Klop!
“Klop”, Afrikaans for conquer/beat. That’s the name of my new app (still in development). It will live at klop.finance and will be a budgeting tool built with the purpose of helping people reach their financial goals. Get out of debt, save towards a target, understand where they stand on a day by day basis, without scratching their heads.
It’s a bold attempt and though I’ve written lots of software in my career, I’ve never built a product from scratch. It’s an exciting challenge!
Why?
Lauren and I are actively maintaining our budget for the last 13 years. Not that we were perfect, but that we tried and we stuck to it. I personally understand how to keep an excel sheet up to date, and it definitely works, but you know, while the planning phase is easy to do, the tracking and understanding part is lacking. That part the takes up lots of time on a month by month basis and I’d like to fix that.
I also have never built a software business. I have the opportunity to do so now and what better thing to try than something that’s been personally bugging me for the last few years? I know there are other options out there, but I’ve never found any of them nice enough to use past the first month, maybe it’s just us? Maybe there are many others like us. We’ll soon find out.
The worst outcome: the experience I’ll gain building something. The best outcome: helping real people make sense of their budget, reaching their financial goals.
Bootstrapping and Sustainability
I would like to build this for others like myself. I want to build a business around it. I want to avoid growth for the sake of it. I want to build a calm organization where people enjoy what they do while having time for the more important things in life. I’m going to build the business one customer at a time, and work hard to remain close to the users. I’ve seen too many leaders loosing touch, products being built with no regard for what users actually want and team mates too afraid to engage with customers.
I will not be the first person to build a sustainable business. I want to do what 37 Signals, Metorik and Ghost have done. A human centered business.
The plan
I plan to build in public as much as possible, using the klop.finance/blog (coming soon) to communicate progress and engage beta users.
I plan to build it using (Ruby on Rails)[https://rubyonrails.org/]. I’ve really enjoyed the development experience so far. It is simple and just works. I haven’t enjoyed writing software much in a very long time and I’m starting to understand that ruby was truly created for programmer happiness.
I plan to run a friends and family alpha for a few weeks and then launch a paid beta for folks who think they’ll find value in the app. I plan to charge for the product from day 1. I want to limit freebies to only the trail period and then expect people to commit and I will do the same, standing behind paying customers to truly understand their needs and fine tune the solution.
I plan to enjoy the work, working in a way that bring me joy, hoping that this will show up in the product.
I plan to learn and share as much as I can and I hope you’ll join me.
Follow along!
For more information, follow along at klop.finance. We have a newsletter that you can sign up to. Lets learn together.