're gonna release. Like, the worst thing is to, like, share all these new things that we're not gonna give them. Like so there's a combination of a lot of things going on here, timing in the market, timing in our work, where we actually think we are in terms of releasing this thing in a few months, whatever it might be. And, anyway, I want to reach out to everybody and say, we're still here. We're doing great work for you. There's a lot that's coming. Most of this is what you've been asking for. Stay tuned. Right? And I also put my email address in. I said, just like, I would love to hear what you wanna say or whatever or what you think or whatever. And, Wait. I'm gonna stop you right there because Please. You would very specifically I'm gonna read it because it says, as always, you can reach me directly and you put your email address. I read all my emails and get back to everyone personally. No assistant, no AI. Emailing me is emailing me, which …