Why Lithic?
30 July 2019
I believe we are at a crossroads in how we build and use technology. Cloud and mobile computing has changed what we can build and the details of how we build it, but in broad business and organizational strokes, I can't help but feel we haven't come very far.
- Tech startups still need to have technical founders and raise millions of dollars to pay programmer salaries.
- Local business owners are still piecing together backoffice solutions that cause growing pains.
- Software engineers are still struggling with taming complex systems and are constantly rewriting and firefighting.
Yet building software today has fundamental differences from 10 or 20 years ago. Why do we have the same problems?
Lithic's answer is simple: we actually have all the tools we need to solve these problems, we've just been too slow to adopt them.
- For startup founders, frameworks and services have advanced to such a degree that entire MVPs can be built without code. And then when more custom and scalable solutions are needed, they can be built both rapidly and able to handle tremendous growth.
- For local business owners, you no longer need to pay a programmer to build a website, and you have great PoS systems. But when you have a unique business problem that software can solve, it may be cheaper to hire someone to build it just for you, than integrate a difficult-to-use and expensive system.
- For software engineers, the tools at our disposal can be exciting to build with, but painful to maintain. We can tame chaos and complexity by focusing on rigor and simplicity in most of our business, and focus innovation and novelty on where it brings value.
The mechanics of the solutions are the same in all cases, and it's core to how Lithic works:
- Fast iteration, making sure everything we are doing is actually important to the business
- High quality construction, so fast iteration can be sustained
- Use trusted and proven tools, patterns, and services
There's no secret sauce! We've just become very, very good at working this way. Experience has shown us that it doesn't just result in a marginally better outcome, but a fundamentally different one.
Whether you are an entrepreneur or engineer, whether you are in the business of technology or t-shirts, we'd love to hear from you.