Somewhere between “I have an idea” and “I should build this,” a perfectly reasonable side project can turn into an imaginary software company. It starts with: “I want to make a tool that resizes images.” Then suddenly you’re thinking about subscription tiers, team accounts, onboarding emails, and whether the enterprise plan should say “Contact sales.” Contact who? It’s you. You are sales. I’ve been building base31.org, and the small tools inside it have made me think about the opposite approach: What if a project just does one thing, does it well, and lets people get on with their day? Let the button do its job Imagine someone opens an image compressor. They have a large image. They would like a smaller image. That is the entire relationship. They probably don’t want to create an account, verify their email, join a workspace, or explain their job title. “Why are you interested in our platform?” Because my image is large, Daniel. The Image Compressor on base31 handles compression and resizing in the browser, including batch processing and before-and-after sizes, without uploading the images. The Background Remover follows a similar approach: edit a photo in your browser and download the result without uploading it. Those are the kinds of tools I want to keep making room for. Open the page. Do the thing. Leave with something useful. A visitor leaving quickly can be a success. Small is a design decision A small project isn’t automatically an unfinished big project. Sometimes its scope is the point. A focus timer doesn’t necessarily need a social feed. A QR code generator doesn’t necessarily need a dashboard. An iframe tester probably doesn’t need a community ambassador program. The temptation is understandable, though. Once something works, adding another feature feels productive. Then another. Then the settings page needs settings. Eventually, the original useful thing is somewhere behind three menus. That’s something I want to watch out for with base31. The directory can grow, but each individual tool doesn’t have to grow in every direction. The site already has separate tools for focus sessions, app screenshots, image editing, GitHub exploration, and other specific jobs. Giving them their own spaces lets people go straight to the thing they need. A bigger collection doesn’t have to mean a more complicated tool. Useful and ridiculous can coexist The other thing I like about building base31 is that I don’t have to choose between practical tools and wonderfully unnecessary websites. The directory has both. There are browser utilities, developer resources, and public APIs. There are also games, interactive experiments, and sites like Cat Bounce, whose purpose is pretty much exactly what the name promises. I think those belong near each other. Some days you need to compress an image. Some days you need bouncing cats. I’m not qualified to decide which day you’re having. A project doesn’t have to save someone three hours to deserve a URL. Making someone curious, making them laugh, or showing them something unexpected is a perfectly good reason to build. Finish the small version If you’re sitting on a side project, here’s the version of this idea I’d like to encourage: Build the part that made you want to start. Not the hypothetical version for ten thousand users. Not the version with every feature you might eventually need. The version where someone can open it and understand why it exists. For an image tool, that might mean selecting a file and getting a useful result. For a game, it might mean one playable round. For a weird visual experiment, it might mean a page that makes someone say, “Wait, how did you do that?” You can improve it afterward. You can expand it afterward. You can decide whether it should become something bigger afterward. But it gets a chance to be real first. base31 also offers free publishing for small static sites: people can upload HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files, give the project a title and description, and let visitors discover it through the directory. That’s one part of the project I’m especially interested in. A home for things that are finished enough to share, even if they aren’t trying to become companies. What’s your tiny project? I’m still building base31, and I want it to make room for more projects like that. Useful ones. Strange ones. Things someone made because they had a problem—or because they thought it would be funny. You can explore it here: base31.org And the code is here: ## NOTAM-bobk / base31 ### The real official web directory # base31.org ### A small directory for a very big web. Useful browser tools, playful websites, public APIs, creative apps, and AI picks—curated together, searchable in one place. Visit the directory · Explore the tools · What's new · Report an issue ## What is this app? **base31 is both a discovery directory and a collection of independent web tools.** The Next.js app serves the directory, editorial pages, and SEO guides. Plain HTML/CSS/JavaScript tools live in this same repository and are served on their own `*.base31.org` subdomains. A separate Cloudflare Worker handles shared counters, votes, community publishing, and notification subscriptions. ### What visitors can do * Search **Featured sites, Other cool sites, Cool APIs, Cool apps, and Cool AIs** by name, URL, description, category, or tags. * Use `#utility` or `tag:no-key` for an exact tag; combine words such as `#utility image` to narrow results. Normal browsing starts with nine cards per section; search shows every match. * … View on GitHub What’s one small thing you’ve built—or wanted to build—that you wouldn’t turn into a business? Drop it in the comments. If it already has a URL, include that too. No pitch deck required.

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