Why I Build Software for Markets Nobody Bothers With
Big companies use price as a moat. The software designed for professional shops costs thousands. I wanted to build something anyone could pick up on day one — and KerfOS is how I'm doing it.
Woodworking is an expensive hobby. Tools cost money. Wood costs money. Mistakes cost wood. And if you’re trying to do anything more complex than a simple box — designing a cabinet run, figuring out your cut list, figuring out how to get the most out of a sheet of plywood — you quickly discover that the software designed to help you is either absurdly expensive, almost impossible to learn, or both.
I found this out the hard way.
What I actually tried
When I started wanting to design cabinets more precisely, I did what any reasonable person does: I went looking for tools. There are options out there. The professional-grade software — Microvellum, Cabinet Vision, the kind of thing production shops run — is powerful but priced accordingly. We’re talking $3,500 to $7,000 for a license, plus annual maintenance, plus the requirement that you also have AutoCAD. For a weekend woodworker trying to design a kitchen cabinet, that’s not a real option.
So I looked at the prosumer tools. They were better — cheaper, at least — but they came with their own problems. The UI felt like it was designed in 2004. Getting a basic design right required reading through forums, watching hours of tutorial videos, and fighting the software at every step. I bought a course. I had a friend who knew CAD try to teach me. I never got far enough to get anything useful out of it.
At some point I stopped and asked myself a simple question: why does this have to be this hard?
The real problem
The price isn’t really the moat. The moat is complexity.
These tools were built for professionals — cabinet shop owners, production designers, people who use this software eight hours a day and can justify months of learning curve. They were never designed for someone who comes to the shop on weekends, who just wants to build a base cabinet for their kitchen, who wants to know “what boards do I need to buy and where do I cut them” without getting a certification first.
The professionals have their tools. The total beginners have YouTube. But the person in the middle — seriously into woodworking, capable of building real things, just not running a production shop — has basically nothing that works well.
That’s a gap. And that’s the kind of gap I think about.
Why woodworking specifically
It’s partly because it’s my hobby and I live the problem every time I go to the workshop. But it’s also because I’ve come to believe that building in a market you personally care about is underrated.
I know what bad looks like here because I’ve used the bad software. I know what the actual friction is — not because I read about it in a user interview, but because I’ve experienced it myself. The frustration of designing something in one tool and then manually transferring measurements to cut. The anxiety of not knowing if a design is going to waste material until you’re already at the table saw. The gap between “I have a vision for what I want to build” and “I know exactly what lumber to buy and where every cut goes.”
Those aren’t abstract problems I’m solving. They’re problems I was annoyed by last month.
What KerfOS is actually trying to do
The goal isn’t to beat Microvellum at what Microvellum does. Professional shops have professional needs. That market is served.
The goal is to build something that a woodworker who’s never touched CAD can open on a Tuesday night and be productive with in 20 minutes. Something that generates a real cut list — the kind you can take to the lumber yard — from a design you built by just typing in your dimensions. Something that tells you how many sheets of plywood you need and how to lay out the cuts to minimize waste.
It should be web-based so there’s nothing to install. It should be affordable — or free to start. And it should not require a course or a forum post to accomplish basic tasks.
On the broader idea
I keep coming back to a simple observation: the most frustrated customers in any market are the ones who are too small for the enterprise tier but too serious for the free consumer tools. They’re willing to pay. They have real needs. They’re just not worth serving from the perspective of a company that’s optimizing for contract value.
That’s where I look for product ideas. Not at the market leaders, but at the people the market leaders have priced out.
If your potential customer has a genuine problem, is capable of recognizing and paying for a solution, but can’t access the existing options because of price or complexity — that’s a real market. It doesn’t have to be huge to be worth building for.
Woodworkers are one of those markets. There are others. I’ll get to them.