It’s been a very hard year
27th of November 2025
Unlike a lot of places in tech, my company, Set Studio/Piccalilli has no outside funding. Bootstrapped is what the LinkedIn people say, I think.
It’s been a hard year this year. A very hard year. I think a naive person would blame it all on the seemingly industry-wide attitude of “AI can just do this for us”. While that certainly hasn’t helped — as I see it — it’s been a hard year because of a combination of limping economies, tariffs, even more political instability and a severe cost of living crisis. It’s been a very similar year to 2020, in my opinion.
Why am I writing this? All of the above has had a really negative effect on us this year. Landing projects for Set Studio has been extremely difficult, especially as we won’t work on product marketing for AI stuff, from a moral standpoint, but the vast majority of enquiries have been for exactly that. Our reputation is everything, so being associated with that technology as it increasingly shows us what it really is, would be a terrible move for the long term. I wouldn’t personally be able to sleep knowing I’ve contributed to all of that, too.
What we do really well is produce websites and design systems that actually work for and with people. We also share our knowledge and experience via tonnes of free content on Piccalilli, funded by premium courses to keep the lights on. We don’t pepper our content with annoying adverts for companies you have no interest in.
I’ve spoken about my dream for us to run Piccalilli full time and heck, that may still happen. For that to happen though, we really needed this Black Friday period to do as well, if not better, as it did last year. So far, that’s not happening unfortunately, but there’s still time.
I get it, money is so tight this year and companies are seemingly not investing in staff with training budgets quite like they did. We actually tried to stem that a bit by trialing a community funding model earlier in the year that I outlined in I’m getting fed up of making the rich, richer and we even started publishing some stuff.
It went down incredibly well, but when push came to shove, we fell way short in terms of funding support. Like I say, we’re not swimming in investor money, so without the support on Open Collective, as much as it hurt, we had to pull the plug. It’s a real shame — that would have been incredible — but again, I get it, money is tight.
This isn’t a woe is me post; that’s not how I roll. This is a post to give some context for what I’m going to ask next and how I’m trying to navigate the tough times. I’m asking folks to help us so we can try to help everyone, whether that’s with web projects that actually work for people or continuing to produce extremely high quality education material. Here’s some ways you can do it.
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