The Internet Publishing Company

We make stuff for the web.

Because it’s the most open platform. and because it’s possible to make good software for it.

Manifesto

Everyone in our team has a fondness for the web. All of us owe our careers (to different degrees) to the existence of the internet, and the people who made it what it is.

We’re also young enough to think we can do better.

We feel like the ways in which we think about software are different enough from the traditional playbook to deserve mentioning. So here’s a list of our values.

Thoughtful

We think that it’s worth working on tools that are novel enough to be genuine improvements over the current state of web software.

Sometimes that might involve writing a sync engine to enable an offline-first workflow, giving users a powerful theme editor, or spending months on the ontological details of a system.

Don’t dismiss new tools that promise improvements, don’t stuff in features that most users don’t want. And give them options to opt-out.

Sometimes it involves saying strong “no"s to feature requests.

To give you tools that work well, their intentional simplicity allowing them to be…

Lightweight

Between the spectrum of UNIX-style “do one thing and do it well” and the bloated offerings of many large SaaS providers, lies what we think of as “”. Software that does a particular set of things well, because those things should work together well.

Lightness is also how we want our apps to feel. No lag, only snappiness. We want you to be able to spin up and throw away pages, workspaces, projects and experiments. Or choose to move them around and keep what you want.

Deciding on this feature set And with this feature discipline comes a lightness on your wallet too…

Cheap

You can do things for way less money when you don’t have to pay $X00k salaries. When LLMs help write features that would take many hours of documentation-trawling and schleps. And, most importantly, when you have so much excellent tooling given to you through open source software.

When prices drop by 10x, it changes the nature of what you can do with things.

Suddenly, you can pay for website analytics without having to think about the price. You can run a once-a-month newsletter without having to be limited by Substack, or a $100+ a year subscription-based pricing for another provider.

So yes, we reject the gospel of “charge more”. But we’re not doing what companies with much deeper pockets can, which is giving away things for free. Our products are made for people who want to pay for them, but want a fair price and good service.

We don’t sell enterprise contracts to subsidise a free tier, or a customer service promise that adds to everyone’s bill. If things break, we fix them quickly – but first we try to prevent that from happening in the first place…

Robust

We try to minimise dependencies wherever possible. The tools and infrastructure we use are chosen for their lack of lock-in and flexibility.

Nobody wants to receive the “Our Incredible Journey” email.

When you are more careful in this way, daily use is also more robust.

Beautiful

To the discerning user (and we like to think of all our users as discerning), how an app feels is a big deal. I’ve discarded apps for having poor whitespace before, and I’ll do it again.

To everyone else, how things feel has a more subtle impact on how they use it.

If you make something that looks like a toy, people will treat it as such. If you make something slightly ugly, you give people an extra excuse to not use it.

But we’re not Designers, we don’t want complete control for the sake of perfection. At the very least, we believe users should control as much of the visual UI as they can.

Web-first

Everything that is a list gets it’s own RSS feed. Everything that would be fun do data-viz with gets a nice API. We love hyperlinks, everything that could need to be shared is available as a link.

Embeds, collaboration.

We don’t have to deal with the problems that comes with release processes and AppStore bullying.