37signals in Business Week Cover Story
Hats off to the folks at 37signals for the Business Week cover story on 3/27. (From Signal vs. Noise.)
Jason and company at 37signals proved out the model that a small team can make a serious run at the hosted application space.
We don’t really see ProjectPipe competing with 37signals’ Basecamp. ProjectPipe and Basecamp are very different in terms of product vision and features, even though they’re both hosted project management applications.
(If you’re new to ProjectPipe, check out our ProjectPipe In Under Two Minutes video for a rapid-fire tour through our key features.)
Oddly enough, I met with a prospective customer last week that ended up choosing Basecamp over ProjectPipe for a startup that he is working on. The primary reason that he cited was that ProjectPipe seemed a bit too structured and process-centric for the 3-4 person team, whereas Basecamp seemed to “feel” more flexible.
We built ProjectPipe’s Project Management Trifecta process abstraction to minimize process-based overhead while still being able to pass muster with the Project Management Office (PMO) at the typical large company.
Therefore, the default configuration of ProjectPipe ships with the minimal set of suggested Documents in the process pages. We have built-in templates for a bunch of other documents, but they aren’t suggested in the default process content.
Needless to say, it took me a bit by surprise that even our minimal default set of documents and artifacts still seemed “too ISO 9000″ for said customer. This is a great example of the value of real user feedback early in the game.
We’re working on a preliminary set of “starter configurations” that you can use to expedite the setup of your project. This is built atop the code that we’ve been using for some time to do our in-person demos. This lets us instantly configure a demo to resonate with a prospective customer’s typical project (.NET, J2EE, etc.).
In the interim, if you’re evaluating ProjectPipe and it seems too structured (or not structured enough, for that matter) , please drop us a line at support@botonomy.com. We’ll be happy to show you how easy it is to customize any or all of the content to meet your needs.
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