Fernando Salvi is the CEO of DireitoNet (in Portuguese), one of the major websites for attorneys, legal professionals and law students in Brazil. (30,000 visitors seek updated legal information there every day.) Below, he explains how Basecamp helps keep everything running smoothly.
We produce and sell legal content on our website that helps thousands of professionals everyday to keep updated with the latest changes on federal legislation. Attorneys in special use our content as a support to their legal cases in courts all over Brazil.
We're a small team of 7 people: 6 located in Brazil and the system developer in Toronto, Canada. To write and review the content that are published on the site, our team need to follow the frequent changes on the brazilian legislation. We've got to be as fast as possible to keep the content on the site updated for our clients.
When we launched our subscription services in 2001, most of the work was already remote, via e-mail. We exchanged documents with the team and were using spreadsheets to keep track of what was being done. It was the easiest solution at the time, since everyone was used to e-mail and we didn't find a solution in software or on the web that was simple to use and affordable. As the business started to grow, we soon realized that this method of work wasn't cutting it anymore. We had thousands of e-mails and it was really hard to find the information you wanted. Who did what, and when? It's pretty scary how fast things can get out of control when communication starts to fail.
So, as part of the solution to the communication problems, we opened up our office in 2005 and started working together (the 6 of us). There was a server to store all the files and e-mail wasn't so important anymore, since everyone could just talk to each other when questions emerged. E-mail was almost neglected and things were flowing a little better, but we had yet some tough times due to the large amount of information that we had to deal with everyday.
One year down the road, we found out Basecamp and started using it to manage a project for the new version of the site with our system developer in Toronto. Everything was working so fine for the tech stuff that we created a new project and started managing also our content production in Basecamp, this time with the whole team in the office. The transition was pretty straightforward: we had one meeting with our team to define where to put what in Basecamp, and that was it. No time wasted on trainings, no technical woes, no headaches.
Since 2006, Basecamp is our control center for everything involving system development and content management. To handle content production and control, we use milestones and messages, so we can keep track of what's gonna be published in the next 15 days. We don't plan too much ahead of time (say, a month or so), because new topics are always arising on a daily basis. When a new topic arises, it goes to a to-do list, so everyone can check if that topic is relevant prior to define a publish date. When a topic is set to top priority, it becomes the topic for a new content. All the details about what should be covered on that content are put on a new message. We then set a new milestone (which in our case is the deadline for that content to be ready for publishing) and assign it to a person. That's it. Now all the team knows who is doing what, the deadlines for each content and what's to be done next week.
With the possibility to post comments on to-do's and milestones, and also to search everything that's being said and done, all in one place, we now rely on Basecamp everyday. We reduced the use of e-mails by 90% and after 2 years using Basecamp in the office, we realized that the office wasn't making sense anymore. Last december, we closed the office and the work is now being completely remote again, thanks to Basecamp. While we reckon that this might be a pretty radical decision that doesn't apply to all companies, it worked for us. We are pretty sure that we don't need an office, or else we can rollback this decision. As Jason Fried (of 37signals) has said in his talks: "decisions are temporary".
We truly believe that small teams can achieve great results if they communicate well, no matter where you work. Basecamp is the tool for this.
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