ShardlyHQFront page
Shardly LLC · Est. 2025 · Germany
A software company that writes its own products and operates them on hardware it owns. Nobody here has a title, and every decision is voted on.
Part two · On the record
From irritation, mostly. Years of watching software shipped by people who had never had to run it, and infrastructure sold by people who had never had to talk to whoever was using it. Shardly started in 2025 to do both halves of that job in one building, with a spreadsheet that had to make the electricity bill work before anything else was allowed to happen.
One person, outright. There is no board, no investor, no second shareholder and no holding company above it. Every decision recorded on this page was made by somebody who has to live with it, and who is named in the imprint as the law requires.
Between one and ten, depending on the month. We publish a range rather than a number, because inflating a headcount is the first lie a small company tells and you have to keep telling it afterwards. Nobody here has a title that exists to impress a procurement form.
The people who buy from us. There has never been an investor, a grant or a line of credit — including the year it would have been very convenient. Everything the company owns was paid for out of revenue, which is slow and makes the argument about what to do next very short.
A software company that operates what it writes. Two competences, held on purpose: knowing how to run things properly, and knowing how to deal with the people using them. Most companies are decent at one of those and outsource the other; doing both is the whole reason this one exists.
A company that is still here in ten years and still small. Not a category leader, not a platform play, not an exit. The measure we care about is whether somebody who bought from us in the first year would buy from us again in the tenth.
Don’t. Check it. The registration, the operator details and the commitments on this site are all verifiable, and every figure we publish carries its measurement method beside it. Where we cannot show our working, we leave the sentence out rather than soften it.
Part three · The ledger
A history that lists only the wins is a brochure. This one is kept the way an accounts book is: each entry names the decision on one side and the price we paid for it on the other.
2025 · Q1
2025 · Q2
2025 · Q3
2025 · Q4
2026 · Q1
2026 · Q3
Part four · How decisions get made
There is no chief anything. No head of, no VP of, no lead. The company has one structure and it fits in a sentence: every decision is proposed, argued and voted on, one vote per person, and the founder holds a final say that is meant to be expensive to use.
Not flat-ish, not “flat with clear ownership”. Nobody has a title, on a business card or in an email signature, because a title is a claim about whose opinion counts before the argument has happened.
Hardware, pricing, what to build next, whether to take a meeting. Anyone can propose; everyone votes; the tally is written down. Seniority does not weight a vote, and neither does having been right last time.
Somebody has to carry the legal and financial responsibility, and that person can overrule a vote. It has been used once. Every use is recorded below, because a veto nobody can count is just a rumour about who is really in charge.
The voting record
3 for1 against0 abstained
The one against was about cash, and was right about the cash.
4 for0 against1 abstained
The abstention wanted to hear the second meeting first.
3 for2 against0 abstained
Closest vote we have had. Revenue predictability was the argument against.
4 for1 against0 abstained
We lost a customer that week. The vote would go the same way again.
3 for2 against0 abstained
Carried on the vote, overridden by the founder. Revisited a quarter later and started properly.
4 for1 against0 abstained
Two engineering quarters. The vote against was about the opportunity cost and it was not wrong.
5 for0 against0 abstained
The only unanimous one. Backups sharing a building with the thing they protect had been bothering everybody.
4 for0 against1 abstained
The abstention pointed out we have never hired anybody, which was fair.
3 for1 against1 abstained
The vote against thought it was vanity. Partly it was.
4 for1 against0 abstained
You are reading the result. The argument against was that we would have to keep doing it.
Part five · The refusals
Values are cheap in the affirmative. These are written as refusals because a refusal is the only kind of promise that costs something to keep.
The moment somebody outside the company needs a return, the company starts optimising for them instead of for the people paying it. There is no round planned and no exit planned.
Every figure on this site says how and over what window it was measured. If we cannot show the working, the sentence gets cut rather than softened.
Exports work, configuration stays portable, and cancelling takes one click with no retention flow behind it. Somebody who stays because leaving is hard has already left.
No analytics product, no tracking cookie, no third-party script anywhere on this site. That is written into the privacy policy, so enabling one would mean rewriting it in public.
No badge wall, no borrowed compliance, no award nobody has heard of. When we hold something, it will be named with its scope and its date.
Headcount is the easiest thing to add and the hardest to undo. The company stays small enough that the person who built a thing is the person who answers for it.
No chief anything, no head of anything. Every decision is voted on instead, and the tally is published — including the one the founder overrode.
Part six · The rest of the file
Go build something.
Shardly LLCOwner-operated · Germany · Est. 2025
hello@shardlyhq.xyz
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