Building softwarefrom the ground up.

Most software is built for a market that can afford it. Enterprise buyers with procurement teams, teams with a budget line for tooling, and people who already know what they want.

That leaves a lot of people solving the same simple problems with awkward tools. A small business running its day out of a spreadsheet. A student hunting through scattered job boards for an internship that actually fits. A team whose real problem is that their process has six steps where two would do.

These are not problems that need more features. They need software that is understandable in a minute and useful every day after that.

Internbird is a product/platform operated by Erstian. It helps students discover internships, training programs, and career opportunities, and manage the applications that follow.

Internbird is the clearest example of how we build. Finding an internship should not mean twenty browser tabs and a mental model of which boards are worth checking. Matching a student to an opportunity they are actually suited for — and then keeping every application in one place — is a problem worth solving properly.

Alongside Internbird, Erstian builds business software, productivity tools and utility software. Those are in development. We publish their status rather than describing them as if they had shipped.

We start with a problem someone actually has, not with a market segment we can write a deck about. Then we build the smallest thing that solves it, put it in front of people, and change it based on what we learn.

That loop is slower than designing for a persona in a conference room. It is also how software ends up working on the first Tuesday rather than the first Tuesday of next quarter.

When a product proves useful, we make it available to more people. When it does not, we change it or stop. We will tell you which.

There is a habit in software of describing things as shipped, proven and loved when they are none of those. It is not lying exactly, but it costs the reader something, and eventually they find out.

So we describe what we are building as what we are building. If a product is in development, we say it is in development. If we have no customers, we do not imply we do. If a page is missing something, we would rather say the page is missing something.

It makes for a quieter website. We have made our peace with that.

The long-term goal is a growing set of useful software across the areas of everyday digital life — for students, for businesses, for teams, and for individuals.

We are not going to tell you when that will happen. Companies that publish a five-year plan and then quietly move the dates teach their audience to discount everything else they say. We would rather be useful this quarter and let the rest arrive when it arrives.

If you want to follow along, the updates page is the honest place to look.