We’re almost ready to submit to the app stores, but this post is about something else we built, just for ourselves. It’s made me stop and think about “personal software”, a buzzword I’ve been hearing here and there.
The idea is that when building gets this easy, anyone can build for their own n of 1, down to every little specification their heart desires. There’s still a learning curve today, but I can see it getting easier fast, and it feels like a big shift in how we think about software.
Once we have real users, we need a way to review the catalogue errors people report and fix them, to check the card photos they submit, and to see what people are actually doing in the app. One way to do that is to sign up for a ticketing tool, a dashboard tool and so on, then figure out how to make them all talk to each other. We looked at that and thought we could probably build it ourselves, and probably do it better for our very specific needs. So we did.
The catalogue is a good example. In April, corrections from a card dealer I work with went back and forth as spreadsheets, and things slipped through in the handovers, including one whole round that got silently dropped. Now he edits the catalogue directly in the admin tool, every change is logged, and any of them can be undone with one click.
Or the card photos. We want to build up a library of real photos people take of their own cards, but each one needs checking before anyone else sees it, card by card and variant by variant. No off-the-shelf ticketing tool does that.
Dashboards on their own are pretty standard, and we could have bought those. But after years across product and commercial roles, I had a pretty clear idea of what I wanted to see, and at this zero-to-one stage, being able to rip everything up and change it as we learn is really useful. So we built that too.
That’s not to say off-the-shelf software has no place. We still use PostHog for analytics and session recordings, because it does that specific, harder thing really well, and crash reporting will be next.
I suspect this is where software is heading. Some of the “easy” things will just become personal software, while the deep, specialist things are still better left to the experts. There is a cost to maintaining your own software, of course, but for now, the trade feels very worth it.