Somebody asked us last week what our differentiator is. The honest answer is that everyone here is a geek, and we have organised the company around not fixing that.

We mean geek in the load-bearing sense. The people here read the changelog before the release notes. They have opinions about date libraries. They will spend a Sunday working out why a list scrolls at 58fps instead of 60 — not because a ticket asked them to, but because the 58 was bothering them.

Who is actually here

Mobile developers who argue about navigation architecture. A backend person who treats every external API as guilty until proven idempotent. A designer who once sent a screenshot with two red arrows on it and the message “this is one pixel out and I can't look at it any more” — and was right. And one of us genuinely enjoys reading tax legislation, which is how we found out what an LLC in Wyoming costs to run.

What we do not have: a growth hacker, a head of synergy, or anyone whose entire output is a document about work.

How the work actually runs

Asynchronously, mostly, because we are not all in one time zone and pretending otherwise makes everyone lie about their calendar. There is no daily stand-up. There is a channel per app, and the rule is that you post what you broke as readily as what you fixed.

Ship day is Friday, which is supposedly the worst day to ship. It works for us because it forces the honest conversation on Wednesday: is this actually done, or is it done-shaped? Anything that is only done-shaped waits a week. Nothing has ever been improved by shipping it into a weekend nobody is watching.

If you wouldn't install it, we don't build it. That single rule has killed more of our ideas than any market research ever would have.

The four rules we actually keep

  • If you wouldn't install it, we don't build it. Every app on our list has at least one person here who is its intended user.
  • No dark patterns. No fake urgency, no cancel button hidden three screens deep, no “are you sure you want to lose all your progress” when there is no progress to lose.
  • No account unless the app needs one. A fuel price does not need your email address.
  • The free tier has to be genuinely useful. Not a demo with the good parts removed.

Everyone gets a day for their own weird idea

One day a week is unallocated. You can spend it on your own thing, and you are expected to show it even if it did not work. Two of the apps on our current roadmap started on one of those days, and one of them started as a joke about how nobody can ever find a toilet in a city they do not know.

That is the whole strategy. Hire people who cannot stop building things, then get out of the way and do the paperwork for them.