Past the day-to-day of running the company, there are three things taking up most of my attention right now.
Lab-grown gemstones: export, and a shop of our own
We work closely with gem growers here in China — the labs actually producing the stones — and handle the export side for them. It turns out to need far more specialist knowledge than "sell stones abroad" suggests: grading vocabulary, certification, customs classification, and the particular ways this trade differs from the mined-stone business it's usually compared to.
Alongside that we're building our own storefront rather than renting space on a marketplace, and that has taken real work. Straightening out the product structure and SKUs, then a pricing and quoting system underneath them. But the part that has mattered most isn't the catalogue — it's the writing around it. Terms and policies, what the certificates do and don't say, and plain-language explainers about what a lab-grown stone actually is. Buyers arrive with reasonable questions and a lot of noise in their heads; the pages that answer those questions honestly do more selling than any product photo. That's a business lesson I keep relearning.
iHomePage CMS
We started this around 2017, wanting a tool you could build a website with by dragging things around. It has been through several rounds of rewriting since, following whatever the technology could actually do at the time — and only now, after all of that, is the positioning finally getting sharp. Knowing what a product isn't took me the better part of a decade here, which is either embarrassing or just how it goes. This site runs on it.
A B2B knowledge base built on LLMs and RAG
I've been chewing on this one for a few months. It's a commercial knowledge-base product for businesses, built on large language models and retrieval — currently somewhere between engineering and getting it ready to actually sell. We've done a few things differently from the obvious approach and the results have held up well in testing. Several customers have already put in orders ahead of release. It won't be long now.
The detour I didn't plan on
In the middle of all that, a week went to a fight with Claude Desktop on Windows: it kept closing itself overnight and refusing to reopen, behind an error message that turned out to be wrong about the cause. Tracing it properly took me from "a file is locked" down to leaked kernel handles in the AppX container layer, and the fix in the end was to drop the MSIX build entirely — the whole story is here.
My machine stays on; the terminals and sessions stay where I left them. Rebooting to make one app work isn't a fix, it's a cost you agree to keep paying.
Writing
Roughly an essay every other week, whenever one has sat long enough that I'm sure I mean it. Everything lands in Technology, Business or Life, and there's a letter if you'd rather have it arrive than remember to come back. More about me and this site on the about page.
— Koen