The itch for a new version

Welcome to Rework, a podcast by thirty seven Signals about the better way to work and run your business. I'm Kimberly Rhodes joined by the cofounder and CEO of thirty seven Signals, Jason Fried. As you guys probably know, we are in the process of building a new version of base camp base Basecamp five. And although we can't share a lot about that now, I did think it'd be interesting to talk a little bit about why we're making a new version. But not only this version, but why we choose to make new versions of our products versus just adding new features. So, Jason, maybe we start a little bit with the history. Basecamp started as Basecamp back in the day, and then we made Basecamp two onto Basecamp three, which then became four. Like, as you're doing this kind of process, what kind of things were you thinking about on making something completely brand new, a brand new version, a new number at the end versus just adding features? Yeah. I mean, when we started this, we didn't have any, idea that we'd be making big new versions. Right? We just make Basecamp, which is now called Basecamp Classic, but just Basecamp. And, we did everything we could to make it the best thing it could be. We added a bunch of features and refined it and updated the interface and all the things. And then there comes a point or there came a point, I shouldn't say there comes a point because this is not always the case. But in our case, there came a point where we had a new idea that would not fit on the chassis, let's say, of the existing product. It was a new interface idea. It was a radical departure from what we had done initially. And when we come up with that, you can't really graft that kind of thing on to what we had because it also came with new technology ideas, new structural ideas, infrastructure ideas, have technically grafted it on, but it would have been such a radical departure that it made sense for us to say, let's start from scratch here. Anyone who's like renovated an old house will maybe you understand what I'm talking about. Like it's actually easier to build a new house Yeah. Than is it built to renovate down to the studs in old house because you've got all sorts of things that you gotta deal with versus starting over from scratch. So it was like, we've done a bunch of renovations in the existing place, and, like, that was enough, and then we're gonna decide to build a new house. Now part of that was leaving the original house standing. So Basecamp Classic still stands today, and it's still used by thousands of customers today. So no one was forced to change from Classic to what became known as Basecamp two. We've changed our mind on that over the years …