FREE. ACCESSIBLE. PORTABLE.
Before I logged one day of building, I set down the basic principles Keely App is based on.
To my mind, setting your north star is one of the most important things you can do before starting any major project. The guiding principles you decide on both rest on the goals you have and determine the eventual outcome. It’s easy to get a good idea and jump on it, and sometimes that’s the only to get a start on it.
More often, though, sitting down to get clarity on what you are doing and why means the difference between success and failure.
I wanted Keely App to be long term solution for authors, not a convenient one-off project only useful to me. I decided early on that every coding decision along the way would be based on the principle “design and build as I mean to continue,” meaning no short cuts for the sake of speed or convenience.
A good example of NOT following that principle was the day I had to direct Claude to hunt down and eradicate all the hard-coded references in the app to the test story we’re using (“Family Feud”). It was my fault for not being clearer in the initial instructions, and really set in stone the first basic principle of the project. If this is going to be useful to other authors, I have to think long term.
But what is “long term” actually about?
For me, that means creating an app that is:
- Always free: The core product will always be available for download and use for free, with no restrictions.
- Always customizable: The core product can be broken open and customized, if someone wants it to work differently than it does. This is more than just changing the theme, this is the ability to look at the code and mess with the guts. I doubt many people will, but they can.
- Always portable: The user files are always easy to find on disk. This is more than just being able to “export” the content, it means you can go to the folder on your device and find the actual markdown files. Nothing is proprietary to the app, and you can store those files locally or in the cloud.
Could I make more money closing the app up tight and selling it? Maybe. But this was never about being a software startup, it is first and foremost about filling a much needed resource for serialization authors. I do hope that later I can recoup my time investment via the paid hosted version, but that’s for later, and it’s not THE goal.
THE goal is creating the tool I’ve wanted all along, and sharing it with authors who need it!
