On wanting to keep making it

I really agree with the last couple of paragraphs of Jim Nielsen’s Make Money to Make More Websites. He’s talking about starting with something you want to make, and finding a way for money to let you keep doing it. I’d like to see a lot more of that in the things we build.

KK Sans is a fairly good example of why this matters to me. I wanted to understand type better, and making a typeface gave me a reason to spend time with it. Then I put it on this site, and suddenly the letters were in things I actually read. A shape that looked fine in Glyphs could turn up in a heading and bother me every time I opened the page.

I’ve rebuilt the lowercase a, adjusted joins and reworked kerning. There are plenty of perfectly good fonts I could have used here. Making my own meant I got to understand why those things looked wrong, then find out whether I could make them feel better. I’m quite happy for that to be a worthwhile use of my time.

And using it gives me a fairly clear idea of what to do next. I can see the awkward gap. I can put a revised letter back into the same heading and read it again. The reason to improve the thing is right there in the thing itself, and I think that’s a useful relationship to have with what you make.

It also gives you something to protect when you start thinking about money. If the reason you made a little app was to make an annoying task easier, then charging for it ought to help you keep looking after that experience. You’ve got a reason to fix the export that sometimes fails, or make the first run easier to understand, because you still want to use it and you’d like other people to enjoy using it too.

I think the interesting question is how much you need to make to carry on. That might mean covering hosting and a few tools. It might mean paying yourself properly, or bringing someone else in so the work doesn’t depend on you being available every evening. Those are quite different ambitions, and being specific about yours gives you something useful to decide against when another opportunity comes along.

Say a small product is paying for the time it takes to maintain, and someone suggests broadening it to reach a much bigger audience. You’d be taking on more features, more support and probably a bunch of problems you don’t personally have. I’d want to know whether I still wanted to spend my days making that version. The fact that it could earn more wouldn’t answer that for me.

That’s the part I’d like us to get more comfortable talking about. Being able to afford to keep a useful thing working, at a size you can enjoy looking after, sounds like a pretty good outcome. It gives you time to notice what’s awkward, learn something, and make another change because you care about how it turns out.

I’d happily earn money from something I enjoyed making. I’d want to keep recognising the thing I enjoyed as it grew, though. There’s a reason I’m still fiddling with the letters on this site; I get to use them again tomorrow.