It occurred to me that I’m so bad at thinking up witty little bits to post on Bluesky that I’d probably do better writing a five-hundred-word piece literally every day and then “skeeting” (as they say on Bluesky, though I have no idea why) the address and topic. I’d have something to say, sort of.
And writing at a steady pace (something I haven’t done in quite a while) means I can do something that’s more my style in terms of building in public. That is, I can get into the weeds on code and WordPress particulars and also talk about some startup decisions more or less as they happen.
The good
I’ve been working away on one version or another of PeakZebra for something on the order of three years now (depending on how you count). This is a terrible way to launch a solo bootstrap business, just in case you were wondering. I think people get problematically cultish about shipping as fast as possible sometimes, but for the most part I do believe it’s a good idea to come up with a business idea that’s relatively small and self contained, at least as far as creating it. Didn’t manage it myself, though.
But the good thing of late is that the vision is considerably clearer and, as I’m putting the pieces together, I’m pleased that some of the pieces that go back fairly far in that three-year period work just fine as I’m integrating them with new pieces. This wasn’t necessarily going to be the case because the framework I was developing for–WordPress Gutenberg blocks–was a moving target the entire time.
It’s funny, when fixing bugs in that older code (because, um, there were a few) to be reminded that, to take one small example, you used to have to enqueue any JS files you were going to use on the client side of your block. Nowadays you can just use a render.js file that you list in your block.json file. All sorts of other minor details have been streamlined in the interim.
And pieces are coming together. I have a test platform that, I guess because I think of it as a blueprint site, I call mrblue. I give my local sites dorky names. The offline version of this PeakZebra.com site is currently totally.local.
The less good
I spend a lot of time wondering whether I’ve gone down the wrong track with the idea of enabling companies to build internal tools on a WordPress platform. That’s in part because I more or less arrived at this goal within an almost entirely WordPress context and I didn’t really dig into all the options that are out there.
I was aware of most or perhaps even all of the no-code application builders that are used by people trying to build no-code startups, but I didn’t really take the time to see what kinds of services were specifically targeting the internal business market.
Setting aside the various things that you can do with customization in Salesforce, there are also quite a few companies that specifically target enterprise internal tools.
Checking these various products out has been kind of depressing, because some of them are very polished and very capable. At least one of them, Budibase, is open source.
So far, though, they are all really most suitable for enterprise use, and I’m more interested in the tiers below that. They are also, accordingly, a lot more expensive. I’m not trying to be the low-cost purveyor, but what I really think is the case is that these other products are really playing in a different product category. I genuinely don’t see PeakZebra tackling the enterprise world anytime soon.
The storm clouds overhead
Meanwhile, Matt Mullenweg seems to be trying his dead-level best to seriously undermine the WordPress economy. I’m not going to make this a forum for my read on the #wpdrama, but what I can say is that I’ve shifted my strategy for going to market with PeakZebra so that I can get closer or farther away from WordPress. More on that another time.