Hi Nathan,
Awesome to have you here!
Indeed, I would love to ask you a few questions :)
1) Has user acquisition became more difficult after spin off from 37signals, or is it actually still an advantage to be historically related to their brand?
2) what were the major things you decided to change after being on your own? Any major change of direction?
And any feedback on your experience would be most welcome :)
@oelmekki Thank you very much!
> 1) Has user acquisition became more difficult after spin off from 37signals, or is it actually still an advantage to be historically related to their brand?
It's definitely an advantage to being related to the brand. People still email Basecamp support questions like "you should make a CRM tool", which the awesome reply is "We did!" :) And Jason/David/and the whole Basecamp crew has been awesome about trumpeting what Highrise is up to.
But the spin-off has had, and still has, plenty of difficulties and challenges.
First, when 37signals became Basecamp, the flow of traffic from 37signals.com greatly decreased, of course, when they used the page to announce how Basecamp was changing.
Second, the announcement gave a bunch of competitors a reason to put up their own false news about "Highrise shutting down". I still bump into people telling me "oh I thought Highrise had shut down". :/
So the transition has a good share of negative momentum we have to fight against.
> 2) what was the major things you decided to change after being on your own? Any major change of direction?
The major thing is really just changing the momentum of the business and addressing the pain I mentioned above - helping people to re-learn that Highrise is still a significant business and not at all going anywhere. Making lots of improvements and getting the word out. Finding a balance between the many big projects we have to do to spin-off and lots of wins we can get into folks hands quickly. We've kept a nice flow of new things out the door.
Basically: Making things again at Highrise and telling people about it. :)
Patrick Mackenzie pointed me to a great post on the subject: http://www.codusoperandi.com/pos... Increasing your luck surface area.
Other than that, there's lots of big things on deck for us. New ideas that Highrise is going to be the perfect platform for. But first we needed to give some love and care to the current product and work on the spin-off before we go too far out there. Please keep your eye on us though. We have some crazy ideas in store :)
@natekontny@oelmekki And as for more feedback, I'd love to help as much as I can.
Goes for anyone who needs help: Feel free to email me at nate@highrisehq.com or hit me on Twitter (@natekontny) if you have any questions or need some help on what you're working on.
Hello. I'm Nate. Made some apps like Draft and recently took over Highrise from Basecamp. I've written a little bit more context about the iPhone release here on Basecamp's blog: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3...
Been a fun project taking over Highrise - with a ton of stuff to do. :) Happy to answer any questions here anyone has about the app, or about the business of taking over a company and turning it around.
@natekontny Hey Nathan! Our team recently got on Highrise, so it's good to hear that there're exciting things on the horizon.
Are there any plans for an Android app?
@equartey@natekontny Definitely. Popular request. Can't promise when. We need to build up our team some more first. Currently looking for Software Engineers to help. Lots of fun and deep challenges scaling and improving something the size of Highrise. If you know anyone please let us know:
https://weworkremotely.com/jobs/...
@miles_matthias@natekontny Miles! Appreciate the support from you on Draft very much. And thank you very much for watching the Highrise activity! Hope things are going well there.
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