“Sometimes the best way to know what your app should be is to know what it shouldn’t be. Figure out your app’s enemy and you’ll shine a light on where you need to go.

When we decided to create project management software, we knew Microsoft Project was the gorilla in the room. Instead of fearing the gorilla, we used it as a motivator. We decided Basecamp would be something completely different, the anti-Project.” 37Signals, Getting Real

These little paragraphs are really responsible in a lot of ways for Staction being around. They’re also responsible for it almost not happening at all. It’s totally true that there is nothing greater to motivate you than working in opposition of something you firmly believe is wrong. But it’s maybe not always the best thing to do…

We drank the punch when we started building Staction. We took 37s’s advice to pick a giant to slay. Granted, when they wrote those lines, they might not have imagined themselves as the giant -but that’s a bit irrelevant. We wanted to see if we could out do Basecamp. Maybe it’s a stupid idea to take on one of the most loved companies online. We’d like to believe that there’s no harm in giving it a shot.

To be honest, we never dreamt of building something that would supplant Basecamp as the premier project management app. But we did think there was a corner of the market to steal. For web nerds, Basecamp feels a bit slow. It’s a little tedious. The first time any of us tried Twitter, we sensed that calm breeze you sometimes feel when you know things are changing. Here was simplicity. Just one box! Twitter is just one text box! But if you’re creative, you can do nearly everything Basecamp can do with just that one text box.

That was day one of Staction actually. A couple of Twitter accounts set to private, and a bit of imagination. We were building on the @, and # language that has evolved naturally within Twitter. We swapped fast notes, sent our time records, sent todos, and basically went about business. It was great, and sucky all at once. The best part was that we no longer had to spend so much time navigating the tree of Basecamp to log entries. The bad part was that it was basically impossible to remember all of out invented syntax to keep things straight.

It was inspiring though. We were actually enjoying project communication more than we had since our first experience years ago with Basecamp. It was fast, simple, and we felt more aware of what other people in our company were doing than ever.

That experiment eventually wanderingly led to Staction. Stacks of action. We evolved the tagging system. Invented a quick reference tag bar that was accessible via the keyboard, and the mouse. Had most of the simplicity of Twitter, but added project management features that make Basecamp great.

Did we slay the giant? No. Did we make a meaningful contribution to the PM space. Absolutely. We think Staction will be a success for the audience we’re targeting. Small focused groups who communicate lots during the day. Groups that think Basecamp feels like too much overhead for the types of communication they really want to do.

If we had it to do all over again what would we change? Quite a bit actually. The whole “picking your enemy” thing has been a distraction for us. We started out trying to fix Basecamp. We started out making something in opposition of something else, rather than something that evolved on it’s own.

A few months back we junked a considerable chunk of Staction. We scrapped it because it had no place in our app. The deleted pieces were consolations we were making in our imagined quest to compete. We forgot that the internet is a big place. It’s easy to get caught up thinking it’s small because there is an immediacy in communication. There is a directness in our ability to see the work of others. We should have let it be an inspiration, but not a focus. That whole time we were building something to combat Basecamp, our app was yelling at us to follow it’s own path. Thankfully, eventually we listened.

-“Staction”:http://staction.com is currently in private beta. If you want to see if you’re one of the people we had in mind when we designed it, – sign up for our email list to try it out.