Naming Basecamp  

Jason Fried discusses how 37signals decided to drop the “Next” from Basecamp Next, on Signal vs. Noise:

More debates, more discussions, more certainty, more uncertainty. This was good and healthy. We weren’t in a rush to pick a name and launch next week. But we also wanted to make a call so we could begin thinking about the transition and how we’d start talking about this new thing we were building.

So we called Jeff Bezos and asked him for his opinion. This was December 2011. The conversation went on for over an hour, but at one point he asked us why we weren’t comfortable calling the new product Basecamp and renaming the current version Basecamp Classic. It was a good question. We’d been asking ourselves this question for months, and coming up with different answers each time.

Having someone on the outside ask us this question really helped us think it through. It’s one thing to ask yourself something. It’s another thing entirely to explain yourself to someone.

This is the single most valuable function of good investors.