Deliberately Made

The first thing I shipped is an app that makes it impossible to miss a meeting.

I made it because I kept doing the same dumb thing. I’d get deep into some problem, completely lose track of time, and look up to find a meeting had started ten minutes ago without me. So I wrote a little Mac app that takes over the whole screen before an event starts. It’s hard to ignore. That’s the whole point of it. It worked well enough that I kept building on it, and at some point the thing I’d made just for myself started to feel like it deserved a real name and a place to live. That’s what Arbitrary Studios is.

Why I called it Arbitrary

I make software. I also make physical things, and eventually I’ll probably sell some of those too. If I’d put “software” or “apps” in the company name, it would stop making sense the first time I shipped something physical. “Arbitrary” doesn’t tie me to any of that. It’s not entirely serious, and that’s sort of the point: it leaves room for the company to be about whatever I decide to build next, instead of one narrow thing. The work isn’t arbitrary. The name just keeps the door open.

The first thing I made

The meeting app is called Hey Listen. I’m bringing it up less because I want you to buy it and more because it’s the clearest example of how I want to build things.

It does one thing, and it does it on your computer and nowhere else. It doesn’t ask you to make an account, and it doesn’t ship your calendar off to some server, because your calendar is nobody’s business but your own. You pay for it once and then it’s yours, updates included. I’m not going to charge you every month for an app that just sits on your machine doing its job.

If you want to take a look, here it is.

What I’m promising

I’m tired of having a subscription for everything. When I purchase an app that runs all on its own, I want to pay once and have it keep working forever. That’s my pricing model: you pay for what you get. The day I start charging monthly for something, it’ll be because there’s a server on the other end doing work to earn it.

I ship when something’s ready, not when a date says I have to. That makes me slower than a company with a team and a roadmap, and I’ve made my peace with it. I’d rather take longer and put out something I’m proud of than something that’s just not ready.

What’s next

More software, mostly. My list of things I want to build is a lot longer than the time I have to build them, which is a good problem to have.

For now this is a side project. I’ve got a full-time job, and I work on this in the evenings, on my own, because I want to. I like to make things that do their jobs well and do them simply, without getting in the way. If it grows, that’s great, but it’ll grow on its own terms. Staying small is my intent, not a phase I’m hoping to outgrow.

---

If that sounds like something you’d want to watch get built, stick around. I’ll keep writing it down as I go.