Ryan Holmes

It's amazing because people are always bringing you problems and opportunities to solve.

And one of the problems that we had, our customers were asking us more and more to help them build audience and help market through social media.

And so we started scaling up a little bit of a team to do this.

We were helping our customers do this.

And what we realized really quickly in 2008 was that there weren't any good tools to help manage social media as a team and manage multiple team members and multiple brands.

And so, you know, we scratched our head a little bit.

And because we had this culture of building products, we decided to build this product out to scratch our own itch.

And we put out a prototype, really rapid MVP, got it out in probably two months and had immediate traction on it.

We saw the numbers, 10 people, 40 people, 100 people, 200 people, 400 people, just growing so quickly through word of mouth, product virality, K-factor.

And it was just in the fact that people needed

needed a tool to manage social in a better way.

And we were easy to manage multiple accounts and multiple team members.

I know exactly what it was.

It was, it was a big donut.

It was a bagel.

Yeah.

We, we, we didn't charge for over a year.

So from 2008 fall to, you know, a year into it, we did not charge.

We, we were a freemium model, but we, we had a, you know, our, my initial goal with it was to build, um, I don't know if you remember 37 signals had a product called base camp.

It was a project management product.