6 ms·

In search of organic software

85 points by pketh 4y ago

altdataseller 4y ago
"I’m open to the idea of selling ~5-10% equity in Kinopio for to live a smoother life right now." And what would we get in exchange for that equity? Would you have a plan to give dividends to equity holders?
- pketh 4y ago
  yup that'd be one good option, I'm sure there are others as well. I think fundamentally rethinking the default assumption of investment models from taking many risky bets on 20x-100x return, to taking less risky/more-informed bets on 2-4x returns may also be something to look at
  - mathgladiator 4y ago
    I'm a fan of dividend model. All I really care about is my 8%. Although, with inflation, this will change.
  - joshmarinacci 4y ago
    Something more like the dividend model would be interesting to me. I'd be willing to do some small scale funding like that.
forgotmypw17 4y ago
I've chosen to develop my software as removed from the financial world as possible. I volunteer my time to work on it, and it receives only non-financial support for the most part. The only exception I've made is paying for web hosting, which is only a few hundred a year.
- pketh 4y ago
  I did this a couple times before building and focusing on kinopio.club full time. In my own personal experience, volunteering only worked with side-projects. If you can do more through volunteering effort that’s very impressive.
jabo 4y ago
One trait I’ve seen in “non-organic” software is the use of the Enterprise SaaS playbook. Start bottoms up, give away free or low/no margin services, gain adoption, capture the market, then with the pressure to grow, they start moving upmarket, go after 100K+ deals and raise prices, and eventually price out / fire vast chunks of their early adopters. Been personally bit by this a few times, so these days I tend to very cautious about adopting non-organic software, at least not without a backup plan. I’m a founder myself and this is one big concern I have about raising VC funds. Wrote about this here recently: https://typesense.org/blog/why-we-are-not-raising-funds/ https://typesense.org/blog/why-we-are-not-raising-funds/ I’ve also started to use the term customer-funded (similar to VC-funded), instead of “bootstrapped”, since the latter seems to give off an impression of early stage whereas the former is a conscious choice and state of being.
- pketh 4y ago
  > these days I tend to very cautious about adopting non-organic software I’ve noticed the same thing happening to myself and hope to avoid a future where consumers only feel like they can trust/adopt software developed by FAANG type companies) Really great blog post and ‘Customer-funded’ is a really good term. I agree, much better than bootstrapped UPDATE: read even more of your posts/product page… if/when I add full data search to kinopio, I’ll be looking at typesense first :)
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - jabo 4y ago
    > UPDATE:… Let me know when you do!
- polote 4y ago
  This is clearly not the enterprise playbook. The enterprise playbook is to sell on slides, iterate with a few customers and go after even bigger customers. Start small and trying to go upmarket is the normal playbook for a b2b smb company that is not growing anymore. Managing enterprise customers is easier than managing thousands or small companies. And it also create a natural barrier to entry
drewcoo 4y ago
Software that "grows organically" is usually used derisively, as opposed to software that was actually designed.
- pketh 4y ago
  The ‘organic’ term here is referring to funding, not design. That said ‘paving the cow paths’ can be a very effective way to build/design what people want. Another post of mine addresses this directly: https://pketh.org/how-i-build.html https://pketh.org/how-i-build.html
UnchartedSystem 4y ago
just wanted to say the actual mind mapping tool the author is building has is a stylish and cozy piece of software. The wii shop music remix attached to the pricing card made me grin.
- pketh 4y ago
  thanks I never know how much to self promote on HN :) if anyone else is looking for the mind-mapping software I build, it's at https://kinopio.club https://kinopio.club and there's no sign up required to use it
  - russellallen 4y ago
    It's great. The movable boxes and links between them remind me a lot of the Self programming language which I love, and the way the boxes wiggle when you pick them up is just genius.
    - pketh 4y ago
      Thanks, I appreciate that :D
ozten 4y ago
I think your vision aligns with some of the new bootstraping-friendly funding options like: TinySeed[1], CalmFund[2], Indie.vc, Earnest Captiol, etc. https://tinyseed.com/ https://tinyseed.com/ https://calmfund.com/ https://calmfund.com/
- pketh 4y ago
  Thanks ozten, ya I agree these both sound interesting and I'll investigate more
albertgoeswoof 4y ago
I’m in a similar boat with https://mailpace.com https://mailpace.com No funding, just a simple business that I enjoy building. If you create great software that delights your users, what more do you need?
- kaba0 4y ago
  Very nice landing page and product. Can’t help but ask, do you really not have an API for Java? Just seems strange that much smaller languages have example codes, yet such a behemoth doesn’t.
  - albertgoeswoof 4y ago
    We don’t have a Java library, yet, to be honest I haven’t worked with Java in 10 years. But we’ll build one soon, watch this space!
Animats 4y ago
This is what, in the UK, is called a "nice little earner".
mathgladiator 4y ago
I love this, and you can consider Adama as organic ( https://www.adama-platform.com https://www.adama-platform.com ). Basically, I'm retired and focused on building up a few products. My first step is a deep-deep investment in a back-end superpower. I'm wandering with no real user-focused goals, and the key reason it is early access is that I want to get some feedback. I am slowly working on a few improvements and building a roadmap for some neat things that I want to try, but I'm enjoying life now (and recovering physically). I'm tinkering with my next step which is a new reactive front-end template system which binds to my super back-end. I have a few theories about getting user value since I am basically do 3-5 start-ups in one. Appreciate the write up, and I'll integrate some of the language in how I present my "organic" software.
- pketh 4y ago
  we don't talk about this enough, or ever, but being retired and building software is kind of like a super power in this case
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
I write "organic" software. In today's software industry, people not only don't care about Quality; they are actively hostile towards it. It almost seems to be a race to the bottom. If it isn't scaled into millions of users, billions of dollars, or gigantic numbers of GH stars, then it's not worth anything, and anyone that works in a way that treats software development as a craft, is treated in a rather shabby fashion. I don't particularly care (anymore), but I probably would, if I were trying to make money. It used to make me rather upset, but these days, I'm more amused, than anything else.
- pketh 4y ago
  > people not only don't care about Quality; they are actively hostile towards it. It almost seems to be a race to the bottom. I think this largely depends on industry and platform. e.g. quality isn't how enterprise software is sold and is therefore not an appreciated trait. e.g.2. selling quality software on the iOS app store is like trying to sell a ferrari in a literal dollar store. It's going to be an uphill battle.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
    > e.g.2. selling quality software on the iOS app store is like trying to sell a ferrari in a literal dollar store. It's going to be an uphill battle. That's a problem. The iOS App Store was initially founded as a "dollar store," but has become more and more expensive, over the years. I think that most of the apps that I've paid for, are in the $10-$40 range. A couple are ongoing in-app "subscriptions." The only non-free app that I sell, is a countdown timer. I ask $0.99 for it, in the vain hope that, one day, I might recoup the localization costs (about $1,300), but I don't especially care, whether or not I ever do. I certainly couldn't ask for more, with a straight face. I'll be releasing a total rewrite of it in a few days, when I get back the localization files. Most of what I do is free, and I've yanked about 20 apps off the store, when they get "long in the tooth."
theIntuitionist 4y ago
I think “organic” is prob the wrong word. It’s already a rather tortured word, even in just the farming world where it’s legislated. My brother, a small organic farmer with about 5 acres really groaned recently when telling me that hydroponic veggies can be labeled organic. And when I see it on non-far products (like salt, which is a real example that will make any nerd’s hair stand on end), it just feels like intentionally misleading marketing, not an honest description. Anyway, I have a real soft spot for the sort of software the author talks about. I think of shops who build software like this as “design build”. Like in the construction world where design build means a small shop focused on overall quality and fit of the home to its owner, not scale or economy, etc. maybe that is a phrase that works?
- hmmdar 4y ago
  I recently had a similar experience. I purchased a bag of citric acid, and it was boldly labeled as non-GMO and "approved for use with organic food".
  - AussieWog93 4y ago
    Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/641/ https://xkcd.com/641/
  - nanomonkey 4y ago
    That is because most citric acid is made in genetically modified black mold grown on GMO produced corn syrup. Sounds crazy, but it's true, and likely pretty safe. A similar process is used to produce most vitamin C supplements.
- pketh 4y ago
  I was thinking about that while coming up with the term. IRL 'organic' food labelling has a lot of real problems, some bordering on scam. Despite that, shoppers in a grocery store have generally the same overall idea of what organic food is Supposed to be. That ideal/supposed state is what I wanted to build off from to have a term that speaks to regular people. It's definitely not a perfect parallel in lots of ways. That said, I think this may be one of those times where the perfect (e.g. requiring the technically perfect word) may be the enemy of the good (of communicating important consumer information to people.) To that end, I tried to keep the criteria of 'organic software' very short and free of exceptions.
eternityforest 4y ago
I usually treat anything that isn't open source, or a product that makes multiple billions of dollars and is totally entrenched in industry, as basically disposable. I will use it, especially if it's free/youretheproductware, if it's convenient, but I don't want to build anything on top of it. I don't want to create anything with it that can't be ported elsewhere. With open source it's a lot more comfortable to say "This appears to be popular and will be around for a long time, I don't need to start thinking about alternatives". Occasionally in some areas it's helpful to keep alternatives in mind in case something better comes along, but some things are already near universal.
- pketh 4y ago
  that's understandable, and also a harbinger of a future I'd like to help prevent. There's lots of great commercial software that's worth paying for and that isn't made by megacorps
mro_name 4y ago
I like the term and idea. Watch out for permacomputing[1]. I found it via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27199225 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27199225 [1] http://viznut.fi/texts-en/permacomputing.html http://viznut.fi/texts-en/permacomputing.html
mro_name 4y ago
I watch out for the scale. Has the organisation/corporation any similarity with mine/me? So e.g. at a farmers market, I don't care about organic in the first place. I can look the vendor in the eye and build trust. If they say organic, nice. They better not spend too much of an effort on certification. That invites cheating. The trust has to be personal. And that is a harsh limit for scaling. So if I am an individual or small entity, I prefer business with other small entities. If I am a big one, likewise. The latter we see all over the place. The former we should more, too, and rely far less on the megacorps.

85 points by pketh 4y ago

"I’m open to the idea of selling ~5-10% equity in Kinopio for to live a smoother life right now." And what would we get in exchange for that equity? Would you have a plan to give dividends to equity holders?

pketh 4y ago
yup that'd be one good option, I'm sure there are others as well. I think fundamentally rethinking the default assumption of investment models from taking many risky bets on 20x-100x return, to taking less risky/more-informed bets on 2-4x returns may also be something to look at
- mathgladiator 4y ago
  I'm a fan of dividend model. All I really care about is my 8%. Although, with inflation, this will change.
- joshmarinacci 4y ago
  Something more like the dividend model would be interesting to me. I'd be willing to do some small scale funding like that.

forgotmypw17 4y ago

I've chosen to develop my software as removed from the financial world as possible. I volunteer my time to work on it, and it receives only non-financial support for the most part. The only exception I've made is paying for web hosting, which is only a few hundred a year.

pketh 4y ago
I did this a couple times before building and focusing on kinopio.club full time. In my own personal experience, volunteering only worked with side-projects. If you can do more through volunteering effort that’s very impressive.

jabo 4y ago

One trait I’ve seen in “non-organic” software is the use of the Enterprise SaaS playbook. Start bottoms up, give away free or low/no margin services, gain adoption, capture the market, then with the pressure to grow, they start moving upmarket, go after 100K+ deals and raise prices, and eventually price out / fire vast chunks of their early adopters. Been personally bit by this a few times, so these days I tend to very cautious about adopting non-organic software, at least not without a backup plan. I’m a founder myself and this is one big concern I have about raising VC funds. Wrote about this here recently: https://typesense.org/blog/why-we-are-not-raising-funds/ https://typesense.org/blog/why-we-are-not-raising-funds/ I’ve also started to use the term customer-funded (similar to VC-funded), instead of “bootstrapped”, since the latter seems to give off an impression of early stage whereas the former is a conscious choice and state of being.

pketh 4y ago
> these days I tend to very cautious about adopting non-organic software I’ve noticed the same thing happening to myself and hope to avoid a future where consumers only feel like they can trust/adopt software developed by FAANG type companies) Really great blog post and ‘Customer-funded’ is a really good term. I agree, much better than bootstrapped UPDATE: read even more of your posts/product page… if/when I add full data search to kinopio, I’ll be looking at typesense first :)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- jabo 4y ago
  > UPDATE:… Let me know when you do!
polote 4y ago
This is clearly not the enterprise playbook. The enterprise playbook is to sell on slides, iterate with a few customers and go after even bigger customers. Start small and trying to go upmarket is the normal playbook for a b2b smb company that is not growing anymore. Managing enterprise customers is easier than managing thousands or small companies. And it also create a natural barrier to entry

drewcoo 4y ago

Software that "grows organically" is usually used derisively, as opposed to software that was actually designed.

pketh 4y ago
The ‘organic’ term here is referring to funding, not design. That said ‘paving the cow paths’ can be a very effective way to build/design what people want. Another post of mine addresses this directly: https://pketh.org/how-i-build.html https://pketh.org/how-i-build.html

UnchartedSystem 4y ago

just wanted to say the actual mind mapping tool the author is building has is a stylish and cozy piece of software. The wii shop music remix attached to the pricing card made me grin.

pketh 4y ago
thanks I never know how much to self promote on HN :) if anyone else is looking for the mind-mapping software I build, it's at https://kinopio.club https://kinopio.club and there's no sign up required to use it
- russellallen 4y ago
  It's great. The movable boxes and links between them remind me a lot of the Self programming language which I love, and the way the boxes wiggle when you pick them up is just genius.
  - pketh 4y ago
    Thanks, I appreciate that :D

ozten 4y ago

I think your vision aligns with some of the new bootstraping-friendly funding options like: TinySeed[1], CalmFund[2], Indie.vc, Earnest Captiol, etc. https://tinyseed.com/ https://tinyseed.com/ https://calmfund.com/ https://calmfund.com/

pketh 4y ago
Thanks ozten, ya I agree these both sound interesting and I'll investigate more

albertgoeswoof 4y ago

I’m in a similar boat with https://mailpace.com https://mailpace.com No funding, just a simple business that I enjoy building. If you create great software that delights your users, what more do you need?

kaba0 4y ago
Very nice landing page and product. Can’t help but ask, do you really not have an API for Java? Just seems strange that much smaller languages have example codes, yet such a behemoth doesn’t.
- albertgoeswoof 4y ago
  We don’t have a Java library, yet, to be honest I haven’t worked with Java in 10 years. But we’ll build one soon, watch this space!

Animats 4y ago

This is what, in the UK, is called a "nice little earner".

mathgladiator 4y ago

I love this, and you can consider Adama as organic ( https://www.adama-platform.com https://www.adama-platform.com ). Basically, I'm retired and focused on building up a few products. My first step is a deep-deep investment in a back-end superpower. I'm wandering with no real user-focused goals, and the key reason it is early access is that I want to get some feedback. I am slowly working on a few improvements and building a roadmap for some neat things that I want to try, but I'm enjoying life now (and recovering physically). I'm tinkering with my next step which is a new reactive front-end template system which binds to my super back-end. I have a few theories about getting user value since I am basically do 3-5 start-ups in one. Appreciate the write up, and I'll integrate some of the language in how I present my "organic" software.

pketh 4y ago
we don't talk about this enough, or ever, but being retired and building software is kind of like a super power in this case

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

I write "organic" software. In today's software industry, people not only don't care about Quality; they are actively hostile towards it. It almost seems to be a race to the bottom. If it isn't scaled into millions of users, billions of dollars, or gigantic numbers of GH stars, then it's not worth anything, and anyone that works in a way that treats software development as a craft, is treated in a rather shabby fashion. I don't particularly care (anymore), but I probably would, if I were trying to make money. It used to make me rather upset, but these days, I'm more amused, than anything else.

pketh 4y ago
> people not only don't care about Quality; they are actively hostile towards it. It almost seems to be a race to the bottom. I think this largely depends on industry and platform. e.g. quality isn't how enterprise software is sold and is therefore not an appreciated trait. e.g.2. selling quality software on the iOS app store is like trying to sell a ferrari in a literal dollar store. It's going to be an uphill battle.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  > e.g.2. selling quality software on the iOS app store is like trying to sell a ferrari in a literal dollar store. It's going to be an uphill battle. That's a problem. The iOS App Store was initially founded as a "dollar store," but has become more and more expensive, over the years. I think that most of the apps that I've paid for, are in the $10-$40 range. A couple are ongoing in-app "subscriptions." The only non-free app that I sell, is a countdown timer. I ask $0.99 for it, in the vain hope that, one day, I might recoup the localization costs (about $1,300), but I don't especially care, whether or not I ever do. I certainly couldn't ask for more, with a straight face. I'll be releasing a total rewrite of it in a few days, when I get back the localization files. Most of what I do is free, and I've yanked about 20 apps off the store, when they get "long in the tooth."

theIntuitionist 4y ago

I think “organic” is prob the wrong word. It’s already a rather tortured word, even in just the farming world where it’s legislated. My brother, a small organic farmer with about 5 acres really groaned recently when telling me that hydroponic veggies can be labeled organic. And when I see it on non-far products (like salt, which is a real example that will make any nerd’s hair stand on end), it just feels like intentionally misleading marketing, not an honest description. Anyway, I have a real soft spot for the sort of software the author talks about. I think of shops who build software like this as “design build”. Like in the construction world where design build means a small shop focused on overall quality and fit of the home to its owner, not scale or economy, etc. maybe that is a phrase that works?

hmmdar 4y ago
I recently had a similar experience. I purchased a bag of citric acid, and it was boldly labeled as non-GMO and "approved for use with organic food".
- AussieWog93 4y ago
  Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/641/ https://xkcd.com/641/
- nanomonkey 4y ago
  That is because most citric acid is made in genetically modified black mold grown on GMO produced corn syrup. Sounds crazy, but it's true, and likely pretty safe. A similar process is used to produce most vitamin C supplements.
pketh 4y ago
I was thinking about that while coming up with the term. IRL 'organic' food labelling has a lot of real problems, some bordering on scam. Despite that, shoppers in a grocery store have generally the same overall idea of what organic food is Supposed to be. That ideal/supposed state is what I wanted to build off from to have a term that speaks to regular people. It's definitely not a perfect parallel in lots of ways. That said, I think this may be one of those times where the perfect (e.g. requiring the technically perfect word) may be the enemy of the good (of communicating important consumer information to people.) To that end, I tried to keep the criteria of 'organic software' very short and free of exceptions.

eternityforest 4y ago

I usually treat anything that isn't open source, or a product that makes multiple billions of dollars and is totally entrenched in industry, as basically disposable. I will use it, especially if it's free/youretheproductware, if it's convenient, but I don't want to build anything on top of it. I don't want to create anything with it that can't be ported elsewhere. With open source it's a lot more comfortable to say "This appears to be popular and will be around for a long time, I don't need to start thinking about alternatives". Occasionally in some areas it's helpful to keep alternatives in mind in case something better comes along, but some things are already near universal.

pketh 4y ago
that's understandable, and also a harbinger of a future I'd like to help prevent. There's lots of great commercial software that's worth paying for and that isn't made by megacorps

mro_name 4y ago

I like the term and idea. Watch out for permacomputing[1]. I found it via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27199225 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27199225 [1] http://viznut.fi/texts-en/permacomputing.html http://viznut.fi/texts-en/permacomputing.html

mro_name 4y ago

I watch out for the scale. Has the organisation/corporation any similarity with mine/me? So e.g. at a farmers market, I don't care about organic in the first place. I can look the vendor in the eye and build trust. If they say organic, nice. They better not spend too much of an effort on certification. That invites cheating. The trust has to be personal. And that is a harsh limit for scaling. So if I am an individual or small entity, I prefer business with other small entities. If I am a big one, likewise. The latter we see all over the place. The former we should more, too, and rely far less on the megacorps.