What a difference a year makes. If someone had told me last summer that I’d be out on my own with a few friends selling a web-based product I’d have said they were crazy.

It all happened over lunch, and then, in a fit of irony, it ate up all our spare time. A fairly innocuous posting by Jeff Atwood titled Does Software Spoil turned into a one-two punch with Are Features the Enemy. As someone who made a living writing Big Software this was a lot to think about. Then I got blindsided by 37signals‘ book Getting Real, which I read over an afternoon, and the next day had lunch with a friend.

An idea we’d had for an Old School program quickly turned into an idea we were having for a website, one that would making hiring easier for small companies, and Without Software was born.

Our philosophy? Keep things simple, focus on what’s really needed, and you don’t need software to make life easier.