Fieldkeep
Software for keeping track of work in the field.
In active development, the furthest along.
The company behind the software
Small software, made properly
If you got here from Fieldkeep or MyBabyStages: I’m Mike, and I make them. Twenty years of shipping things people use. Games are the loud half; web products have run alongside them the whole time. Here’s what that means for the software.
Where the experience comes from
The games are the part people know: worlds where a lot of people are in the same place at the same time and everything has to respond instantly. My last one runs on twelve platforms with every player in one world, and getting that to work well is a harder engineering problem than most business software will ever pose.
Web products have been there the whole time though. Before the first game there were sites I built as a teenager, then Wooglie, a games portal that served hundreds of millions of plays. Fieldkeep isn’t a change of career, it’s the other half of what I’ve always done.
That’s the background I bring to Fieldkeep. Not a template someone filled in, but software built by someone who has spent two decades on the awkward parts: how data is stored, how fast it comes back, what happens when something goes wrong at three in the morning.
It also means I build small on purpose. A tool that does one job well beats a platform that does nine things badly, and I’d rather ship something you can figure out in five minutes.
The short version
- Twenty years of building for the web, games and otherwise
- Millions of people have played something I made
- Backends, servers and databases are my own work, not outsourced
- You’re talking to the person who writes the code
The products
MyBabyStages
A small tool for tracking a baby’s milestones, built because I wanted it myself.
Finished and running. Also at BabyFases.nl, the Dutch version.
The practical details
- Company
- M2H, a Dutch company running since January 2009
- Chamber of Commerce
- 66055210
- Run by
- Mike Hergaarden, building things for the web since 2004
- Released
- Twenty-odd products, 2 million+ copies sold, one game live on twelve platforms at once
- Funding
- Self-funded, so the roadmap answers to the people using it
Being self-funded mostly shows up in what gets built. There’s no growth target to chase, so a feature makes it in because someone asked for it, not because a spreadsheet needed it to.