Bear Blog: a no-frills blogging platform that chose to grow slowly and stay small

What it is

Bear is "the no-nonsense blogging platform" made by Herman Martinus in Cape Town (Herman's blog). It runs as a small company that "exchanges some extra add-ons for money," and uses that money to maintain the platform and let him work on it full time (Bear Manifesto).

Timeline

• 24 May 2020: the Bear Blog GitHub repository is created (GitHub).
• 26 May 2020: "Show HN: Bear – Minimal blogging platform" reaches 685 points (Hacker News).
• Dec 2020: in "My product is my garden" he says he reached basic profitability, "matching an average developer salary here," about 10 months earlier, mostly through JustSketchMe, while building Bear (Herman's blog).
• 27 Jan 2025: the Bear Manifesto promises no shutdown, no sale and no ads (Bear Manifesto).
• Mar 2025: "The Great Scrape" describes bot networks hitting Bear daily, with about 500,000 requests blocked in 24 hours (Herman's blog).
• 1 Sep 2025: Bear becomes source-available, moving from MIT to a license that bans offering it as a hosted service (Herman's blog).
• 25 Oct 2025: first major outage, when the custom-domain proxy went down under bot traffic (Herman's blog).
• 3 Dec 2025: "Grow slowly, stay small": Bear "covers its own expenses and compensates me enough to have a decent quality of life" (Herman's blog).

Why it worked

• A clear promise. Simple, clean blogging, with commitments written down publicly: no shutdowns, no "exit strategy," no ads (Bear Manifesto).
• Trust as the product. He says what makes Bear special is "the people who use it, and the commitment to longevity" (Herman's blog), not the code.
• Small on purpose. "It isn't leveraged and I control its direction and fate" (Herman's blog).
• A strong launch. The Show HN post got 685 points (Hacker News).

What to learn

1. Decide what "enough" is. "A smaller, slower growing company is less risky, less fragile, less stressful" (Herman's blog).
2. When users fear shutdowns, public commitments can be a selling point.
3. Choose your license with competitors in mind. He picked a license based on the Elastic License over AGPL because AGPL doesn't protect against "free-ride competition" (Herman's blog).

Risks and what didn't work

• Copycats: people forked the MIT code "in the attempt to set up a competing service," which he says threatened his livelihood (Herman's blog).
• AI scrapers forced him to remove RSS subscriber analytics because bot traffic made them "completely wrong" (Herman's blog).
• Running solo means slow incident response: a weekend outage went unnoticed "for longer than is reasonable" when monitoring failed (Herman's blog).
• No revenue figures are public; income claims are the founder's own.