Korrit
korrit.devContext
Korrit is the development and automation studio I run. It started in 2023 as part time work during a degree, and it is what I do full time now that the degree is finished.
The work is usually a business system a company runs its day out of, the automations sitting underneath it, and the site in front of the whole thing. Clients have included architecture firms and a shoemaking studio, which is about as much of a pattern as there is. CTK, which has its own page here, is one of them.
None of them came to me wanting software. They came wanting back the ten or so hours a week that were going into moving information by hand from somewhere it already existed to somewhere else, and the software is just what that turned out to look like.
Details
- Role
- Founder and Developer
- Team
- Solo
- Timeline
- 2023 — present
- Clients
- Architecture firms, a shoemaking studio, CTK
- Deliverables
- Business systems, automations, websites
- Status
- Running, and now full time
Key design moments
The bottleneck was never how fast I could build
I spent the first year assuming that if the work was good enough the work would arrive. It does not. Build speed has almost never been the thing standing between me and a signed client, and sales has been the thing nearly every time. What helped was narrowing the offering until it was specific enough that someone could hear it once and know whether it was for them. A studio that builds anything is a studio nobody can refer to anyone. The narrowing is not finished and I do not think it ever will be, because what I am good at keeps moving and the sentence describing it has to keep up.
Doing all of it myself is why nothing is ever finished
I design it, build it, sell it and answer the emails about it, and the cost of that is that I am the only person who can say when something is done. I am bad at saying it. There is always a version that is marginally better and I will go and find it, usually late, usually on something the client stopped thinking about a fortnight ago. Splitting the work into tasks and doing them when nobody is asking me to is the part that actually helps. Being content with what I have made is the part that has not arrived. Going full time sped both of those up.
One thing, properly, beats a list
Any skill can be learned and any service can be offered, and I have done a fair amount of both. Neither is what makes someone choose you. Being genuinely better at one specific thing is, and that is a narrower and less comfortable place to stand than a list of everything I am capable of. Most of what I have got wrong in three years traces back to preferring the list.
Impact
The revenue is everything Korrit has taken since 2023, most of it earned around a full course load. The hours are what clients have told me they got back rather than anything I measured, which makes it the figure I would defend the least and the one I care about the most. The three years is the only one of the three that is simply a fact.
Reflections
Working for myself means there is no hour in the week where the work is officially over, and I have not really tried to build one. Free evenings go into learning something or improving a workflow that was already fine. I know that is not entirely healthy, and I also know the obsession is why the work is any good, and I have not worked out what to do about both of those being true at once. The line about never working a day in your life if you love what you do is one I actually agree with, and it leaves out that you also never stop.
What I would tell myself in 2023 is to pick the one service earlier and let the rest go. Breadth felt like the safer place to stand and I held onto it for a long time, and every client I have won since has come from being specific instead. The offering will have changed again by the time anyone reads this, which used to bother me.