Weird inc.
We have big aspirations for Weird. At minimum, a 'social network of personal websites' can be catalyzed by simply mapping and linking existing web spaces together, playing the role of social glue. On a grander scale there's potential for a pro-social reformation of the web as we know it, putting people's websites at the center of our sociodigital interactions.
Something this ambitious can only be built by a team of builders who keep coming back day after day to lay another brick down. We believe the most realistic and sustainable way of realizing that outcome is with old-fashioned commerce:
- Make product
- Sell product
- Return to step 1
The trick is to do this in a non-extractive manner. We reckon the easiest way to keep us honest, both to ourselves and the customers of our products, is to be explicit about how we will make money.
Seth Godin's "The Modern Business Plan" provides a very useful, prose-focused template to outline our in-progress thoughts on community-aligned commerce.
It’s not clear to me why business plans are the way they are, but they’re often misused to obfuscate, bore and show an ability to comply with expectations.
If I want the real truth about a business and where it’s going, I’d rather see something else. I’d divide the modern business plan into five sections:
1. Truth
2. Assertions
3. Alternatives
4. People
5. Money
This is the v0.1 release of our Open Business Plan.
Truth
The truth section describes the world as it is. Footnote if you want to, but tell me about the market you are entering, the needs that already exist, the competitors in your space, technology standards, the way others have succeeded and failed in the past. The more specific the better. The more ground knowledge the better. The more visceral the stories, the better. The point of this section is to be sure that you’re clear about the way you see the world, and that you and I agree on your assumptions. This section isn’t partisan, it takes no positions, it just states how things are. Truth can take as long as you need to tell it. It can include spreadsheets, market share analysis and anything I need to know about how the world works.
Home ownership on the web, remarkably, is just as fraught with rent-seeking monopolists as our physical spaces. No one gets to own anything anymore. What started as the "free and open web" is now controlled by megaplatforms beholden to an economics of surveillance and manipulation.
But the Big Social autocracy messed up. They squeezed too hard for too long, and people are leaving en masse to provably less abusive platforms with credible exit.
Chief among these is Bluesky which is bringing into mainstream a nearly forgotten cornerstone of the Indie Web: Domain sovereignty, i.e. digital land reclamation.
In a reinvigorated social web where your domain-name is your universal address in the digital sphere, Weird is the virtual home to which that address is pointing; the house behind the door sign.
Open Indie
What does our idea of a "home on the web" actually look like in practice? Our MVP functions much like Linktree, the 'linkspage' market leader valued at 1bn with a team of ~40. But whereas Linktree (1) isn't interested in data reclamation nor (2) open data and APIs, Weird specializes in both.
'Weird the data importer' is our wedge into the data fortresses keeping our digital identities captive. What will start as a Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate (to your) Own Site (PESOS) strategy makes way for a fully self-sovereign Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere (POSSE) end state.
Imagine a WordPress-like website engine that aggregates all of your digital personas into a unified mosaic, completely under your control by combination of cloud backing and local storage.
Assertion
The assertions section is your chance to describe how you’re going to change things. We will do X, and then Y will happen. We will build Z with this much money in this much time. We will present Q to the market and the market will respond by taking this action. This is the heart of the modern business plan. The only reason to launch a project is to change something, and I want to know what you’re going to do and what impact it’s going to have.
We will begin by selling weird.one as a managed cloud service for ease-of-use.
'Weird Nerd' premium subscribers can pay $50/yr ($25 during alpha) to use their own custom domain name, along with a growing assortment of other perks, very similar to the pricing structure of Obsidian.
muni-townWhat sets Weird apart from the likes of Linktree or even WordPress is that every user of Weird can effortlessly keep a local storage of all their Weird data (identity, posts, contacts..) with a (upcoming) browser extension or the native Weird App. No need for a tedious "export and save" step; your data is continuously synced to your device, just like a local email client of yore. This effectively makes everyone an 'essential self-hoster' of their own data, without the burden of serving a live site from their personal computer.
Complete self-hosting is still an option for the 1% of computer geeks so inclined, but even they may still purchase the 'Weird Nerd' package for the comforts of cloud backups, CDNs, domain automation etc., similar to the WordPress Jetpack model.
Incentives for self-hosting
We intend to structure our business in a way that incentivizes a continued investment in the self-hosting capabilities of Weird. Many open source companies with a SaaS offering end up with inverse incentives to continue improving their self-hosting story because it competes with their SaaS business.
By exploring fair ways to monetize our on-premises offering in commercial contexts we will ensure an ongoing equilibrium between our product vs business incentives.
Self-hosting as a self-negotiator on pricing
A SaaS product that can be alternatively self-hosted with ease is inherently pricing-transparent. When discerning customers can effortlessly compare the experience of a managed SaaS versus an on-premises package, it keeps pricing honest.
Alternatives
Of course, this [assertion] section will be incorrect. You will make assertions that won’t pan out. You’ll miss budgets and deadlines and sales. So the alternatives section tells me what you’ll do if that happens. How much flexibility does your product or team have? If your assertions don’t pan out, is it over?
There are several different angles that Weird can pivot into if our initial value proposition doesn't pan out for some reason:
- General purpose CMS with plugins (WordPress is ripe for competition)
- Local-first knowledge base with cloud synchronization
- Cloud + local archiver for many other 3rd party accounts such as Bluesky, Mastodon, Discourse etc.
- Offline-capable, collaborative storage provider for partner applications
- Bluesky/ATProto PDS hosting
- Social Web Consultancy
Even if our initial plan does pan out, these are things that Weird might grow into eventually.
People
The people section rightly highlights the key element… who is on your team, who is going to join your team. ‘Who’ doesn’t mean their resume, who means their attitudes and abilities and track record in shipping.
Weird is backed up by a globally distributed, multidisciplinary community of mission-aligned builders:
Founders
The latest iteration of Weird was founded in early 2024 by two long-time collaborators. Around 2019 Erlend and Zicklag connected online over a shared passion for open source game development, culminating in the Fish Folk project. That partnership eventually pivoted to working on Weird.
Erlend - The Director
Erlend Sogge Heggen has been working in open source, games and web tech for the past ~20 years. All of his most notable project engagements lasted over five years:
- jMonkeyEngine – Project Lead. We made a fully functional game engine together, still in use by professionals and hobbyists today.
- Discourse – first as a Community Advocate, then VP of Community and lastly a 6 month stint as a Product Lead of Discourse Chat.
- Amethyst organisation – Project Manager. Founding member of the Rust GameDev Working Group.
- Fish Folk – Founder & Project Director.
See full work bio for more.
Zicklag - The Architect
Zicklag is a self-taught software & DevOps engineer with a passion for producing high quality solutions to real-world problems. He was the lead developer of the Jumpy game and its underlying Bones engine.
As Chief Technology Lead at the family-owned Katharos Technology he has spent nearly a decade working with games and apps tech, contributing to a wide range of open source projects in the process, including Bevy, Piccolo, WGPU, and egui.
Money
The last section is all about money. How much do you need, how will you spend it, what does cash flow look like, P&Ls, balance sheets, margins and exit strategies.
We're entirely self-funded on our own savings, helped by Erlend's modest "exit" from Discourse as an early employee.
Ideally we can grow the company and reach sustainability by sales alone. Once we're selling 40 new subscriptions per month (at $25 alpha pricing), we will have achieved baseline sustainability at $1000/month (MRR).
We're committed to a practice of non-extractive entrepreneurship:
To that end Erlend enrolled in the Post Growth Entrepreneurship incubator of 2024. It's worth noting however that Weird is not strictly a 'PGE company' since we are not categorically opposed to the possibility of accepting investments that come with an expectation of some modest returns for investors.
What I know for sure is that I don't want more than the equivalent of middle-class earnings for myself and my co-owners (including investors) and I don't want to grow our company beyond a few dozen people. (It's so funny to me that by the Silicon Valley standard, that's a humble and unambitious goal statement.)
I do want to build cultural, economic and legal incentives into the company that makes longevity the stable-state goal and an 'exit' unattractive or even impossible, and I do want to funnel any excess profits right back into the open source ecosystem which we are building on top of.
Co-ownership
Everyone we work with is a potential co-owner. We've no interest in being majority owners in perpetuity.
In fact, we don’t really think it’s good for a medium-sized company or product to have any owner with more than 10% ownership, assuming it’s big enough to have >20 people involved.
The long-term intent is to bring the co-founders' total ownership - starting at 25% each - down to 5-10% over the next several years.
We also don’t think someone who’s not actively working in a company should get to sit inactively on their share for very long until it starts automatically being sold off. We're no fans of rent-seeking dynamics.
If we do take investment it's going to be a very modest amount, and if we don't the only money going around will be coming from our subscriptions, which will be a slow buildup.
The potentially much bigger (but also quite possibly insubstantial, as is the nature of entrepreneurship) financial return would come from the equity, which would be up to 5%-10% for every Founding Partner, the people who join during the nascent stages of the company.
We have room for around 4-6 founding engineers/designers in the team.
The exact math hasn’t been done yet but it’d be something like ‘get up to 10% over the course of 3 years’, depending on the time investment. It’s incremental, not all or nothing. And we’re all doing it, me and zick included; we just had a big head-start.
So if it turns out we wanna squeeze in another 4-6 junior devs / interns who can get around 0.25%-2.5% equity each, maybe the full percentage amount we were all building up towards has shrunk a bit. But that has no bearing on anyone’s compensation/ownership relative to any other equity holders, since we’d all shrink our ownership for dilution events like that.
Another likely dilution event is when (if my motion for it is accepted) we implement our ‘ecosystem reinvestment fund’. It’s a fund loosely based on an old idea of mine that’ll be up to all co-owners to allocate, depending on which projects/initiatives we wanna fund collectively. One can dream!
Investment
Taking investment while avoiding extractive dynamics is challenging, but not impossible. While no longer active, our favorite example of what a values-aligned investor looks like for us is Calm Fund.
In short, they focus on giving founders & investors capped dividends (basically a form of revenue-share, though econ-lawyers may disagree) instead of betting on the prospect of a company-ending exit.
We may for instance decide on a maximum 1.25x return on investment, so an investor who puts in $100k into the company could at most expect to get $125k back in dividends over the course of a few years. An unthinkable investment in the spray-and-pray VC model, but not at all dissimilar from a more traditional high-risk loan.
Furthermore they actually require that a company is earning around $1000/month before they invest, meaning they intentionally have limited leverage.
If we ever take any investment, we intend to stay lean enough that we only need about $250k to get us off the ground, and no more than say $1.5m in total lifetime investment.
Anti-Fragile Company
Structuring a company to be anti-fragile and ethical by design is an imperfect science without definitive answers. We are still weighing our options, taking inspiration from organisations such as the Ghost non-profit, the Subvert coop and the post-growth Radically Open Security.
For now the most promising model appears to be a form of steward ownership, which aligns with the exit-resistant type of investment exemplified by Calm. However, such structures cost money and time to set up, and the designation of steward ownership specifically is still in the process of being formalized in countries across the world.
As such, we rely first and foremost on social contracts, i.e. simply spelling out our best-effort intentions for the future, as we're doing here. That may sound flimsy, but it's social contracts all the way down in the end, some are just more credibly backed by state-sanctioned violence than others.
As open source practitioners we ultimately stake our livelihood on our track record and reputation as earnest contributors to the commons. By sharing not just our code openly but also all of our team communications (soon to be liberated from the Discord-silo by Weird archiving) and strategic documents like this one, we improve the chances of our product vision living on independently of its original founders.
This is also the stance of our friends at Bluesky:
While I find any company that has taken tens of millions in VC money innately frightening, I doubt there was any other way for Bluesky to build a desperately needed offramp for X/Twitter in time for the mass migration that consequently happened, so I commend them for navigating those perilous waters as best they could.
That said, I don't fully agree with this statement:
Businesses live & die on a shorter timeline than people
That's only true in the modern era, especially for tech companies. There's a reason why we've got a whole bunch of people walking around with last names like 'Carpenter' and 'Mason'. Kongō Gumi famously existed independently for nearly 1500 years before it finally succumbed to modern capital pressures.
So while I agree with the general strategy of designing our products and ecosystems under the assumption that their commercial benefactors are "possible future adversaries", it must not be considered an inevitability, lest it become a self-fulfilling prophecy.