37Signals becomes the richest SaaS company

37Signals, the developer of online project management service Basecamp, according to the recent investment round, has become the most expensive company in the Internet services market. The group of investors, led by Yardstick Capital and Institutionalized Venture Partners purchased 0.000000001% of the company for $1. So, the potential 37Signals' market price has increased to about $100 billions. This was officially  announced in the company blog. During the company-wide meeting, dedicated to this event, Jason Fried (37Signals founder), announced, that all SaaS applications, developed by 37Signals, including Basecamp, will become free in order to attract more users and to reach the estimated userbase already in 2013.

We would remind that according to the company's business plan they plan to have 12 billions of users. Aanandamayee Bhatnagar, the professor at Grenada State’s Schnook School of Business, says that this number is not so outlandish. How will the company overcome the fact that there are only 6.8 billion
people alive today? “Why limit users to people?” he said.

Regarding the announced 37Signals market price, the professor also considers that it's close to truth: "I always evaluate company price using the following formula: [(Twitter followers x Facebook fans) + (# of
employees x 1000)] x (RSS subscribers + daily page views) + (monthly
burn rate x Google’s stock price)2 and then double it if they use Ruby on Rails. Of course, it's an empiric formula, but mostly gives realistic results."

Of course, we don't know if the professor has a personal interest in providing such information, but the guys in 37Signals are definitely having fun.

See also: Top 10 Project Management software