24 Feb 2016
Josh

We're building a bookmarking service

At Hello Code, we decided a while ago that we didn't want to be a typical start-up with funding, VCs, and a manic desire for growth above all else. We wanted to build the sort of company where we could support ourselves, in a pretty comfortable lifestyle, by pursuing ideas and making products that interest us. We wanted to do it the old-fashioned way — by providing products and services in exchange for money.

To further those goals of supporting ourselves and working on interesting ideas, we're building a new service. It's called Larder, and it's for bookmarking things on the internet. It came from a frustration Belle had with bookmarking. She likes to try all the apps, and she invariably finds niggles with each one that she just cannot tolerate. What's a girl to do? Decide to build one of your own, of course. She's a born developer.

So what's our angle? There are already plenty of bookmarking services. Well, we're not trying anything too revolutionary. We just want to hit a solid compromise between attractiveness, reliability and simplicity. Being designed by me, a developer, means it's not super attractive. But it's also going to be a lot more reliable than some other, more attractive services. It also supports folders as well as tags, for example, so everything isn't all in one big list.

One special feature we do have is the ability to import your GitHub stars as bookmarks. Personally, I read and save a lot of developer-related stuff. I star repositories on GitHub all the time, but I also use a bookmarking service — so for a long time there I would get confused about whether I bookmarked an article or the docs about a library, or starred the library itself on GitHub. Eventually I stopped bookmarking anything at all and relied entirely on starring stuff for anything code-related. My life was like the "before" shot on an infomercial. But I found a solution! Larder imports stars, automatically tagged by language, so I can have my stars and non-repo bookmarks coexisting happily in the one place. It has literally changed my life. Thanks Larder!

Larder will initially be a web service, but we'll build native Android and iOS apps to complement it. In the meantime, we're looking for beta testers. If you like the sound of what I've described, and you'd like lifetime free access in return for giving us detailed feedback about bugs and how you use it, sign up to be a beta tester. Everyone wins.