Why I built Pagecord

I started blogging in 2005 when I set up my first company, a consultancy that was just me contracting myself (and my soul) into financial institutions to hand-write code in exchange for cash in the City of London. I had to wear smart trousers, shirts and shoes but I got away without a tie. People carried briefcases. It sounds almost Victorian, doesn't it?

I was never a prolific blogger and many of the posts I wrote back in the day got binned because they were terrible (although some survived). I found the self-promotion excruciating, but my enthusiasm was real even if the dedication wasn't. Twenty years later I'm now more prolific, primarily because I built a blogging platform of my own and it was never gonna dogfood itself. I still cringe at the self-promotion, but I've learned to get over that because I know it lives only inside my head.

Anyone who ever tried to build a blogging platform will know that the basics are simple, but there are many, many hidden gotchas, ballaches, botfarms, and footguns that you'll be subjected to. The devil is in the user-generated content detail. If you manage to stubbornly persist through this quagmire and build something worthy of selling, the chance of making any "I'm quitting my real job" money from it is essentially zero. Blogging platforms are a commoditised niche and hence a ridiculous idea to take on for that, and so many other reasons. So why on earth did I decide to build Pagecord?

Let me try and explain.

My first company lasted about 5 years in total, but in 2007 I co-founded another company that was an actual proper one, not a tax-avoiding consultancy. I spent 15 years being its CTO and it was a successful enterprise. A few years after we'd sold the business, I decided to move on for reasons I've written lots about before, but basically it wasn't very interesting or challenging any more. I then worked as a not-quite-CTO for a year or so for a company I was always curious about. This job was interesting and challenging for different reasons, but it was clear to me after a while that the role wasn't really needed, which made me feel like a spare part who was getting in the way, so I upped and left.

Following that, I got close to co-founding another VC-backed company. We had a Y Combinator pitch lined up, but I got cold feet at the eleventh hour. My gut said it wasn't the right time (looking back, it arguably was! 😅🤦‍♂️) and, frankly, I needed a break so I took one.

After a while, I got the urge to build something again. Leadership positions are all well and good, but there's nothing like the feeling of building a new product for customers that really love it. I wanted a bit of that again. I pulled together a prototype app called Teamlight (RIP ⚰️) that was an email and Slack-based B2B company directory and team check-in product, but after running a beta test with a few businesses, I lost all enthusiasm. The domain just didn't interest me, so into the garbage it went.

A domain that does, and always has, interested me is blogging – independent writing on the internet – and publishing platforms, as well as the whole web reading and typography experience. I've followed blogs since they became a thing (the first I remember was Joel on Software), and I happily read them using the wonder that is RSS. There's something magical to me about the open web and people writing for themselves for free, not to shill or monetise something. Books, journals, blogs – I've learned so much from reading over the years and I can genuinely say that blogs helped me enormously in my career. We can also thank blogs for today's LLMs, which have hoovered up every word as part of their training. Blogs are honestly a gift.

I've tried a large chunk of the blogging products that have existed since 2005. This personal blog has actually existed in Wordpress, Tumblr, Write.as, Ghost, Hugo, and Jekyll at one point or other, plus I've also used a bunch of other products like Squarespace, Medium, Bear, Pika and probably others that I can't remember any more. I'm a little bit obsessed, it's fair to say. I really liked many of these products, but I could never find one that was perfectly suited to me. Some were too corporate, some too low-tech, and most I felt wanted too much money.

I was never truly satisfied with any so frankly it was inevitable that I'd end up having a go at building my own platform.

During the Covid nightmare I'd actually shipped a blogging product, Blogline, but my heart wasn't quite in it at the time – I was still full time in my job and I wasn't happy enough with the product. I found it hard to devote enough time to it, then it ended up going a bit stale, so I canned it. In early 2024 I stumbled across Daft Social which I thought was brilliant fun. It was simple, quirky, and slightly irreverent. I loved how you could only operate it via email. It was opinionated, intentionally simple, and truly minimalist. My kinda thing.

I already had my own HEY World blog, which was a "publish by email" product available only for HEY customers. Daft Social seemed like a simpler version of this, but one that worked with any email account. I never used Daft Social (too basic for me) but it got me thinking about resurrecting the Blogline idea, but with a better name (I already owned pagecord.com) and a simplified approach. A part HEY World, part Daft Social frankenproduct, but a bit more fleshed out with support for other things I wanted like custom domains, basic analytics, themes and whatnot.

I built the first prototype in 3 days, put it live, then launched it on Product Hunt a few days later for a laugh. It got some nice feedback for an unoriginal product, but hardly any traction. I didn't think much more of it, but I kept tinkering over the next few months. Then the four coding agents of the AI apocalypse arrived, so I went all-in with my new robot best friends for a few months to transform Pagecord into the product I always wanted, and that's kinda where things stand today.

Pagecord is now over two years old, has hundreds of bloggers writing on it, and is a profitable business. The product is built and operated entirely by me, and it's still — I hope — as effortless to use as it was on day one.

I built Pagecord because I wanted the product I wished existed, and now it does. I genuinely couldn't be happier with it!