Home cooking
What I'm learning by building software only for people I know.
I’m trying to build software just for myself and the people close to me. Every user is in my contacts. That lets me skip most of the usual product work. There’s nothing to market and nothing to A/B test, and I don’t have to guess whether anyone uses the thing. I can ask them at dinner.
The software still has to be easy. The bar I’m aiming for: someone in my family can figure it out in ten seconds without texting me. I polish things so they’re easy to use, not so they hold attention.
Decisions get smaller too. I hardcode settings that a commercial product would make configurable. I skip the explanations that exist for strangers. I’m building for ten or twenty people, and I know all of them.
The circle stays loose. Someone will share a Tukur link with a person I’ve never met, and that’s fine. I cook for my family, and sometimes a friend brings a friend to dinner. The name comes from Robin Sloan’s essay “An app can be a home-cooked meal”, and I’m more or less following his recipe.
There’s no business model, and I’m not looking for one. Nothing here needs to collect anything from the people using it, so their data stays theirs.