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Why we built Murakami Labs as a studio, not a startup
Murakami Labs is an independent software studio, not a startup. Here is what that choice means, what it costs, and the first app it built.
Murakami Labs is an independent software studio: we design, build, and run a small family of focused mobile apps, and we pay for the work with what those apps earn rather than with outside money. Some people would call this an indie software studio, and that fits too. This essay is about the word we put after the studio, and the word we chose not to use. We are not a startup. That is a decision, not an accident, and it shaped the product you can install, the way we spend a week, and the size we are willing to grow to.
The question underneath is a plain one. When someone builds software and wants to charge for it, they almost always reach for the startup template: raise a round, aim at one enormous market, and treat growth itself as the product. We studied that template and set it back down. Here is what we picked up instead, and what it costs to hold.
What a startup would have meant
A startup, in the sense the word carries today, is a specific machine. You raise money against a big future, spend it to grow faster than revenue alone would allow, and the growth buys the next round, which sets a higher bar, which needs more growth. It is a treadmill by design. For the right idea and the right team it works, and a great deal of software worth using was built exactly this way. We are not sneering at it. We are saying it is a shape, and the shape has consequences.
The first consequence is the single bet. A venture-backed company usually lives or dies on one product becoming enormous. Second products are distractions until the first one wins, and the first one has to win at a scale most software never reaches. The second consequence follows from it. When growth is what keeps the money flowing, growth quietly becomes the thing you optimize, sometimes past the point where the app is still good for the person holding the phone. We did not want to run that machine. Not because it is wrong, but because it is not the work we came to do.
So we declined the round we never raised. No investors, no board seat to grow into, no valuation to defend next year. The cost of that is real, and we will come to it. The freedom is real too: we answer to the people who use the apps, and to the arithmetic of whether each app pays for itself.
What a software studio means, day to day
Studio is an old word borrowed from craft. A workshop turns out many small, complete things over the years, each one finished and sent out the door, the bench and the tools shared across all of them. That is the model, carried into software. We build small apps. Each is scoped to ship in eight to twelve weeks, does one specific job, and has to earn its place on a home screen against everything else competing for the space. If it cannot earn the spot, it does not belong in the family.
Underneath the apps sits shared, quiet infrastructure: the same accounts system, the same payments, the same paper-craft design language. A new app inherits all of it on the first day, so each one starts further along than the last. The surface a person sees is different every time. The plumbing is the same, and boring on purpose.
We design distribution in from the start rather than bolt it on afterward. Calm-PLG is our name for it: we shape each app so its useful output travels between people on its own, without nag screens, invite gates, or growth theater. A good transcript reaches the classmate who missed the lecture because it is worth sending, not because the app pestered anyone to send it.
And every app has to pay for itself. This is the quiet center of the whole thing. A studio is not a portfolio where nine small apps subsidize one rocket that has to reach orbit or bust. Each app carries its own weight. When one works, its earnings fund the next app, not a larger and hungrier version of itself. That single rule is most of the distance between what we are and what a startup is.
The first app, in the open
All of this stays a manifesto until there is a product to point at, so here is the first one. Polmi is a lecture-transcription app for college students. A student presses record at the start of class, and a few minutes after it ends the phone holds a clean transcript, a short summary, and a small set of flashcards shaped like something a person would actually study from.
Two decisions from building it show the studio’s hand. We left live, on-screen transcription on the table, because a streaming pipeline in a lecture hall with weak Wi-Fi tends to fail at the exact moment a student needs it; batch recording is sturdier, so batch recording is what we shipped. And we kept the flashcards small. A fifty-minute lecture becomes a dozen cards a student will flip through, not forty she will skim once and forget. Neither choice will ever make a headline. Both make the app better for the person in the back row. We wrote the full reasoning down in why we built Polmi.
Polmi v1 is live now, on the App Store and Google Play. It is the first entry on a list we mean to keep short and finish well. You can follow what the studio is building as more of it comes together.
What this choice costs
Choosing a studio over a startup is not a free lunch dressed up as principle, and we would rather name the bill than pretend there is not one. It is slower. Without a war chest to spend ahead of revenue, an app takes the time it takes, and the next one waits its turn behind the first.
The ceiling is lower, on purpose. A studio built this way will not turn one product into a household name and a nine-figure outcome. We are trading the top of the range for better odds of reaching the middle of it, and for keeping what we reach. If your aim is the largest outcome money can buy, this is the wrong machine, and a startup is the right one. We mean that plainly.
And nobody writes headlines about a studio like this. There is no funding announcement, no chart bending upward behind a founder on a stage, no logo wall to join. The work is quiet by design, so the recognition is quiet too. We made our peace with that. What we get in return is ownership of the whole thing and the freedom to keep an app alive at a size a venture-backed company would be forced to shut down. Those are the terms. We signed them with open eyes.
Where that leaves us
So that is the answer to the question in the title. We built Murakami Labs as a studio, not a startup, because we wanted to make small, complete, useful things for a long time, and let each one stand on its own feet. The plan is not a pitch deck. It is a short list of careful apps, built one at a time. The honest way to judge it is to install one and see whether it earns its place. We will write here again when there is something specific to say.