What customers are doing with their Basecamp Backups – Part 2

This is a continuation of the posts on what customers are using our product for. Many of them are using them beyond the original idea that we had for the product which has been really interesting to us. We’ve been working hard to make things work better for these alternate uses in order to make them be main stream uses. The usage scenario I’ll talk about here is that of a user who is migrating away from Basecamp to another tool. For whatever reason, this is actually pretty common. Some people are unhappy with Basecamp, some have outgrown it and are in need of a project management tool that has more process associated with it, and some others have been mandated to use another tool by their corporate structures. Many of these customers have come to us to export all of their data, files and Writeboards from Basecamp so that they can migrate them to other tools. These customers are looking for a one time snapshot of their Basecamp accounts before they close the account.

We knew that some people would want to do this, but it didn’t really hit us that we needed to support it immediately until we were chatting with a customer about why he was cancelling our service, this customer told us, “the real problem I was trying to solve was archiving the Writeboards because we are moving off of Basecamp”. We did actually support, in a round about way. Essentially customers could sign up and use our product to get their snapshot and then cancel their account as this customer was doing. But they were all telling us that our service was such a time saver to them that they wanted to pay us for it. Another customer told us “it (Centripetal Retrieve) was the only solution I could find for backing up files and Writeboards in Basecamp. I was setup and scheduled for backup in five minutes. Once I confirmed a successful backup, I was no longer worried about losing my content because I'm finally guaranteed a local copy. It is a simple product that does what it says well and I appreciate that. I just need a way to pay you for it now!” The payment for a one time export is the part we didn’t support! We’ve now fixed this by providing 2 separate one time export plans that allow a customer to get a complete snapshot of all their data, files and Writeboards delivered to their Dropbox of FTP accounts and be done with it.

We now also provide a free trial plan that will give you a test trial to make sure that our product will do what you are looking for. This plan will backup all the data, files and Writeboards from one Basecamp project and deliver it to your Dropbox or FTP. We’re also in the testing phase of a DVD service that will allow you to get that export delivered to you on DVD. We’re super excited about that one!