37signals
More info
- Creator
- Jason Fried, Carlos Segura, Ernest Kim
- Released
- 1999
- Type
- Software company
The small Chicago shop that gave the world Basecamp, Rails and an entire genre of opinions on how to run a company.
37signals started in 1999 as a web design firm in Chicago. Basecamp, a project management tool built for internal use, launched in 2004 and became the main product. Programmer David Heinemeier Hansson extracted the framework he had written for it and released Ruby on Rails the same year, which shaped web development far more than Basecamp ever did.
The company has always been small and loud: the books Getting Real and Rework, a public fight with Apple over App Store fees when the HEY email service launched in 2020, and a move off AWS onto its own servers in 2022–2023, documented down to the invoice. It renamed itself Basecamp in 2014 and went back to 37signals in 2022. Hotwire comes from here too.