A Street of Small Booths
Every town has one: a street lined with small booths. Cheese, honey, pottery, a knife sharpener. None of them tries to be everything. Everything is out in the open, so you can walk up, see what it is and try it. Each booth knows the people who stop by. Most last because they are useful to a small group of people, not because they're big.
Rua dos Bytes is my attempt to build software the same way. It's a street of small digital booths. Each booth is one product, made for one community, and built carefully from start to finish.
Why a street and not a startup
With Attentive, we did it the startup way: two accelerators, venture money, 20 people, and several pivots looking for product-market fit. We didn't find it. Looking back, the lesson I keep coming back to is that we weren't focused enough and we weren't fast enough.
Rua dos Bytes is the opposite bet. Instead of one big idea that has to work, it's many small ones that each have to be useful to someone. No pitch deck, no hockey-stick slide. The question for each booth is simple: is there a group of real people with a real problem we can solve well?
It started from a passion for building things, after many years of building for size rather than depth.
The booths so far
- Radar Wine: a directory of Portuguese wines, covering grapes, producers and regions, from everyday bottles to the great ones, with picks under €20. It's for people who love Portuguese wine and want to find more of it.
- Aniwal: connects pet owners with trusted professionals (vets, grooming, hotels, training) and lets them book in one place.
- usadoscdds: a second-hand market for school uniforms at Colégio D. Diogo de Sousa. Families buy and sell outgrown uniforms locally and simply. I went to that school for many years. The need came from being a father now, with my kids going there too.
- Ideias Novas: an online window for a women's fashion boutique in Santo Tirso, where the boutique manages its own collections.
- Montra: many small businesses only have a Facebook page. Montra builds them a ready-to-use website from the information they've already published, and the owner just decides whether to keep it.
Some of these booths serve a whole community (every wine lover in Portugal), and some serve a single shop. That's fine. The street has room for both.
What every booth has in common
It starts from a community, not a technology. Radar Wine exists because of wine lovers and usadoscdds because of school families. The software comes second.
It's small on purpose. Build the smallest thing that's useful, put it in front of people, and learn. Montra's rule sums it up: build the site first, from data they already published, then show it to them. Proving that idea cost €0.
It shares the street's infrastructure. Every booth starts from the same Django template and deploys the same way, to our own servers, automatically on every push. Setting up a new booth is cheap, so we can run many. Packing one up is cheap too, and that matters just as much.
Quality over quantity. A narrow product can afford to be polished. When you only serve florists, or only Portuguese wine, you can get the details right.
Why I like building this way
The goal is to test many things quickly. Some booths find their people, and some get packed up soon after they open. Either way is fine.
The street keeps growing
New booths go up when we find a community that could use one. What booth would you set up? What would make you stop and try one? Tell me at info@rdbytes.pt.
If you walk by, come have a look.