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Basecamp Breeze officially launched
- sschueller 14y agoIf this sells then I am have to reconsider the complexity of problems I try to solve for people. Is it really that hard to setup a email list?
- eli 14y agoIf you work at even a moderate sized company, it probably means you need to make a request to a different department, and 1 or more people may need to sign off on that request. It might take a day or two. Meanwhile you can probably expense $10 with no special authorization and have you email list instantly.
- X-Istence 14y agoAnd at the same time break all kinds of rules and possibly violate various contracts and whatnot because email is now leaving the company server, traversing the Internet, being processed and stored by a 3rd party and transmitted back to your servers. I'm part of a small business that does government contracting ... that'd be one hell of a thing to have to admit to during an audit!
- Hates_ 14y agoNo, but creating the product is a very small piece of the puzzle. 37Signals have a good amount of existing customers and what looks like a well greased marketing machine. That's what'll make this successful or not.
- xauronx 14y agoI was thinking the same thing. This is the kind of thing I would create for a friend for free on a weekend or two. Unless I'm missing some huge complexity.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- yitchelle 14y agoExactly my thoughts, there are quite few alternative solutions, Google Groups, Yahoo Groups, even Mailhosted serves[1]. Is 37signals just looking for a different challenge? I am guessing that this will be integrated into one of their other products. [1] - http://wiki.list.org/display/COM/Mailman+hosting+services http://wiki.list.org/display/COM/Mailman+hosting+services
- statictype 14y agoI thought the same thing. Then I tried googling for it. Seriously, just ask your mom or dad or how they might go about setting up a mailing list.
- jschuur 14y agoOn the other hand, how are Mom and Dad going to discover Basecamp Breeze?
- rhizome 14y agoThey aren't, which is what most if not all of the critiques are missing: it's just an upsell for their existing customers, of which there are enough to make building this tool worth it.
- statictype 14y agoI presume the same way they discover Basecamp?
- slurry 14y ago> I am have to reconsider the complexity of problems I try to solve for people I don't know how this product will sell but in general I think that is not a bad maxim.
- silverlake 14y ago10 minutes ago I setup up Google groups for a small company. They had no clue what Groups is for, nor why it's better than CC'ing a dozen people. The Groups page does an awful job of explaining it's purpose to non-technical people. The lesson here is that tech people need to learn to communicate with normal humans. 37signals shows you can charge for that as well.
- grzaks 14y agoMaybe it is not, but if it's one-click and time saving people would pay for it. For the same reason they pay for things like soccer match results via SMS or $0.99 shopping list app for their iPhone.
- fleitz 14y agoWhy solve complex problems when most people have simple ones?
- sakopov 14y agoIf i understand this correctly all this does is creates email groups? Is this seriously a paid feature?
- potomak 14y agoI love to share things with small groups of people through email, I use Google Groups, it's free and it works great.
- jmduke 14y agoI admire the effort, but I don't think the mental effort required to create a Google Group is so high as to pay $10 for this service. Google Groups really aren't that hard; from a college kid's perspective, all students and teachers are already familiar with the ecosystem to the extent that even 60+ year old professors don't need to ask a student to help them after class just to set one up. Frankly, it takes more effort for me to grab my credit card from my wallet and input the payment information than it does to set up a Google Group. Still, best of luck to the 37signals team! I love the idea of one-off services like these.
- simonw 14y agoI imagine 37signals know what they are doing with the pricing here. It would be fascinating to hear how they did their customer and pricing research for this product.
- calgaryeng 14y agoI posted a comment on their blog about this, not sure if it went through though (old IE version here at work...) I think they WAY overstate the difficulty of setting up a Google Group. I just did it in 2-3 steps.... All of the "settings", "more settings" and "permissions" they describe all work JUST FINE as defaults. Not only that, it is free.... They talk about filling out a Captcha as "difficult", but I have a hard time seeing how filling out credit card details is any easier I personally don't think this would have got any attention if it wasn't out of the 37Signals shop. As a P.S., did you notice how they display the Google Groups signup with form validation errors? ....
- mgkimsal 14y ago"I personally don't think this would have got any attention if it wasn't out of the 37Signals shop" It likely wouldn't have, and wouldn't be viable for a 'regular' startup without an existing audience of people who've already bought web services and trust the brand. Yes, there will be some non 37s customers who become customers because of this, but this will succeed financially primarily because of the already built-in audience.
- caiusdurling 14y agoThis arrived the day before I needed to create an email list for a small group of friends I'm involved with where we email each other once a week or more. $10 for literally 90 seconds work to get us a list was a no-brainer really. We have no need for a web GUI, and google groups piss me off every time I try and login to see anything there anyway. Perfect service for what we wanted!
- hacknjack 14y agoPersonally, I have no need for this product. They solve a problem I don't have. They list the flaws of email as: 1. You have to remember each person’s email address -- Gmail has a groups feature, so I just need to make a mailing list once and never worry again. Alternatively, Facebook groups are easy for informal communication. 2. If someone doesn’t “reply-all” when responding to a group email with multiple email addresses, then it all falls apart. -- Eh, sometimes not every single message needs to be sent to every single person. I like the flexibility of being able to choose reply-all or just reply to one. Perhaps this would be useful for someone who's not very good with email, but if my mom can't figure out how to send an email to a group then I doubt she's gonna sign up for this product (or even know to look for a tool similar to this)
- lukeholder 14y agoits a single email you need to know that sends to all others on the list.
- jmduke 14y agoThat is also how Google Groups works.
- roc 14y agoI think the point is that your mom wouldn't have to do anything. One person -- presumably the one who is good at email but frustrated that everyone else isn't, e.g. You -- sets it up and pays and just sends their very next email to 'the group'. And everyone else just responds to that email as they would any other and it Just Works for them, regardless of whether Mom chronically forgets to "Reply All" or Dad never remembers to put Aunt Sally on the list. I'd imagine people who don't email a lot with less-tech-savvy types probably don't see the advantage. And it really does sound like a 'feature' that any mail host could add at any point. But if it gets traction and other mail providers match the feature, that's a win for everyone, right? I doubt 37signals has big plans for the revenue from this service. They're likely just solving their own problem and charging just enough to cover the administrative overhead and dissuade spam use.
- artursapek 14y agoI could see the monetary value in the email domain grab, but is breeze123.com such a great domain to begin with? I don't think that's worth paying for. Their video and splash page just seems to be showcasing the different emails you can get, at breeze123.com. "our-interns@breeze123.com" "awesome-book-club@breeze123.com" That just sounds like a password. And it's all they're offering. I guess they think Google Groups isn't catching the entire market that would have a use for this. Another problem I see is they say "pay once, use forever" when I've found that I always lose the need for a certain group email list after a while. A project ends, a team breaks up, a meetup stops happening. Maybe a better product would be something that makes it easier to set up and throw away these more temporary email domains.
- roc 14y agoThe payment looks most like a barrier to spam. Thus anything that made it possible to create more groups and/or larger groups would require an increasingly higher price to break the economics of using this to spam people.
- mrbill 14y agoOne-to-many email aliases and/or mailing lists are nothing new, why is this news?
- jiggy2011 14y agoSo, it's a mailing list?
- pdog 14y agoI'm curious how/why 37signals decided to make and sell this product. Is there a way to set this up with a custom domain?
- sklivvz1971 14y agoAnd I thought email was obsolete. Do this with SMSs and it would be HN-worthy :-)
- jmduke 14y agoJust as an fyi, this exists (to some extent) already: https://groupme.com https://groupme.com
- Nikolas0 14y agoThis has to be a joke.....
- jmedwards 14y agoWhat fascinates me about this is that there really is (for me, at least) a 'go to' place for setting up a simple email list. And how the gap is so big, they can charge for it. I.e. the kind of thing you'd recommend your mother or father to go sign up for and manage themselves. Or in other words, their target audience.
- scottmagdalein 14y agoFolks folks folks. The primary issue with Google Groups is that it's ugly all around, not just the signup process. This is an issue that this community (keen on fixed width fonts and cli) doesn't usually care about. But I promise you that my wife cares about something being not ugly.
- mtrimpe 14y agoTalking about not ugly; it seems that they're using a hex encoded unique identifier for the groups (see movie-talk-bfcd5ecc@breeze123.com in the comparison page.) I really don't get why people don't look into encoding designed to work well with your eyes more often. There are some pretty good and easy options out there such as ZBase32 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base32#Alternative_versions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base32#Alternative_versions)
- gosub 14y agodynamic third level domains could be made even more legible: movie-talk@green-dragon.breeze123.com
- jasonfried 14y agoWe're not using the hex encoded UID in the email addresses anymore. They are nice and clean now. bookclub@breeze123.com
- statictype 14y agoWow. When I first saw it, I thought "huh? Isn't this just a mailing list? Is this an actual product?" Then I did a quick search for "setting up a mailing list" ... and I got Google Groups (not the same), a bunch of address book hacks for Outlook and then GNU Mailman. They found a really good market with something really obvious. I don't understand the pricing though. Why just a one-time fee? Why a limit of 50 people and no other pricing plans? Why no custom domains?
- X-Istence 14y agoGoogle Groups is a mailing list...
- fleitz 14y agoThe answer to all your questions is MVP.
- heartbreak 14y agoPerhaps it's MVP?
- luigi 14y agoI could see this being appealing for people who use GroupMe. "I wish I had GroupMe but only on email."
- bluetidepro 14y ago2013 must be flying by, it's already April 1st...? ;) Jokes aside, I don't understand why they are making such a big deal about this? I understand they have an existing large client base already and if they wanted to add this to their product list quietly that would be one thing, but why try to turn it into something bigger than it is...? Also, I would say (based on what I've seen) that most of the Basecamp clients are somewhat "tech smart", meaning they could easily see there is next to no value in this for a price. There are countless free alternatives that anyone with a basic "tech smart" savvy could figure out. Not to mention a lot of those alternatives would be much more flexible. I'll even go as far to say that the average person (like my parents, family, etc.) knows about even easier alternatives (for free) like Google Groups or Facebook Groups. And both of those would include all of the functionality (plus more) presented by Basecamp Breeze (and again, for free). I typically associate 37signals products with intuitiveness and creativity/originality, this seems like neither. I'm quite disappointed.
- stephen 14y agoPretty genius pricing--if the lifetime cost of your customer really is that low (which I'm sure that is), I bet their signup rates will be much better than something silly like "$2/year".
- jschuur 14y agoThis looks like a great way for someone junior at 37Signals to prove themselves, by developing a small product from start to finish. I'm not 100% convinced 37Signals hires 'someone junior' though.
- timjahn 14y agoI find it very interesting how so many people commenting here are shouting "This is so stupid! It's so EASY to setup a mailing list, I can do it in 2 seconds! Even a monkey could setup a freakin' Google Groups list!" Seems to me they don't understand just how technical they really are compared to a large portion of the people in their everyday lives. I can think of 1 single person in my family who knows what Google Groups is. But I can think of at least half a dozen people who might need to be able to email a group of people without needing to know technical things.
- simula67 14y agoLibrelist (http://librelist.com/ http://librelist.com/) source code is open.
- atacrawl 14y agoI won't get into the usefulness of or need for the product. That's a different debate. But this product does raise a couple of questions for me: 1) Why was the Basecamp brand attached to this product? 2) If Sortfolio was deemed expendable, why did this product pass muster? EDIT: Also, the basecamp.com homepage is now a lot less focused then before. I'd be curious to see how or if this affects Basecamp conversion rates.
- kunal10 14y ago>> EDIT: Also, the basecamp.com homepage is now a lot less focused then before. I'd be curious to see how or if this affects Basecamp conversion rates. i dont think that will be case for lifetime. They will change when needed focusing on what is important.
- lhnz 14y ago>> Email is the universal constant of communication. Hyperbole.
- jbail 14y ago$10 one time doesn't seem that profitable long term. This product is either supposed to be a loss leader that brings more customers into the 37Signals fold (to use Basecamp, etc) or there are more features and functionality planned for the Breeze product. My guess it's the later and its why Breeze wasn't just incorporated into Basecamp.
- tchock23 14y agoI think it's the former. This feels to me like a marketing strategy and loss leader to grab a new set of customers and eventually migrate them into the full Basecamp product. I could see people saying to themselves, "I love this email list thing, but it would be cool if we also had a calendar or could create lists, etc..." which prompts the upgrade to Basecamp. The $10 one-time fee then becomes a way to separate the customers who are at least willing to take out their credit card for something like this, vs. those who would never do that. It will probably end up being a decent marketing tool that pays for itself over time.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- iambibhas 14y agoMailing list for dummies.
- kunal10 14y agoat this moment it seems like a very simple solution to simple problem (for some people. reply-all or signup and other services). i think people are concerned about $10? but looking forward to what will be next in breeze?
- splatcollision 14y agoOk, this is beautiful. First of all, Hacker News readers are not the target audience. Looks like a perfectly implemented simple version of the core of basecamp, communication. Priced to match. Note: only group members can email the group, so it's private.