Hoishi used to say almost nothing about itself. That hasn't entirely changed — but what we do all day has, and this page owes you a straight answer.
Hoishi began as a private room — a place where a few operators compared notes on work that never made the news. We liked the dark, and mostly stayed in it. Then we started writing: field reports about builders we rate, people shipping consequential things with no launch event and no appetite for applause. The reports travelled further than anything we'd ever kept to ourselves, which taught us the obvious lesson — the stories were never ours to sit on.
So today hoishi is two things: a publication, and a podcast in the making. The subject is builders. The volume stays low. It's kept by one person — Stephen, who founded Vendorapp and signs exactly one page here — and it sells nothing. No fees for features, no sponsors on the show, no services behind the contact form. If you arrived looking for something to buy, this is a genuinely disappointing website.
The privacy we used to keep for ourselves now protects the people we write about.
The work gets the light; the person decides how findable they want to be. Their own sites carry the full story.
Subjects correct facts, never adjectives. The take stays ours; the truth stays theirs.
Features and seats at the mic are earned, not sold. There is nothing here to invoice.
Written or recorded, nothing ships until the subject is comfortable being quoted. Freely given beats carefully extracted.
We count visits with Google Analytics — only if you allow it — because we like knowing which transmissions get read. Still no ads, no funnels, no A/B tests.
Introductions travel faster, but we read every pitch that arrives without one. The worst case is a polite no.
"We're optimistic about the next decade. We're just convinced that most of the work that earns it will be done quietly, by small teams, on problems that don't trend."— Hoishi
Most of what's interesting about hoishi now lives in the record, not on this page.