Alexis Bouchez

~ / startup analyses / 99 Next Projects 37signals (Basecamp) Will Create Next

99 Next Projects 37signals (Basecamp) Will Create Next

37signals is the most opinionated software company on earth. Twenty plus years in, a few dozen employees, zero VC, and a back catalog that reads like a counter history of SaaS: Basecamp, Highrise, Campfire, Tada List, Writeboard, Backpack, HEY, Writebook, the new Campfire, Kamal, Rails itself. They kill products in public. They open source their deployment tools. They write books about not working too hard. They hate subscriptions enough that they built an entire business line (ONCE) around selling software the way you used to buy it: pay once, own forever, self host, ship updates when we feel like it.

So what do they build next? Below are 99 guesses, grouped by the business line they most likely fall under. Some are obvious bets (a HEY Calendar Pro, a Basecamp for solo folks). Some are just the logical next box in the ONCE catalog. Some are weirder: a radio station, a bootstrap index, a coworking brand in the Merchandise Mart. All of them feel like something Jason or DHH could plausibly ship between two essays and a Le Mans race.

2. 1. ONCE pay once self host line

ONCE is the business model they invented after years of being angry at recurring revenue SaaS. You pay a flat fee, you download a tarball, you run it on your server, you own it. Campfire and Writebook were the first two boxes on the shelf. Here is what the next eleven could look like.

  1. ONCE Basecamp: the full Basecamp experience as a self hosted tarball. Messages, todos, schedule, chat, docs. Priced like a small car, sold forever.
  2. ONCE Kit: a tiny CRM with companies, people, deals, and a built in email inbox. The Highrise heirloom, rebuilt with HEY's email engine.
  3. ONCE Forum: a Discourse killer. Categories, threads, email replies, static rendering, BYO domain.
  4. ONCE Stack: a self hosted status page. Incidents, components, subscriber emails, embeds. Pay once, own your uptime page.
  5. ONCE Pitch: investor update tool for the rare VC backed customer. Monthly updates, metrics blocks, PDF export.
  6. ONCE Survey: a Tally alternative in a single binary. Forms, results, email notifications, CSV export. No Typeform dark patterns.
  7. ONCE Docs: internal wiki and docs site in a tarball. Markdown, search, comments, version history.
  8. ONCE Roadmap: a public roadmap tool with upvotes and status. The Canny replacement the ONCE crowd has been asking for.
  9. ONCE Helpdesk: a ticketing system with email ingestion, canned replies, and macros. Zendesk energy, none of the monthly bill.
  10. ONCE Signals: analytics dashboard for a small business. Sales, churn, signups, simple charts. No cookies, no segment, no snakes.
  11. ONCE Post: a paid newsletter platform. Publish, send, take payments, stop paying Substack forever.

3. 2. HEY spinoffs and extensions

HEY is the opinionated email client with its own domain product and its own calendar. The natural move is to keep pulling the "personal software suite" thread. Every adjacent tool people already trust Google with is fair game.

  1. HEY Contacts: a real address book. Notes per person, last seen, merge fields, iCloud and Google sync.
  2. HEY Drive: file storage with opinionated sharing. Links expire, access is simple, no folder hell.
  3. HEY Notes: the Apple Notes replacement for people who do not want iCloud to be the center of their life.
  4. HEY Tasks: a todo list that lives in the same sidebar as your inbox. Drag an email, get a task.
  5. HEY Reader: RSS and newsletter reader built on HEY's email ingestion. Subscribe to a feed, it shows up in your Feed screen.
  6. HEY Pages: single page personal sites you write like emails. Send to pages@hey.com, publish at yourname.hey.page.
  7. HEY Vault: opinionated password manager. Shared with your household, biometrics, no browser extension bloat.
  8. HEY Send: a WeTransfer clone. Upload, get a link, it expires on its own, no ads.
  9. HEY Family: shared family inbox with kid safe screening. One household, many devices, one calendar.
  10. HEY Me: personal CRM. Remembers birthdays, last conversations, ping reminders. Like Monica, but inside HEY.
  11. HEY Bookmarks: save a link, it gets a readable snapshot, email digest on Sunday morning of what you did not read.

4. 3. Basecamp modules and splinters

Basecamp is the big box, but every time they ship a feature, there are three modules inside worth shipping as their own product. Pings alone could be a company. So could the Schedule.

  1. Basecamp Solo: a version of Basecamp for one person. Cheap, personal, no seats. Replaces Things and Notion for the solo founder.
  2. Basecamp Lite: the three screen version. Messages, todos, chat. Nothing else. Priced for first time managers.
  3. Basecamp Agencies: client portal preset, billable hours off, time off tracker on, retainer cap built in.
  4. Basecamp Hiring: the hiring pipeline module, as a standalone product. Jobs, candidates, interview notes, scorecards.
  5. Basecamp Classrooms: for teachers and tutors. Assignments, parents as guests, no grades, just discussion.
  6. Basecamp Missions: a lightweight "mini project" product. Week long things, not six month things.
  7. Basecamp Runway: the Shape Up cycle baked into a product. Six week cycles, two week cool down, built in betting table.
  8. Basecamp Pings: the DM feature as its own tiny Slack killer. Two person rooms, optional groups, email fallback.
  9. Basecamp Campfires: a standalone version of the chat rooms for people who do not want the rest of Basecamp.
  10. Basecamp Schedule: the calendar and event tool carved out. Simple shared calendar, email invites, no video calls.
  11. Basecamp Clients: client portal as a standalone product. Single shared space per client, feedback, approvals, invoices.

5. 4. Writing and publishing tools

Writebook was the first move. The publishing instinct goes much deeper than that at 37signals; Signal vs. Noise, SvN, the books, the essays. Any of these could ship as ONCE products or as small SaaS under the HEY or 37signals brand.

  1. Letters: long form essays and newsletters in one app. Write once, email to subscribers, auto publish to a clean site.
  2. Field Notes: a note taking app shaped like the physical notebook. Short entries, date stamps, searchable.
  3. Column: publish a weekly column. One post a week, autosave drafts, no analytics, just a word count goal.
  4. Zine: make and publish ezines as beautiful PDFs and web pages. Templates inspired by Signals v. Noise.
  5. Guide: structured manual and playbook publisher. Chapters, glossary, print view, PDF export.
  6. Diary: encrypted personal journal with a daily prompt. Optional weekly digest back to yourself via HEY.
  7. Library: reading list with highlights and notes. Import from Kindle, share one shelf per book.
  8. Anthology: multi author book. Several writers, one shared Writebook, a single final ebook.
  9. Draft: a writing tool with version history for every paragraph. The git for prose the marketing world asked for.
  10. Interview: record, transcribe, and publish interviews. Designed for podcasters who only do Q and A format.
  11. Dispatch: beat reporting for small newsrooms. Sources, pitches, drafts, publish flow, email delivery.

6. 5. Small team rituals

37signals writes more about how they work than almost any other company: Shape Up, automatic check ins, hill charts, no meetings. Each ritual they run internally could ship as a product if they cared to extract it. They usually do not, but eleven are too good to leave on the table.

  1. Huddle: async standup tool. Everyone posts by 10am, the email digest sends at 11am.
  2. Retro: retrospective tool in the Basecamp tone. Not sticky notes on a Miro board: prompts, answers, a single shared doc.
  3. 1:1: manager 1:1 notes with a shared agenda and private notes pane.
  4. Onboard: new hire onboarding. Day one checklist, welcome letter, meet the team screens.
  5. Handbook: company handbook publisher. Structured like Writebook, version controlled, public or private.
  6. Awards: peer kudos. No emoji spam, no leaderboards, just a monthly email with who thanked whom.
  7. Hours: an anti timesheet time tracker. Enter hours once at the end of the week, nothing more.
  8. Off: out of office tool. Request days, auto reply, shared team calendar, no approval chain nonsense.
  9. Offsite: company offsite planner. Flights, rooms, agenda, budget, one shared page per trip.
  10. Birthday: team birthdays, work anniversaries, simple cards and one email nobody forgets.
  11. Walk: walking 1:1 scheduler. Finds a 30 minute window when two people are both free and local.

7. 6. Rails, Kamal, and infra

DHH runs Rails, Hotwire, Kamal, Solid Queue, Solid Cache, Solid Cable, Propshaft, Thruster, and Mission Control. That is already a full stack. These are the adjacent products that would fit the philosophy: give people the cloud without forcing them onto a cloud.

  1. Kamal Cloud: a managed Kamal target. Point Kamal at it, one command, you are in production on hardware they bought.
  2. Solid Stack: the Solid Queue + Cache + Cable trio shipped as a one click starter with monitoring baked in.
  3. Mission Control Pro: extended job dashboards, alerts, and metrics for Solid Queue in production.
  4. Rails One: a one click "start a new Rails app with the 37signals defaults" service. Opinionated setup, ships fast.
  5. Thruster Edge: a CDN inside Thruster. Regional caching for assets and cached pages.
  6. Rails Radar: weekly digest of Rails commits, gems, RubyGems downloads, and interesting PRs.
  7. Rails Jobs: a Rails only job board. $199 a post, email blast to subscribers, no JavaScript fatigue.
  8. Rails Gems: a curated gem registry with 37signals approved stamps. Like Awesome Ruby, but editorial.
  9. Rails School: official online Rails course. Project based, video + text, lifetime access, pay once.
  10. Rails Templates: a registry of opinionated app templates. "Start a Basecamp flavored app in one command."
  11. DHH Hardware: opinionated dev laptop recommendations, the Omakub for macOS or Framework, shipped as a setup script.

8. 7. Books, courses, and content

37signals is also a publisher. Getting Real, Rework, Remote, It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work, Shape Up. The next decade of books and courses writes itself, especially now that Writebook exists and ONCE gives them a payment rail.

  1. Getting Real 2: twenty years later. Same voice, updated for AI, remote work, and ONCE.
  2. Shape Up, Second Edition: updated case studies, appetites for AI assisted work, new betting table examples.
  3. The Rails Way: an official DHH endorsed book on how to build Rails apps the 37signals way. Written inside Writebook.
  4. How We Work: their internal operating handbook, published as a book. Every policy, every ritual, every hire letter.
  5. Calm Money: a book on running a profitable bootstrapped business. Numbers, pricing, not hiring.
  6. The Rework Podcast, Revived: short form, two voices, weekly. Sold as a download bundle, not streamed.
  7. 37signals Films: mini documentaries on how other small calm companies work. Signal v. Noise on screen.
  8. 37signals Library: curated reading list with commentary. Ships as a Library product (see above).
  9. 37signals School: pay once courses on Shape Up, hiring, product management, writing, customer support.
  10. Essays, Collected: DHH's blog posts and Jason's essays bound into two beautiful print books, printed on demand.
  11. Anti Enterprise: a new book arguing small, boring, profitable software beats the SaaS industrial complex.

9. 8. Anti SaaS replacements

The 37signals business strategy in 2026 is simple: take a category everyone hates paying $99 a month for, ship a self hosted alternative you pay $399 once for, watch people tweet about it. Here are eleven categories primed for that treatment.

  1. ONCE Linear: issue tracking in a tarball. Triage, cycles, roadmap, Git integration. Priced like a new MacBook once.
  2. ONCE Notion: pages, databases, wikis. Boring fast, no AI slop, no block hierarchy headaches.
  3. ONCE Slack: the grown up ONCE Campfire with threads, DMs, and file uploads. For teams of 10 to 500.
  4. ONCE Intercom: customer chat widget, shared inbox, canned replies. Ships with one pricing tier forever.
  5. ONCE Calendly: scheduling links, team availability, group booking. No weird branding pages.
  6. ONCE Mailchimp: list, segmentation, templates, sender auth. You plug in any SMTP and go.
  7. ONCE Zapier: a visual automation tool that runs locally. Webhooks in, webhooks out, BYO triggers.
  8. ONCE Airtable: tables, views, formulas, no marketplace. The spreadsheet DB you actually own.
  9. ONCE Loom: record screen, instant link, self hosted storage. Videos expire by default.
  10. ONCE Notion Calendar: a calendar app that reads your ICS feeds, draws one week, does nothing else.
  11. ONCE Miro: whiteboard with sticky notes. Runs in a browser tab, saves to a shared Postgres. No AI auto layout.

10. 9. Odd experiments and weird bets

This is where the fun sits. 37signals has always been part software company, part newspaper, part club. The weird stuff is how they stay weird. Eleven bets that feel on brand but you cannot quite predict.

  1. 37signals Radio: an internet radio station for calm companies. Interviews, music, a weekly Jason and DHH show.
  2. Chicago: a coworking brand inside the Merchandise Mart. $300 a month, no VCs, no ping pong tables.
  3. Calm Index: a public registry of profitable bootstrapped companies. Revenue, team size, years alive. A TinyBuild style leaderboard but with dignity.
  4. Bootstrap Fund: an anti VC investment vehicle. Cheap debt for calm companies, no board seat, long payoff.
  5. Deliberate Company: a certification program for companies that refuse crunch, VC, and hypergrowth. A B Corp for calm.
  6. Pricing Page Generator: a tool that asks five questions and ships you a full Basecamp style pricing page as HTML.
  7. Anti OKR: a goal tool where you can only set one goal per quarter. It deletes the rest.
  8. Silence: a focus time blocker for teams. Blocks notifications for everyone between 9am and noon.
  9. Signals: a daily newspaper run by 37signals about small companies, writing, and software. One email, five links, no ads.
  10. 37signals Press: an actual book publishing imprint that signs other authors. Writebook as the house tool.
  11. Replay: a yearly "year in review" product for small teams. Auto generated from Basecamp data, sent as a printed zine in December.

11. Why these nine buckets

The ONCE line is the clearest arrow. Once you have Campfire and Writebook in a tarball, you have a template for every category you want to drag out of the SaaS cloud. The HEY suite is the second clearest: email is the hub, and every personal data type around it (contacts, tasks, files, notes) is a natural next app. Basecamp itself is a Russian doll; each feature is arguably its own small product. Writing and publishing is the house style. Rails and Kamal are the plumbing they already own. Books and courses are the house voice. Anti SaaS replacements are the house war. Odd experiments are the house soul.

Not all 99 will ship, of course. 37signals kills things in public and is proud of the graveyard. But if you had to bet on what the next ten years of the company looks like, it is something like this list: a few more ONCE boxes, a slightly wider HEY suite, one or two new books, a quiet Rails infra product nobody saw coming, and at least one weird experiment that feels more like a magazine than a product.

The fun part is that you do not have to wait for them. Half of these are things you could build this weekend yourself. The playbook is right there in Getting Real, and the deployment tool is right there in Kamal, and the font is right there in the Basecamp website you keep squinting at. Pick one, ship it, and put "inspired by 37signals" in the footer.