Highrise

» see highrisehq.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

highrise was a CRM for small teams. i was in university in ankara in 2007 with no clients to track. by the time i was adjacent to a real sales pipeline the whole segment had shifted to hubspot and salesforce. highrise was one of those products i knew about from reading getting real and rework at the university library, not from ever opening the app.

37signals had launched basecamp in 2004 and backpack in 2005. highrise was the third product, shipped on 20 march 2007 with the same rails aesthetic and calm design, contacts and follow-ups in a place small teams could search. david heinemeier hansson and jason fried were still active on the signal-vs-noise blog and each launch got maybe an hour on hacker news and a wave of small-shop signups.

in 2014 37signals rebranded to just basecamp, with the flagship product taking the company name. highrise got the spinout treatment: nathan kontny took the ceo seat and a small independent team ran it out of chicago for the next four years. the pitch was that a focused team could keep evolving the product where basecamp could not spare the attention.

by early 2018 the math had not worked. basecamp folded highrise back in-house in april. jason fried wrote a post in august announcing that after eleven years the product would stop taking new signups on 20 august 2018 and would run in maintenance mode for existing customers. no shutdown date was set. accounts stayed open. no new features going forward, just security patches on a frozen codebase.

~ the case file ~

~ the spinout that did not work ~

kontny was a serial founder who had sold his previous startup draft to acompli which itself got bought by microsoft. he ran highrise like an independent product from the chicago office for four years. the team was small. shipping was steady but incremental. by the time basecamp pulled it back the paid-user base had drifted rather than grown. some of that was salesforce compression from above, some was competitors like pipedrive and hubspot going after the same small-shop segment with harder feature velocity.

~ what frozen in amber means ~

37signals has a stated policy of running its old products "until the end of the internet". that is a real commitment for the tiny percentage of internet companies that mean it. highrise is one of that percentage. existing users can still log in in 2026, existing data is still exportable, existing billing still runs. no new customer will ever see the signup page. no one at 37signals is writing new highrise code. the product is not dead in the network sense but it is dead in the product sense.

~ what it leaves behind ~

highrise was proof that 37signals could ship three products at once. the retirement was proof that the same team could not run three products at once for eleven years without one of them fading. jason fried and dhh have written about the shift into what fried calls doing less. by 2018 basecamp was that less. highrise and its shelfmates from the 37signals catalog are the receipts for what got left off the ledger.

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