Loic
Location:
Paris, FranceReputation points: 20
Loic's co-founder search details
Why Loic would make a good co-founder
I am a software developer, passionate about Free Software and self-hostable services. In the past decade I spent five years as a core developer of Ceph.io, a self-healing distributed storage system. My primary motivation was to make it accessible to individuals, not just the cloud providers. I then went on a four years mission to help whistleblowers by developing tools to protect their communications such as SecureDrop.org.
Early 2021 I came back to a more technical project that finds its root twenty years ago, when software forges appeared for the first time. I am determined to change centralized code hosting platforms such as GitHub into a constellation of federated forges.
I am actively looking for a business co-founder excited by the project and sharing the same core values.
Elevator pitch for startup:
In July 2022 Hostea started offering code hosting services similar to those provided by GitHub. We knew that by doing so we were entering a mature market, engaging in a David against Goliath fight. Hostea already has a competitive software foundation and the primary goal is to bootstrap a business, reach out to users and customers. In order to do that Hostea can leverage unique properties that have the potential to radically transform the landscape: Free Software, federated and self-hostable. It could be compared to the rise of organic food producers in the past decades: it enables people to use and produce healthier software.
We are a team of two, Loïc Dachary a developer committed to Free Software since the late 80' and Aravinth Manivannan who shares the same long term vision. Both of us are, first and foremost, geeks with strong technical skills but unable to create a sustainable business. That did not stop us and we moved forward regardless. Until the Plausible story was published and inspired us to reach out, look for someone with the right skills and the right mindset to be a co-founder of Hostea. It is also a good approximation of what the Hostea success story could be, turning a SaaS based on Free Software into a profitable business.
In 2019, Plausible was implemented as a Google Analytics alternative and was, at the time, a technology without a customer base. A year later and a meager $400 in monthly income, the creator started looking for a marketing co-founder and they both bootstrapped Plausible into a self-sustaining company with an annual income of one million USD in 2022. No investors, all Free Software, fully self-hostable: a success story that reflects positively on the spirit of a post growth economy.