Why does Spryv exist? What are the goals of this new project?

Currently, Spryv is being created by one person in their free time (me) and is slowly becoming a real app. I thought I would write this post to write down my goals, for future readers and for organizing my current thoughts. So here it goes.

Goals

• Customer-focused
• Fast
• Private
• Useful

Customer Focused

Spryv should be a customer-focused business. I hope to be able to help every customer and care about fixing their problems. I’ve been thinking about how technology start-ups normally operate. The process is generally to make a product, then look for investors, and then grow to allow the investors to make a profit.

This model creates an obsession with growth that can be detrimental. If the owners of the company need growth to make a return, they will care more about gaining new users than losing a few. Now, they do still care about their users, but once you get to a scale like Google, you stop caring about individuals. Spryv should care about individuals. Not because of any profit motive, but just to be a company that people like. Many tech companies are often disliked. Spryv’s goal should be to not become like them so Spryv should always focus on the individual customers, even if one customer doesn’t meaningfully affect profits.

But to accomplish this, Spryv may not be able to have investors. Investors care about growth and making money (I mean why wouldn’t they - they just paid thousands and thousands of dollars and hope to get it back). Spryv should focus on more than growth and profits.

Fast

Spryv should be fast. I want the Spryv products to work well on pretty much any hardware, even if it doesn’t appear to have value for the company. I just like my tools to be fast (and part of my motivation for creating Spryv is to create a replacement for my use of Google Drive).

Private

Spryv should collect the absolute minimal amount of data. Spryv should never sell people’s data. All the uses of data should be transparent and clear to the user. The way the system works shouldn’t be hidden. In these blog posts, I’m planning to describe the internal structure of Spryv and why I make the decisions I make.

I’m considering End-to-End encryption, though it will be optional because there are downsides, such as losing all your data if you lose your passwords. I have some ideas for implementing it, and I will probably go into more detail in a future post.

I’ve thought about having everything open source. I love open source, but I don’t know the viability of building a business on it or what challenges there would be. One option could be a source available license, which would allow people to review the code (increasing transparency) without allowing another business to “steal” my work.

Another downside of open source would be the idea that someone could self-host it. You can’t. The code is not set up in a way to allow for self-hosting, everything is built on Cloudflare as the backend, and would not be simple to change and self-hosting isn’t something I would like to support.

Useful

Spryv should offer useful apps. Currently, the way I define useful is something that I would use myself. So currently I’m thinking about the following apps

• Drive app
• Documents app
• Spreadsheets app (with some additional features, which I will probably talk about in a future post)
• Photos app
• A time-tracking app

Conclusion

Spryv should be a private, fast, and customer-focused set of apps. These are my goals and hopefully the company ends up following them.