Short runs of useful software.
Fig. 1 — Title plate. Two inks,
hand registered, one sheet.
Drag registration in the docket
above to pull the plates apart.
I am one person with a small press. I build automations, document pipelines and websites — made to order, in short runs, by hand. No platform, no subscription, no team to feed.
- What
- Automation · Document processing · Websites
- Who
- One person, brief to handover.
Nobody to escalate to. - Run length
- Days and weeks. Not quarters.
- Handover
- Source, notes, a walkthrough. No lock‑in.
Fig. 2 — On the
economics of a
short run.
Most software is printed in editions of millions.
Yours doesn’t have to be.
A script that renames forty thousand files correctly. A pipeline that turns a month of invoices into one clean spreadsheet. A page that loads before you have finished blinking. These are small jobs.
Small jobs are badly served by big software. They get a subscription with two hundred features you will never open, or a six‑week engagement with three people on the call and someone taking notes about the notes.
What a small job actually needs is one person who will set the plates, pull a proof, run it once while you watch, and hand you the finished thing.
So that is what this is. The talking, the building, the testing and the handover, all the same pair of hands. There is nobody to escalate to, which turns out to be the feature.
Fig. 3 — Proofs pulled
before this press.
- Public work
- Korenčan in družabniki — Process consulting for manufacturers
- Temmes — Import–export brokerage
- visit Sveta Gora — Pilgrimage church — accommodation & booking
- Experience with automation
- Before Small Runs, I built automation for a regulated pharmaceutical
production lines.
That work is not public, but the kind of problem — exacting, high‑stakes,
no room for a script that fails quietly — is one I have already spent years solving.
What comes off the press
Proof sheet · three plates · see 02 ServicesScripts & automation
The boring part, handed to a machine that does it at three in the morning without being reminded.
- File wrangling, renaming, sorting
- Scraping & change monitoring
- Scheduled and triggered jobs
- Glue between two tools that refuse to talk
Document processing
Paper and PDFs in, structured data out, at a volume nobody should be typing by hand.
- Invoice, form & report extraction
- Bulk conversion between formats
- Validation, matching, de‑duplication
- Generating thousands from one template
Websites, hand‑built
Written by hand, loaded in one breath, and handed over with every file that makes it work.
- Portfolio, landing, docs, small shop
- No framework tax, no build ceremony
- Keyboard‑complete, screen‑reader sane
- You own the source
The ticket is
blank on purpose.
Those three plates are the work I set most often. They are not the whole catalogue.
If you can describe the fiddly, repetitive or quietly expensive thing you keep doing by hand, there is usually a way to hand it to a machine. Tell me what it is and I will tell you honestly whether it is worth building — including when the answer is no, keep doing that yourself.
- The thing you keep doing by hand
- How often it happens
- What it costs you when it goes wrong
- What you have already tried
- Deadline, if there is a real one
How a job runs
Four stations · feed to deliveryStation 01
Brief
You describe the job in plain words. I tell you what it will take, what it will not fix, and whether it is worth doing at all.
Station 02
Proof
A small working version, early and unpolished, running on your real data. Not a picture of the thing — the thing.
Station 03
Run
Built properly and handled failure by failure, then run end to end once while you watch it happen.
Station 04
Handoff
Source, plain‑English notes and a walkthrough. It runs on your machines. Nothing phones home, nothing expires.