Why PVT Digital exists
A small technology company that builds and keeps its own online businesses, rather than building them for someone else. Here's what we're doing and why we're writing about it.
Most people who can build software spend their careers building it for someone else. A client briefs it, a team ships it, and the thing that gets made — along with everything it earns — belongs to whoever paid for the hours.
PVT Digital is a bet on the other arrangement. We build online businesses, and we keep them.
What we are
PVT Digital Ltd is a technology company based in Birmingham. It owns, manages and develops a portfolio of online businesses: software products, useful websites and services, each built in-house and run for the long term.
Some are already operating. hashbox.dev is a set of free developer tools. snapcalcs.co.uk is a collection of UK personal finance calculators. PVTinteractive offers web design and digital marketing to UK businesses. Others, such as Crossmith, a web-based crossword compiler, are still being built.
Why a portfolio
A single product is a single point of failure. One algorithm change, one competitor or one shift in a market can take it to zero.
A portfolio behaves differently. Each business is small and focused, and none of them has to carry the company alone. They also feed each other. The tools, code, design patterns and audience built for one project lower the cost of the next. Over time the company gets better at starting things — and, just as important, better at stopping the ones that aren't working.
How the work gets done
The economics of small online businesses have changed. Work that once needed a team — research, design, development, content, support — can now be done by one person directing a set of AI agents.
That is how we operate. Agents draft, build and check; a person decides what gets built, sets the standard and signs off what ships. It is not magic, and it is not autonomous in the way the hype suggests. It does mean a very small company can run more than one business at a time.
There are rules that come with that. Everything we publish has to be genuinely useful. Nothing goes out because it was cheap to produce. A free tool has to work properly; a guide has to answer the question better than what's already out there. The internet does not need more filler, and filler doesn't build anything worth owning.
Why we're writing about it
This journal is a working notebook. We'll write about how we choose what to build, how we build it, how agents fit into the work, what the numbers look like when we can share them, and what goes wrong.
Some of it will be practical: how a particular tool or workflow is set up and what it costs. Some of it will be strategy: why an idea was killed early, or why a free tool came before a paid product. All of it will be specific. If you build or run small online businesses yourself, we hope it saves you some time.
New articles will appear here several times a week. The RSS feed is the easiest way to follow along.