About STRICH
About STRICH
👋 Hi, I'm Alex, the author of STRICH Barcode Scanning SDK. I hold an MSc. in Computer Science from ETH Zurich and I'm passionate about software and all things visual.
I've been writing software for a variety of companies for over two decades, as a student, full-time employee, freelancer and eventually owner of a small software development agency. I later scaled back to focus on what I love most — building software — and founded Pixelverse LLC, the umbrella company for all my current ventures.
Why I built STRICH
At some point during my agency time, I started writing barcode scanning apps, using both state-of-the-art commercial offerings with license costs in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars, and Open Source libraries which needed a lot of DIY work and were unmaintained for years. That is when I perceived a gap between the two, and I decided to build my own barcode scanning library, in the midst of the COVID pandemic.
Another frustration of mine was that most of my customers believed that they needed a native app, when in fact a web app would have been perfectly fine, and would have been much easier to maintain, especially for in-house or B2B apps. I've seen apps thrown out of the App Store simply because nobody bothered to check an email alias. That's why I decided to build STRICH exclusively for the web, from the ground up.
Pilot phase (mid-2022 to early 2023)
After immersing myself in barcode specifications and re-acquainting myself with the field of Computer vision, I built the first prototype of STRICH in about 6 months. I had previously built an in-house app for Swiss Railways which was using an Open Source library for barcode scanning, with mixed results, so I took the opportunity and asked them if they would be willing to be early adopters and help me bring STRICH to production quality by integrating it in their app in an opt-in fashion. The pilot phase lasted for almost a year, and STRICH emerged battle-tested and ready for launch.
Launch (early 2023)
I quietly published version 1.0.0 on NPM on March 15, 2023. In the beginning, nobody except for my pilot customer used the library, but slowly and steadily, paying customers started signing up. In August 2023, I decided to take the plunge and self-submit to Hacker News. To my delight, the submission took the top spot for a short while, and an interesting discussion ensued.
Growth (late 2024 and onwards)
After the HN submission, STRICH started to grow slowly but steadily, but it did not generate enough income for me to be able to work on it full-time until about Fall 2024. Being able to pay myself a decent salary and provide for my family by doing something I love is a dream come true. I now work on STRICH full-time, with only a few, non-core tasks like 1st level support, design and legal advice done by others.
My goal for STRICH is to build the best library for in-browser barcode scanning. It does not intend to displace the state-of-the-art solutions, but to provide a simple, lightweight, and easy-to-use alternative that works for the vast majority of use cases and runs on a wide variety of devices. STRICH is a bootstrapped, profitable business fully owned by me.
Sometimes people are surprised that a single person can build a product and operate a business on their own, and they ask questions like "what happens when you are gone?". All I can say to that is that I am fully committed to STRICH, love working on it and am financially dependent on the income it generates. Also keep in mind that just because a company is big doesn't guarantee its product will always be around — just take a stroll through the Google Graveyward, for example.
Future Development
I'm excited to continue adding features that improve the library for all users, take advantage of new capabilities of the web platform (besides just keeping up with browser updates!) and try new approaches that lend themselves to real-time barcode recognition in constrained environments like web browsers. I do not plan to port STRICH to other platforms, as I believe in a strong and capable web platform that can be used to build all kinds of applications, outside of the walled gardens, and I am just one person with limited bandwidth.
I'm not ruling out growing the company and hiring other people to work on STRICH, but for now it's mostly me and I intend to keep it that way for the foreseeable future. If you see that as a risk, this product is probably not for you, and you might be better served by an alternative, of which there are a few.
Thanks for reading this!