Growth

Oct 13, 2026

• Intercom

  Basecamp's Jason Fried on product strategy - The Intercom Blog

  Jason Fried, co-founder of Basecamp, discusses the company’s approach to product strategy, including when to undertake a major product overhaul. Basecamp releases ground-up versions every few years when incremental updates reach a local maximum, and it supports older versions indefinitely to avoid forcing customers onto its schedule. Fried argues that a chat-first communication mindset can be toxic and that Basecamp’s tools are designed for asynchronous, organized communication rather than real-time chat. Despite generating tens of millions in revenue and profits, Basecamp deliberately keeps its team small to avoid the pressure of a large organization and to focus on creating great work. Fried advocates for careful growth over rapid scaling, a philosophy he plans to explore in a future book titled “Regrow.”

• Intercom

  Brian Balfour on creating meaningful growth - The Intercom Blog

  Brian Balfour, VP of Growth at HubSpot, defines a growth team as distinct from product and marketing, focusing on getting the target audience to experience core product value quickly and often. He argues that the lines between marketing and product have blurred due to technical, data-driven marketing and accelerating growth speeds, necessitating a new team structure. Growth teams should not build core product value but rather optimize the funnel, such as onboarding, referral, and engagement, using a rapid experimentation process. Balfour warns against chasing vanity metrics and emphasizes that growth is a mentality and process, not just tactics, and that the right time to build a growth team is after clear product-market fit, typically around Series B. He recommends getting executive buy-in, educating across teams, and securing early wins with data to overcome skepticism and establish the growth team’s value.