Cabin Fever Software

who we are:

Hi! I'm David Young, founder of Cabin Fever Software & Brewing Company LLC. Yes, the brewing part is a joke--but I do like brewing my own beer. We did, though, actually get started in a cabin in Alaska. With mosquitos! Lots of them!

the beginning:

Some friends of mine and I started Cabin Fever in 2004 as an idea for a new business-relationship model between software developers and small business owners, and we actually formed the initial LLC in 2009. These days, however, all code/text in our projects and websites has been written by me, and the vast majority of it in the last two years. Though I am very grateful to have assistance with customer support and bookkeeping! 

The PayPal Lesson:

Our current flagship product, Scarecrow, launched in 2012. It was a big moment for us, but it came crashing down after a few months when PayPal decided it had to freeze our business account, and keep all subscription money, because they said they couldn't verify my physical mailing address. They wanted a lease document or a mortgage. Instead I sent them a copy of my deed to my fully-owned property (that cabin in Alaska!), and a link to the borough website where they could verify it for themselves. They never responded, and so we suddenly had no subscribers. Given that we were selling online-presence security, I have to say it was disheartening to see "single point of failure" demonstrated so very clearly. Definitely taken that to heart ever since.

life, re-imagined:

In 2012, I had also published a novel (a lifelong dream), and at the time writing fiction struck me as far more rewarding than software. So I did that for a few years (though I also published my free online privacy book in 2016...no email collection; you can just download it). Scarecrow and software development in general became more of a side project.

Life happened. I started a one-guy trucking company, which was yet another dream of mine. It was fun. Quit trucking after a couple of years to spend more time with family/kids, and...I dunno. I got interested in software again. So here we are. 

That's my story. I've been at this for a while now, seeing small businesses and software development from a lot of different angles. I started writing code at the age of 13 in 1981. Also I've been running web, email, and database servers on multiple platforms continuously since 1998 (aside from an Appalachian Trail hiking interlude, and a bicycle trip from New Orleans to Minneapolis).

I've been everything from an anonymous-cubicle developer to lead developer/architect, everywhere from startups to huge corporations (Dell and USAA among them), to Director of Product Development for multiple medical devices, both hardware and software. 

That last included being HIPAA/FDA point of contact for the organization and dealing directly with representatives from over 60 DoD, Coast Guard, VA, state-level, and Alaska Native Corporation organizations, as well as being a technical representative of our organization for a multiple-agency, multiple-project telemedicine meeting in DC to determine how Iraq war troops' medical information should be transferred back to doctors in the US in a HIPAA-compliant way (email? Really?). First I wrote software that worked, and then....

in a nutshell:

What I'm getting at here is simply this: I very much prefer building solutions to spending time in meetings. Just saying.

I am dead serious about small business owners and independent software developers and their currently broken relationships. As an independent developer, what do I want to do? Find business owners who need software. Build for free. Get free beta testers and actual user dialog going. Lifetime free subscriptions for initial business owner customers, and reasonable/cheap for everybody else too. Why not? My overhead is low. I can pivot. Making stuff is, and I know I keep saying this, fun for me. And I like to feel I'm doing useful work.

Scarecrow grew out of three such projects that, in my head at least, merged. It's about website protection, sure, with independent website uptime/content detection from multiple locations, content checking via ftp protocols as well, super-transparent backups (I hate the black-box nature of backup systems in general, so I didn't build another one of those), restores, basically monitoring/backup and hack-detection plus an audit trail. A sort of web business continuity insurance that protects against (at least some) business relationship failures, as well as more obvious threats.

But Scarecrow is ALSO intended to start conversations. Ideally, other developers will also get excited about this. We might actually make a difference here!

Just wait till redacTor comes out. Should be soon now. Definitely something else to talk about. 

I'm sure there are plenty of other projects out there that really should be built. Have ideas? I'd love to hear them.