Our Manifesto

Context

Technology firms are bloated. Money was raised too easily in the past decade due to low interest rates. This has resulted in extreme over-hiring of staff and expansion into unrelated and irrelevant fields. This leads to many of their cash-cow verticals having to fund their other less successful ventures.

Here are some examples:

1. Google Graveyard - an impressive list of products that have tried and died. A ton has been spent on innovation, and we really don't see any product or vertical that has given them anything close to their cash cow, ads. Even today, Google Cloud, a massive focus for the company, hasn't even hit its yearly breakeven.
2. Grab Superapp - it has long been known that Grab has been gunning to become a superapp, first wrestling control of the ride-sharing economy in Singapore, then going into food delivery. Recently acquiring a digital banking license. Now they are going into insurance, financing, payments. There was a point in time where you could even purchase movie tickets on the app.

Furthermore, most of these tech firms are heavily funded, and have stakeholders pressing them in all directions. They are pressured to keep expanding endlessly, never settling for stagnation. This further exacerbates the bloat; expanding into markets or products that don't make sense, hiring and managing teams in regions that eventually get shut-down.

Due to bloat from hiring or over-expansion (builders would say scope-creep), prices for tech products have been on the rise. Ride-sharing and food-delivery applications charge obscene fees to support their massive operations, whilst having very little differentiation between each other.

Simple products that used to provide direct and no-nonsense utility are flooded with features that users barely use. This comes with ridiculous price tiers, with free tiers being hardly sufficient, and paid ones having such large price increments that small businesses or average joes aren't able to afford them. Meanwhile, enterprises get bulk discounts and preferentials rates.

The Theory

1. Keep the Team Small

Avoid manpower bloat at all cost. Do not bring in more personnel unless there is already a role that NEEDS to be filled. Keep the team lean and clean.

2. Build Smart

We build products that are based on the pareto principle. 20% of our blood, sweat and tears gets 80% of the result required for a functional product. We strip ideas of their extraneous fluff and bring it back down to simple.

3. Leverage on Modern Stacks

Web and app development today is cheap and fast, whilst yielding better results. Services like Vercel or Supabase remove complexity from development operations and allows us to focus on the truly valuable parts of the product - the business logic and user interface. We can keep tech costs low and margins sky-high. This allows us to keep prices low, and projects to perpetually sustain themselves.

4. Employee-ownership

Employee-owners feel greater accountability for both their own and their colleagues' job performance due to their shared interest in the company's success.