Why I Build Small Tools Instead of Platforms

Had A Farm builds focused one-job tools. eiSEO scans a site. Seedfile generates a file. eiAEO (now part of eiSEO) watches what answer engines say about you. Pacewell was created for my mother and others who suffer from Parkinson's.

The clearest case is the three tools people keep telling me to merge.

Every few months someone tells me these are obviously one product. They're right that the customers overlap. And since launching eiSEO, I've merged the AEO and GEO features that originally were separate apps.

I'm hesitant to merge more since I believe a bug in one could take down everything. And the person who only wants an llms.txt would have to create an account in an accessibility platform to get it.

The merge always sounds like efficiency and always arrives as coupling.

Keeping them apart costs me something real. Three deploy pipelines. Three sets of docs. Three things to keep patched. I pay that on purpose, because the alternative is one thing I'm afraid to touch.

Butt Stuff is 21 bodyweight and band exercises. No ads, no accounts, no subscriptions. Pop-A-Squat reminds you to do ten air squats every hour. Also free, also nothing to sign up for.

People assume that's because they're small and I didn't bother. It's the opposite. The absence is the product.

Think about what an account would require: a database of who did what exercise, a password reset flow, an email provider, a privacy policy that means something, a breach plan, and a legal obligation to a stranger's fitness data that I would be carrying for as long as the app exists. For a page that shows you how to do a glute bridge.

No accounts means no data to lose, no server to keep warm, no reason for me to ever get a 2 a.m. page about squats. It also means the thing can outlive my interest in it. Static files with nothing behind them will still work in ten years, and I'm not paying anything to make that true.

Free with nothing attached is not a shortcut past monetization. It's the only version of those apps I'm willing to still be responsible for in 2036.

Pacewell is a daily wellness companion for people with Parkinson's, and it's the app I'm most careful with, precisely because it's narrow.

There is a version of that idea that is a general wellness app with a Parkinson's mode. That version would reach more people and help fewer of them. Parkinson's is not a subset of general wellness. The day has a different shape. Medication timing matters in a way that step counts do not. "Just be consistent" is advice from someone who has not watched a bad afternoon.

Building for one condition means I can be specific instead of encouraging. It also means I have to be humble about what I don't know, which is most of it. I built Pacewell for Mom. She is the reason it is narrow, and the reason I am careful with it.

Narrow is not the compromise. Narrow is what makes it usable by the people it's for.

I want to be honest about the price, because "patience over speed" sounds like a poster in a break room.

It has cost me launch dates, more than once. It meant Windrow took long enough that people had stopped asking about it by the time it went live. It means I watch other people ship a competitor to something of mine in six weeks and get the write-ups I don't get. It means revenue that grows like a garden and not like a graph in a pitch deck.

And it means I've never shipped something I had to quietly kill a year later, and no customer of mine has ever had their data held hostage by a pivot.

Good soil doesn't happen by accident. Neither does software you can still trust after the founder gets busy.

If you want to see what a catalog built under that constraint looks like, it's all on the Had A Farm site. Nothing there needs an account except the things that genuinely cannot work without one.

I manage web for an academic medical center. Everything I write about that work comes from what is already public. Opinions are mine.