Makes me so happy to see people like this exist. All good software, really all good software, is indie small ones made with love and care whose authors also lived a good life outside of the cubicle mess. (I know about the exaggeration, but really, 95% of what I love is indie software, you don't find that kind of creativity and love in any company)
> I was getting married and I volunteered to do the seating plan for our wedding reception. It sounded like a relatively straightforward optimization problem, as we only had 60 guests and no family feuds to worry about. But it was surprisingly difficult to get right.
Man, this sounds way too familiar!
Great read. This was particularly funny.
> A mock-up of PerfectTablePlan, including icons I did myself, was used without our permission by Sony in their ‘Big day’ TV comedy series. I threated them with legal action. Years later, I am still awaiting a reply.
Now compare the longevity and sustainability of this software product to VC-funded startups, which are more like blips on the radar before they disappear by going bankrupt or getting acquired.
Having multiple people in a company does not guarantee that it will stick around. People saying "but it's a one-person business, I can't trust it in the long term" are wrong.
Living legend! Lifestyle biz bootstrappers ftw.
Since I cannot ask you your actual ARR, can you answer if you believe it's feasible to reach high 7 figures/low 8 figures in ARR as a solopreneur over a long period of time? I don't mean 1 year $10M ARR AI trendy apps, but a consistent $10M ARR business year after year >20 years.
Excellent read. I was happy for the author while I was reading it, looks like it was and still is an amazing journey.
By the way, some engineers are dream with working at FAANG, others to create a million dollars startup. My dreams was always something like this: work on a niche piece of software that solves a problem for a subset of people. Give them a something that avoids a headache for them, deliver value, and get paid. You aren't going tonbe millionaire, but it's going to be a nice ride.
> A well known wedding magazine ran a promotion with a valid licence key clearly visible in a photograph of a PerfectTablePlan CD. I worked through the night to release a new version of PerfectTablePlan that didn’t work with this key.
This is weird to me on several levels.
- Why would it require "working through the night" to blacklist a key? In large enterprise software, sure. But in a one-person project?
- If past versions still work with the leaked license key, what does this solve? If someone wanted to steal your software, they'd find a key anyway, no?
[Edit]: But a very cool project and a nice writeup! I enjoyed! Good luck!
Kudos to you. The only piece of software I wrote was open source and could never find a way to monetize it beyond consulting and VC funding. A sustainable long term business selling a piece of software that just works is all we could ever hope for as developers.
This post makes me nostalgic for the old Joel on Software forums.
Nice one! I would expect more versions of PerfectTablePlan all these years, going from v1 to v7 is roughly 3 years per major release ;-)
I’ve used (and paid for) BBEdit, for more than 30 years.
Ok that Perfect table plan software looks amazing. I so wish I could work on something like this. A standalone desktop app that solves a need and that people keep coming back to year after year, that people love, that people will buy.
You are living the dream!
> The lowest point was the pandemic, when sales pretty much dropped to zero.
Don't know why there wasn't a perfect table plan 6-foot edition.
I remember going to an event where someone took out one of those segmented collapsing ruler things to put people a minimum distance apart.
> but I preferred to keep it as a lifestyle business
Can we please retire this term? It’s a business. Moreover, it’s a real business, with profit and risk and product and customers, which is a lot more than many investor-funded businesses can say.
The fact that it’s flexible and even enjoyable? Wunderbar. And it doesn’t even require foosball tables or free snacks or an in-house masseuse or an on-site gym.
This is awesome and I love stories like this. I miss installable software.
"It has seated royalty, celebrities and heads of state"
Reminded me that there really are more potential attack vectors in software than one would think. Not immediately sure what a bad actor could do with manipulating or stealing seating charts but I'm sure thre's something.
> web. But I couldn’t face rewriting PerfectTablePlan from scratch for the web.
Someone will develop for the web. But perhaps you don't want to make it easier to clone.
Building a business to sell for your retirement funds would need much more work and would get more money if SaaS for Planners? Unless you sell your engine to a wedding planner software specialist.
The browser as a platform is daunting (touch support, small screen support, CSS, HTML, DOM, connections, browser versions, frameworks).
> Javascript. Ugh.
I personally never found JavaScript to be the problem - I think a single developer can good engineering workarounds. Avoid the bad parts.
I developed for the browser using JavaScript: without using frameworks because my engineering was better than what was available. I personally would still avoid a frameworks unless I needed accessibility (which is crazy hard to support).
> Also PerfectTablePlan is quite compute intensive, using a genetic algorithm to generate an automated seating plan and I felt it was better running this on the customer’s local computers than my server. And some of my customers consider their seating plans to be confidential
Sounds like a price point: standalone should be more expensive. However likely difficult to hit that enterprise sale point (re patio11?)? Ideally you want to charge expensive wedding planners much more. Low end planners could still use your web version.
I assume you've had competitors that have sunk because you are best value for money?
Loved the writeup.
I'm guessing I've written a bunch of ignorant stuff - I'm just practicing my thinking by writing... Most important, I presume you're looking forward to finishing up and not doing more work. I was.
Reading this gave me a lot of hope.
I started selling software licenses this year, and I would be very happy if I were able to write a post like this about the same software 20 years from now!
Does it still use a genetic algorithm and is this necessary? I'd guess there is some kind of MIP or IP solver solution that you can just call out to, but that could be extremely wrong for all I know.
Loved this post! It's my dream too to come up with an idea for software that doesn't exist, that I can build, and that people are willing to pay me for ;)
After 15+ year building stuff for others I would totally like to have one app that earns money and I don’t get requirements from bunch of business people.
You're living the dream, great work.
Looks like an impressive bit of software and not some flash in the plan disruption nonsense.
> It is about 145,000 lines of C++.
Huge respect for maintaining such a large codebase.
Love it. Keep on keepin' on.
What's not mentioned is marketing. I tried a couple of queries into Google, and this software didn't come up. I wonder what a couple k of marketing and ad spend a would do for revenue. There's clearly a need for this kind of software, and little bit of marketing could help others find it when they need it.
Very cool! Yet:
I found out that CDs are edible
It's cool to see a product that apparently uses evolutionary algorithms do so well.
Makes me nostalgic of desktop software. I hate that everything today is a website and requires a ridiculously fast internet connection. And what seems to be in fashion for "desktop software" today is to ship a website together with a whole browser and pretend it's not a website.
I wonder how the licensing works: do people pay for newer versions? Or do people just buy one version but more people get married every year, bringing new customers? I guess it is not a subscription model, right?