Goto Tools Short Links

Every once in a while you do something unexpected or out of character. Last summer I created a company, initially out of spite, but it turned into an incredible learning experience and the realization that it is very easy to start a company. Perhaps this may be helpful to others starting a similar journey.

Many of us at Qarik are Xooglers, in fact we started Qarik to help companies develop more like Google. At Google, we used "go" links to quickly share a URL in a memorable way. I.e. type in "go/hr" to get to our HR portal. It effectively replaced an intranet for most use cases.

Naturally we wanted the same at our new company. We found a tool that worked well and wanted to purchase it, however, the cost was over $10 per user per month. To put this in context, we spend $18 per user per month for all of Google's communications and collaboration tools. It is also 2x the amount most companies spend on GitHub.
I also, however, find value in paying others so we can focus on our core. While this tool will be helpful, it didn't make sense for us to spend over $12,000/year. As it turns out my core is building robust cloud based systems…

So over the weekend last summer while watching my kiddos at a pool I built and launched a virtual SaaS company, Goto Tools. Since this was going to be a side project, it needed to be built in a way that wouldn't require my time during normal business hours and because I am lazy, it needed to be 100% automated including tracking expenses and revenue and all accounting functions. Despite these design goals, I went from idea, to fully operational, including CICD with automated testing and self healing in 3 days. In all honesty, it did take two more weeks for the official business license registration, so 14 days but 3 days sounds way better.

Almost everything is 100% automated. A dirty secret is I don't charge any customers because it is very cheap and I haven't yet built robust billing (shh, please don't tell my customers). Perhaps I'll do that sometime next summer. In the meantime, I can count some impressive customers from an AI company (105 employees) to a food delivery company (>3,000 employees) to a large FANG tech company (close to 1,000,000 employees), which I am shocked as they must have their own 🤔. Well, clearly there is a need, even if they already have their own internal system that tries to meet the need. If I am being honest here, it probably started with an employee that did a Google search by mistake and ended up on my site rather than their internal system 🤷.

I have found many tools that make running a company incredibly easy and affordable. I spend a total of $79/month for all fixed costs. Everything on top of this is variable and trackable directly to revenue if I decide to monetize.

Characters are limited here, so head over to Medium for more details include the company stack