Last year I was reflecting on my now 15 years in the industry. Looking back, I’ve been so privileged to work with some amazing people and met some of my greatest friends in the industry.

I’ve also been lucky to work at some really cool early stage companies, where I learned so much, both in growth times but also during tough periods. Lessons which helped me grow more than I could have imagined when I first started out.

Similar in most of the places I worked was the huge ambition and drive I experienced. But taking outside money through angels and VCs does something to a company. The targets are sky high, growth needs to happen to secure that next funding round and I felt like we often looked at product and engineering decisions based on mostly growth and revenue, instead of looking at user needs. What could have been a smaller sustainable business delivering great products to fewer people had to become much larger, which meant leaving some users behind.

After a while I started wondering if this was the way for me. And I realised that I want something different. To work in a more user focused, sustainable way, with time to focus on building great quality products which serve smaller user bases, but serve them well.

Instead of waiting for the right company to come around, I decided to do it myself. I’ve launched my own company, Nurtured Bits! It’s just me for now, fully bootstrapped. No outside money.

The first product launches today, DaraCMS. It’s a CMS for teams managing Markdown content. Markdown has become increasingly popular, but it comes with a big downside. No matter how hard we tell ourselves that everyone can write and understand it, reality is that it becomes much harder for many people in the organisation to contribute. DaraCMS solves this, by providing tools for everyone to write and contribute, no matter your technical level. I think this fits well in a lot of teams who need to allow access to other people in the organisation, while controlling what they can access. I’m proud of the editing experience so far, one I think even technical people will like!

You can check it out here: https://daracms.com/

- Tobias