Leaving Basecamp: Rolling Out Our First ERP

In November 2021 we rolled out ERPNext across Karkhana.io — the company's first real ERP. Until then we ran everything on Basecamp. This is the short story of how we got there.

It started with mapping our Moments of Truth — every point where our work touched a customer or another team. Doing that surfaced a pile of problems and opportunities, and one clear conclusion: we needed a genuinely data-driven way of working, not just a place to park tasks. That pointed at an ERP. After a lot of research and exactly 43 discussions, we settled on ERPNext.

From the 2nd of August we went deep. Documentation, forums, YouTube, consultants — whatever it took to learn the thing inside out. We didn't just want to rebuild Basecamp in a new tool; we wanted something more collaborative and more data-oriented than what we were leaving behind.

So we experimented. Add data, check it, analyse the flow, delete it, re-add it — over and over until the process fit the way we actually think and work. We had late-night debates over features most people would call trivial, because those are the ones you touch every day. In one installation alone we made around 379 customisations.

Sometimes unwinding all those customisations got more painful than starting fresh. So we started fresh. Across roughly four months we stood up about eight different installations before one of them felt right enough to hand to everyone.

That's the part I didn't expect to matter as much as it did. Somewhere in those eight installs I stopped thinking like operations and started thinking like product — obsessing over the daily flow, the small frictions, whether people would actually adopt it. It's a habit I've carried into everything I've built since.

The price of doing the same old thing is far higher than the price of change.

We left Basecamp behind that day. Godspeed.