Scratch Your Own Itch

Read enough startup stories and you’ll see a pattern emerge: I was struggling with this, so I created that.

Phil Knight and Bill Bowerman’s search for better running shoes led to Nike. Sara Blakely’s struggle with pantyhose led to Spanx. Tope Awotona’s frustration with scheduling meetings led to Calendly.

While there will always be the outlier who strikes gold in an unfamiliar industry, one of the biggest head starts you can give yourself as a founder is solving your own problems.

In other words, you’ve got to scratch your own itch.

When you build a product or service, you make the call on hundreds of tiny decisions each day. If you're solving someone else's problem, you're stabbing in the dark. When you solve your own problem, the light comes on. You know exactly what the right answer is.

Solving your own problems earns you a massive advantage. And in the world of startups, every advantage counts.

Why We Built Basecamp… with Basecamp

We know a thing or two about scratching our own itch here at Basecamp.

When we launched as a web design startup 23 years ago, we had no idea we’d become one of the world’s most trusted project management tools. We just had a lot of projects and were struggling to keep up. So, we created a tool where everything from everywhere could be collected in a single place.

As it turns out, a lot of other companies had the same itch. Soon enough, they were coming to us for the cure.

Nearly two decades later, thousands of companies have worked on a project inside Basecamp. From solopreneurs and small agencies tracking client deliverables, to major corporations running entire departments, Basecamp takes teams that are “a disorganized mess” where “projects feel incomplete” and turns them into teams that are “more organized,” “have less email” and are “actually accomplishing things”.

But even with our loyal user base spanning across the globe, we still build to scratch our own itch. Our entire company runs on Basecamp – from HR and Marketing, to Customer Support, Finance, and yes, even our Developers. We literally use Basecamp to build Basecamp. Why? Because we’ve spent nearly 20 years building something that not only provides value for our customers, but provides value for us, too.

It takes massive energy to build something special. So why not build something you love?

Put it in Basecamp

Whatever you choose to build, put it in Basecamp.

Basecamp allows you to organize your projects, reduce time in meetings, and communicate effectively with co-founders, teammates, and freelancers, without spreading work across multiple apps. Basecamp enables you to focus more on building, and less on all the other noise and distractions that come with startups.

See for yourself by taking 90 seconds to sign up today. Try it for 30 days, on us (no credit card required). If you like it - and we’re pretty sure you will - it’s just $99/month for your entire team.

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Keep it together. Put it in Basecamp.