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Basecamp (neé 37Signals) are in a significantly different position than many companies in two ways: - Unlike most B2C companies, they have effectively zero unp

Basecamp (neé 37Signals) are in a significantly different position than many companies in two ways: - Unlike most B2C companies, they have effectively zero unpaid traffic. Ad supported content needs to scale far higher to be able to make useful revenue. - Unlike many B2B companies, they have remarkably low compute/storage needs. They're not doing ML, they're not doing anything with video or images, they're not doing anything to serve end customers at scale, they don't have any low latency requirements, they don't have uptime requirements, they're not doing builds. They're a CRUD app. This is not to say there aren't hard problems and not to down play their good solutions, but compute is just not one of their major problems and likely never will be. Their scaling will therefore be much slower. They are about the best fit for bare-metal as there can be.

bigbuppo 3y ago
So what you're saying... because they're not ad-supported, their products are cheaper to run and better for the environment because they're not burning countless megawatt-hours of electricity to find data to sell to third parties?
- danpalmer 3y ago
  Not at all. I'm saying that by not being ad supported, they don't need 10 million users to be profitable. There's no profitable ad network with 1000 users, because no one cares about showing ads to 1000 users. However if you charge those 1000 users $100 a month, that's often a very nice business! Ad supported businesses need to scale to millions of users in order to be able to sell ads. The selling of the ads isn't necessarily a resource intensive process, but you need so many users to even have a market.
ahartmetz 3y ago
So you are saying they don't need much compute juice and storage? But compute juice and storage are what cost the money at cloud providers, so their financial reasons are weaker than the ones of other companies.
- danpalmer 3y ago
  My point was that by not needing many resources, and not scaling quickly, it is much easier for Basecamp to run on their own machines. That said, compute and storage tend to be the cheapest products from cloud providers, as they are the products that the other "value add" products are built on top of where more margin is made. For example, EC2 is much cheaper than Lambda for the compute you get, because Lambda does a lot more for you.

bigbuppo 3y ago

So what you're saying... because they're not ad-supported, their products are cheaper to run and better for the environment because they're not burning countless megawatt-hours of electricity to find data to sell to third parties?

danpalmer 3y ago
Not at all. I'm saying that by not being ad supported, they don't need 10 million users to be profitable. There's no profitable ad network with 1000 users, because no one cares about showing ads to 1000 users. However if you charge those 1000 users $100 a month, that's often a very nice business! Ad supported businesses need to scale to millions of users in order to be able to sell ads. The selling of the ads isn't necessarily a resource intensive process, but you need so many users to even have a market.

ahartmetz 3y ago

So you are saying they don't need much compute juice and storage? But compute juice and storage are what cost the money at cloud providers, so their financial reasons are weaker than the ones of other companies.

danpalmer 3y ago
My point was that by not needing many resources, and not scaling quickly, it is much easier for Basecamp to run on their own machines. That said, compute and storage tend to be the cheapest products from cloud providers, as they are the products that the other "value add" products are built on top of where more margin is made. For example, EC2 is much cheaper than Lambda for the compute you get, because Lambda does a lot more for you.