Today I wanted to share the story of how Jason Fried and DHH used controversy to market Basecamp.

Jason and DHH are remarkable entrepreneurs who have propelled Basecamp to millions of dollars in revenue through a potent mix of consistent content marketing and a bold willingness to express contrarian viewpoints, even when it sparks controversy. They’ve achieved all of this without spending more than $1 million in the past 17 years of operation.

While content is a common strategy in today’s online business landscape, Jason and DHH’s approach stands out for its ability to consistently attract attention and generate buzz. They achieve this by fostering debate and challenging conventional wisdom.

This method is unique to Basecamp, and I’ve never seen any other SaaS company nail it quite so well.

Their primary strategy revolves around a blog (Signal vs Noise) or podcast (Rework) offering business advice and their thoughts on technology and tech culture as their core customer base is businesses looking for project management solutions.

What makes them unique is their ability to publish provocative viewpoints that spark online debate, and get them a lot of press and attention.

While any drama can cast a negative light on your business, it’s a double-edged sword that can also lead to increased customer churn. However, when done well, can strongly polarize your ideal customers and solidify their loyalty.

Due to the inherent risks, most businesses steer clear of drama and strive to stay within the Overton window of current media and cultural discourse.

Below are some controversial views that garnered basecamp a lot of attention.

1. Smartwork and not hardwork:

In popular culture there is a huge emphasis on working hard, spending long hours in the office, and clocking in more than 80 hours a week at work to get ahead of the competition. People also call this hustle culture and this has come to be accepted as common sense advice for anyone who is trying to build a business.

Jason & Dhh talk about working smart and not hard and often talk about how they have built the foundation of Basecamp on a healthy worklife balance and working 40 hours a week. They firmly believe long hours at the office don’t equate to productivity.

2. Remote work way before it was trending.

Even before remote work surged in popularity due to lockdowns, they championed remote work and received significant criticism for their unique, then-contrarian approach. Notably, they even wrote a book titled “Remotely” to talk about their approach to work.

3. Typescript Drama

DHH has criticized TypeScript on several occasions and even removed it from Basecamp products. This sparked a heated debate within the programming community, with some TypeScript enthusiasts expressing strong disapproval and even advocating for boycotting him. His main criticism boils down to TypeScript adding unnecessary complexity (“gymnastics”) to the code and diminishing the joy of development. While this might seem like a minor issue to developers who code and use these tools daily, it can take on a religious dimension for others, considering the large community that supports and contributes to tools like TypeScript, making developers’ lives easier.

4. Ban on political and societal discussions.

In April 2021, Jason Fried announced a ban on political and societal discussions at work. He reasoned that navigating such conversations was inherently difficult, as it could be unclear whether participation made one a target or non-participation made one complicit. This decision, aiming to eliminate unnecessary complexity, sparked significant controversy and led to a mass exodus of employees.

5. Moving on from cloud

It’s always fascinating to see DHH challenge the status quo and so-called industry best practices. He recently published a post about Basecamp’s departure from the cloud to self-host on bare-metal servers, citing unsustainable costs for a business of their size. As with all their public pronouncements, it generated significant buzz and sparked conversations about cloud computing and, indirectly, drew attention to Basecamp itself.

Now, having explored controversial content marketing, let’s delve into their product launch strategies.

Go-To-Market: hey.com

After Basecamp, Jason and DHH embarked on a new venture: Hey.com. Their launch blog post was anything but conventional; it read like a passionate manifesto, brimming with both activism against the old and excitement for the new. As marketing geniuses, they possess an uncanny ability to pinpoint user pain points and articulate them in a way that stirs controversy, a testament to their brilliance.

Even their products are a part of the controversy and have a theme and are a commentary on the larger problems in tech culture and society.

Go-To-Market: once.com

They’ve recently launched a new suite of products under once.com, taking a contrarian and activist approach to industry standards. Their landing page is a powerful letter, dissecting the problems with the modern SaaS subscription model and advocating for a single, upfront payment for software.

This once again serves as a commentary on the issues within tech culture.

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