141: Jason Fried - Running the Tailwind Business on Basecamp

Published on Jun 10, 2020

In this episode, Adam talks to Jason Fried about growing the Tailwind team and how to best use Basecamp to keep his particular company organized. He also walks through tons of real examples from their recent work on HEY, sharing lots of behind-the-scenes stuff about how Basecamp use Basecamp themselves.

Topics include:

  • How did Basecamp evolve from being a team/client communication tool to focusing on keeping your whole company organized, and is it really even that different?
  • How exactly should we set up Basecamp on day one to support a small 3-5 person remote software team? What tools should we use and which ones should we ignore for now?
  • Finding the balance between being organized enough and splitting things up too much
  • How big should projects be? Is "HEY v1" a project, or is a project something more like "HEY File Attachments"?
  • What tools do you normally enable for regular projects, and how do you use them?
  • How are you normally using chat at the individual project level?
  • Why todo lists should be created by the individuals doing the work, and not the people assigning the work
  • How should we use the company HQ project? What are some less obvious ideas we can apply there that can make a big difference?
  • Using a "what we're working on" project to keep everyone on the team in the loop and feeling connected
  • Using "heartbeats" to summarize the work a team has been doing over a period of time for the rest of the company
  • Advice on bringing on new employees and how to assign them their first project
  • When you're such a writing-driven company, how do you make sure decisions get written down when they are made in real-time instead of naturally occurring within Basecamp?



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