Independent Businesses on the Web

At Hubbub, we help small independent shops compete with the supermarkets, because we believe this leads to thriving local communities. There was a great article on A List Apart this week taking that same principle as a metaphor for businesses on the web:

I am happy with my small shopkeeper status. I talk and write about bootstrapping because I want to show other developers that there is a sane and achievable route to launching a product, a route that doesn’t involve chasing funding rounds or becoming beholden to a board of investors. I love the fact that decisions for my product can be made by the two of us, based on the discussions we have with our customers. If we had investors hoping for a return on their investment, it would be a very different product by now, and I don’t think a better one.

I think it is important for those of us succeeding at this to talk about it.

I found the article fascinating on the back of a year working at Hubbub, but also as an independent developer essentially running my own software company on the side. This has been a fantastic year for my PrayerMate app, and in many ways, I feel like I’m only just getting started, with some seriously major updates coming up in the next few months. Being a one-man team has its drawbacks, but I also love being able to build a product that I want to use myself without being beholden to anybody else’s agenda for what features I should be adding, and without the pressure of it being my primary source of income (not that I wouldn’t love to be able to devote more time to it if sales picked up enough!)