Week 881

Week beginning Monday, 1st December 2025. I can’t quite believe it’s already December! 🤯

We’ve continued to focus on working on Jam, our open-source online music store, while keeping some business development irons in the fire. We’ve also all been making a conscious effort to do more exercise - it’s often something that slips for me when working on a client project for a sustained period, especially when there are various “fixed” launch dates - so it feels good to get back into better habits. 💪

Jam 🍓

We’ve done a lot of talking and thinking about Jam this week. For example, Chris R & Chris L dug into the details of the pricing model and how to make sure it’s sustainable - spreadsheets were involved!

Chris L has been working on adding functionality to support record labels with the involvement of someone who runs a label. We’re thinking that this might be one way to attract more artists and music to the platform.

Chris R has been putting together an Investment Readiness Assessment and supporting documents for Polly at Newable so we can unlock a few more hours of free business advice.

I’ve been working on some different ways we could use Stripe Connect to make it simpler for artists to receive payments for sales of their music and ideally reduce the administrative burden of operating the site. This has meant digging into a bunch of tax and compliance legislation which reminds me a lot of the time we decided to try building our own online banking site!

Space 4 🪐

On Thursday we met up at Space 4 and had some useful discussions. Chris R had spent some time digging into the calculations for our individual pots and how they relate to our financial forecast. He’s come up with some extra calculations which give us some better visibility of the months ahead. We also continued discussions about Jam throughout the day.

We then met up with Seb for lunch. It was great to catch up and exchange a bunch of ideas abotu Jam and separately some possible ways to earn money that aren’t so inextricably linked to the number of hours we work on a project.

Miscellaneous 🧩

Earlier in the week, I added this site to We Use Rails which aims to provide a curated list of Ruby on Rails web apps in order to help people curious about Rails discover real-world applications and businesses built with Rails. I noticed that there aren’t many other open-source entries which is a shame.

I was intrigued to read about Telebugs, a product by the author of We Use Rails, which describes itself as a self-hosted alternative to Sentry, the exception reporting app. It uses the ONCE business model, i.e. a single one-off payment allowing you to self-host the app and get email support. This was particularly interesting given 37Signals’ recent decision to move away from ONCE back to a SaaS model.

A while back I read how we should all be using dependency cooldowns to mitigate open-source supply chain attacks and mentioned it in Slack. Not long afterwards, Chris R followed this advice and added the cooldown option to some of our Dependabot configurations.

Business Development 👔

We’re still on the look out for interesting projects, so do drop us an email if you’d like a free, no-obligation chat about how we might be able to help. No project too small!

That’s all for now!

– James