Why I'm Still Building Murmel

A few people have reached out to me over the past week, since we soft-launched the long-overdue v2.0 release of Murmel. Some were outright cheerful, others were curious why I still invest time and energy into building Murmel, even though tools like sill.social exist, and they more or less offer the same set of features as us. The answer I gave everyone sounded something like this:

Competing with someone purely based on your feature set is a race to the bottom. It’s a losing game. There will always be someone better, faster, or more resourceful than you, who could destroy your app in mere days if they wanted to. That’s especially true nowadays, when anyone can build anything in mere minutes with the help of AI.

Think of Murmel, Sill, and other apps in the same space as coffee places. The fact that one coffee place exists does not mean that it’s the only one in town, or that other people should be discouraged from opening up new ones. With minor taste and variety differences, one could argue that coffee is the same everywhere, so why bother.

And this is where I think they are fundamentally wrong. Because, while the end product may be structurally the same, you don’t go to a coffee place for the coffee alone. You go for the experience, you go because it is close to you and it feels like home, you go because you buy the people’s story and want to support them for who they are, not only for what they do.

For instance, we are a small team from the German and Bulgarian Alps. It’s only natural that German-speaking and more generally EU-centric communities would choose to trust us. We have been working on Murmel for the last five years, and our company has a decade-long track record of delivering quality software for the European market. Certain people trust us for who we are — they buy our story — and that’s not something a bigger feature set can replicate.

At the same time, Tyler is a great guy and a fantastic engineer in his own right, and if you buy his vision and story better than ours, by all means, go with Sill.

There is enough room under the sun for all of us to create and deliver value. At the end of the day, small teams like ours should team up and support each other in our fight against the big walled gardens that crave for people’s time and attention.

If you’re curious what we’re building — give Murmel a try.

Links #

Murmel — Your morning read, already waiting.

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https://murmel.social

Sill

Sill streamlines your Bluesky and Mastodon feeds to give you a clear picture of what's happening.

https://sill.social