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About · and the standard we publish to
We started this, we don't run it, and the best thing posted this month was not posted by us. That's the intention, not modesty.
01 / WHO'S BEHIND IT
Nobody here is the expert and nobody is the audience. The person who saves you a weekend this month is somebody who lost one to the same tool last month, and next month that's you for somebody else. Pulling in both directions is the entire mechanism.
That is deliberately the shape of this place. Two of us started it because we wanted the room to exist, not because we had a course to sell. Six years each running growth at B2B startups, which mostly taught us how much of what gets published leaves the price off.
The practical version: we install and time everything on the shelf, we write the standard down in public, and then we try to stay out of the way of the people using it.
02 / THE HOUSE RULE
A tool with the cost stripped out is just a nice story about somebody else. So nothing goes up without three things: what it really took, what it touches, and where it bit.
Not a range. An actual number. Rounding down is how somebody loses a Saturday to your optimism.
03 / THE STANDARD
Every listing goes through the same four stages, and what we do at each one is written down in public rather than kept in our heads. That is deliberate: it means a rejection is something you can argue with instead of something you have to accept.
05 / THE LIMITS
The two of us, which is a real limitation and we'd rather say so than pretend there's a committee.
What keeps it honest is that the standard above is public and the rejection notes go back to you: if we say no, you get what we tried and where it broke, and you can argue with it. A private standard applied by two people would be a problem. A public one you can hold us to is a different thing.
Right now it doesn't. It costs the two of us a few pounds a month in hosting and a lot of evenings, and we're fine with that while it's small.
If it ever needs to pay for itself, the candidates are a paid job board or sponsored sessions labelled as sponsored. Not affiliate links, and not paid placement in the teardowns. If that changes, it gets announced here first - not discovered by someone reading the small print.
Partly, and we'd rather be straight about which parts. Some teardowns need a server you're willing to maintain - those are marked ◆◆◆, and if that's not you, skip them.
The difficulty rating and the honest setup time exist precisely so you can tell in five seconds whether something is a Tuesday evening or a lost weekend.
The listing gets marked and the setup notes stay up, because knowing a thing is abandoned is more useful than the listing quietly vanishing.
Everything on the shelf is self-hosted or exportable for exactly this reason - you should be able to walk away with your data whether or not the maker is still around, and whether or not we are.
06 / GET IN TOUCH
The room is faster, because somebody who has done your exact install is more use than we are. Email if it's about the standard, a rejection you want to argue with, or anything you'd rather not post.
