Why?

There's a piece of my soul in publishing

In a way, Minima is my love letter to the web.

A big chunk of my life and career has been in and around publishing – after helping grow New Atlas into one of the biggest independent news publishers on the web, I started a managed programmatic advertising business with my wife.

The model we ended up with there was effectively playing a fractional CTO role at the publisher we managed advertising for, growing the pie itself as well as the advertising revenue.

That's left me with a unique perspective on how just how bad things can get under the hood – from fully custom solutions, to WordPress, to expensive enterprise solutions with five figure monthly fees and multi-year lock in contracts.

In short, putting words and pictures on the internet shouldn't be as painful or as expensive as it is.

Why now?

The costs are too damn high

Publishing is, frankly, an awful business.

You can lose 90% or more of your traffic overnight, at the whims of an algorithm.

Yet decent WordPress hosting, plus the yearly plugin subscriptions to do essentials like SEO/news markup, adds up very quickly.

Technology is going through a paradigm shift

Firstly, Cloudflare's developer platform is driving down the cost of hosting software.

Secondly, AI is driving down the cost of building software.

It's about time for publishers to see the benefits of these changes.

Disclosure: I'm a Cloudflare shareholder.

WordPress is self-destructing

I take no pleasure in this, and started working on Minima long before this happened, but there's now an unprecedented need for alternatives.

There are countless developer-oriented solutions, but that's not what Minima is.

Where we're going, you won't need developers.