Small but sexy

When observing the tech industry today, one can’t help but notice an obsession with hyper-growth. This trend is often fueled by the expectations of venture capitalists who seek high returns in a short timeframe. However, this obsession frequently leads to inferior products, where design decisions are driven by sales and marketing rather than user experience. It results in short-sighted technical choices that prioritize flashy, trendy technologies over battle-tested, future-proof standards.

Recently, I’ve examined the dashboards of various tools in our space and was astonished by the neglect evident in their design. They bombard users with banners urging upgrades to higher plans, overwhelming amounts of competing information, and a persistent push to contact sales. While I understand the need to generate revenue, such an obsession often sacrifices the craftsmanship of the product.

At Tuist, we refuse to compromise on quality. This commitment is deeply rooted in our principles. We prioritize creating a product that sparks joy, which is why we’ve invested in hiring a product designer, even within our limited budget. We believe that aesthetics are crucial for evoking positive emotions when using our tool. As a result, our growth may not match the rapid pace of other players in the industry, but that’s not our goal. We are focused on building for the long term, emphasizing slow and steady growth driven by product quality, our open-source contributions, and ongoing community support.

Our relationship with open source is genuine; it’s not merely a marketing strategy like brands paying influencers to promote their products. We are committed to leveraging open-source as a means to drive innovation in the industry, dedicating our time and resources to make it a reality.

We are turning Tuist into a commercial business so that we can do more MIT open source for the Apple ecosystem.

This mindset also shapes our technical decisions. As a small team, we recognize the need to keep our technology stack simple, as we cannot afford the complexity of maintaining a convoluted system. There’s a crucial distinction between a system that is inherently simple and one that merely appears simple because a third-party service manages the complexity. For this reason, we’ve chosen Elixir, and we couldn’t be happier with our decision.

Embracing simplicity has significant advantages, particularly for our on-premise customers who need to self-host the server. The requirements are minimal: a server, a PostgreSQL database, and S3 storage. If scaling is necessary, it’s as easy as adding more cores and memory to your instance. Furthermore, we prioritize standards across the board. Our stack doesn’t rely on a build tool; we write vanilla CSS and JavaScript—yes, no Tailwind. This approach is liberating, as the web platform is designed for longevity, and we intend to leverage that durability.

Do we worry about breaking changes in Next.js? Not at all. What about Tailwind or TypeScript? We remain unconcerned. While others may spend time updating their toolchains, we focus on building useful features with our straightforward CSS and JavaScript. Our productivity has never been higher, and once we establish our design system using web components, creating new features in Tuist will feel as effortless as playing with LEGO.

Eventually, we plan to open-source our server, allowing you to contribute and extend it as you wish. We are steadily building momentum that will become unstoppable.

Will we reach every corner of the app development ecosystem? I doubt it. However, we will gradually convert teams into believers in our craft and contributors to a common vision that advances the industry. Will this take years? Absolutely—so what? We are designing our company to maximize momentum with minimal resources while ensuring that everyone involved in making Tuist possible enjoys the best professional experience of their lives as they build our product.