Independent software has never been better. It deserves an economy to match.

Small software is no longer small.

It has never been easier to make good software, and rarely harder to make a living from it.

A single person with a clear idea can now build, ship and run a product that would once have needed a team. The result is an extraordinary abundance of small, careful, opinionated software, made by people who answer their own support email and know their customers by name.

This is the part of the software world we find most interesting. The products are often better than their larger rivals at the one thing they do. What they lack is not quality. It’s reach.

Being listed is not the same as being found.

Distribution is where independent products stall. Attention is expensive, platforms are crowded, and the playbook for getting noticed was written for companies with budgets and departments.

The sensible response would be for independent creators to work together. Two products that serve the same customer could recommend each other. Three could be sold as one. Someone’s well-made integration could save a dozen others from rebuilding it.

It rarely happens, and not for lack of goodwill. Collaboration has overhead. You have to find the right partner, trust them, agree terms, track who sold what, split the money and keep doing it every month. For a company of one, that overhead is the whole week.

Why directories and marketplaces aren’t enough.

Directories and marketplaces do one thing well: they put many products in one place. But they treat each product as a separate unit competing for the same glance. Their model of the world has no place for a relationship between two products.

So a creator can be listed beside the perfect partner for years and never know it. A customer who needs three tools has to discover, buy and connect all three alone. And a useful capability built by one creator stays locked inside one product.

We don’t think the answer is a better shelf. It’s a different structure: one where the connections between products are the point.

An ecosystem where products hold each other up.

Gibly is our attempt at that structure. It’s being designed around four connected capabilities: a growth network where creators find partners and trade tracked referrals; collaborative bundles that turn complementary products into joint offers; an exchange for reusable agents and capabilities; and ecosystems that gather creators around the audiences they share.

Underneath all four is the unglamorous part: agreements, attribution, checkout and payouts. That’s the overhead that stops collaboration today, and taking it on is how the platform is meant to earn its place.

Gibly is intended to make money when creators do, through fees on the transactions it enables. If creators aren’t earning more together than apart, there’s no reason for us to exist.

Three things we won’t trade away.

Creator ownership. The people who build a product own it: the code, the brand, the customer relationships they’ve earned. Gibly is not an agency, an incubator or an acquirer, and joining is not meant to change who owns anything.

Shared commercial opportunity. Value created together should be divided by rules the contributors agreed and can all see. No hidden terms.

Quality and trust. A bundle is only as good as its weakest product, and a capability is only reusable if others can rely on it. Clear information about what something does, what it needs and how it has performed matters more to us than the size of a catalogue.

An economy, not an empire.

Over time, we’d like Gibly to become a network of independently owned products that is, taken together, as capable as any large suite, with no single owner.

A customer would be able to assemble exactly the software they need from products that already work together. A creator would be able to stay small, stay independent and still have the reach of something much larger.

That’s a long way from here, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise.

At the beginning, deliberately.

Gibly is pre-launch. There is no marketplace to browse yet, and no list of customers or partners to show you, because there aren’t any.

What there is, is an idea we think is right and an open invitation. We’re forming a Founding Circle of independent creators to help decide how this should work before it’s built. If the problem described here is one you recognize, we’d like to hear from you.