Looking Back on a Year of Growth
By Robert
November 6, 2025
6 min read
It has been a year now since we announced that we were working on Alga PSA, and I wanted to share some thoughts on how we started, how things have changed, and what’s coming next.
I have always been a productivity cough enthusiast, from before the days of YouTube and Notion and Obsidian. My main tools of choice were always the trusty MindMap (free mind), Getting Things Done (do the next smallest thing), and the Pomodoro technique. I found throughout those times, for me, different productivity methodologies work best for the context I found myself in. If I was completely zoned into work, counting pomodoros was just mindless and useless. If I found it difficult to even get started, GTD wasn't going to help.
Maybe that’s why the idea of working on business automation tools always appealed to me. I love the idea that one can turn a business into a machine that runs and does the right things at the right time, even when you’re tired, or inspired to work on something besides invoices and excel (hard to imagine, I know).
We’ve discussed the founding idea of this company, when Github Copilot and GPT 3 had yet to hit the mainstream, and we saw a glimmer of what was to come; the tsunami of interest we see in AI today. So, we started Nine Minds to take productivity and automation to the next level. There was this incredible thought that maybe the computer could surface the information you needed and give you help just when and where you needed it.
Well a year has gone by, and we’re far beyond that point! But I am getting ahead of myself.
We were early (and it is still early), but we saw some glimmers of the amazing possibilities. We created service ticketing plugins that helped hundreds of engineers work through ticket issues, providing advice and helping with responses.
We set out to create the next logical step along the path, to work with the tickets and documents that MSPs had already created. This led to our pivot... WE felt the strong headwinds of a vendor tooling space that, while full of great people, had all of the wrong incentives, and had a history of very old-fashioned thinking when it comes to the business of software.
We made a video about it and it struck a chord. It has hundreds of views, and when we visited IT Nation that year, it seemed like everyone I spoke to had seen the video, and knew exactly what we meant.
We took stock of our capabilities, our experience, and the opportunity, and set out to change this industry the hard way, by building a product and putting ourselves and our ideas to the test in the market.
This industry has faced major problems with vendor lock-in, security vulnerabilities, unfriendly vendor relationships, consumer unfriendly behavior, onerous contracts, aggressive overbearing sales tactics, and the like. At our most idealistic, we were more concerned with just building cool products, and being a force for change, and building a successful brand and company. If it meant we weren’t going to be billionaires off of the back of this wonderful small business community, we were okay with that.
So we promised to open source the product. If you want to check the security of the product, you can. If you want to audit it, you can. If you are just getting started and every penny counts, you have our blessing to use it on premise (and our encouragement as well). We would make money by just offering a great hosted platform and experience, and our support and expertise. It’s good for the community, and it’s just the way we want to work.
So a year has gone by, and, against all of the odds this has worked. We’ve built a product we’re so proud of in record time, in the open, every line of code for all to see. No lock-in. We’ve built a wonderful discord community of small MSPs, and we have a growing company with early adopters around the globe. The sun never sets on Alga, and we haven’t even exited early access yet.
The last year has been incredibly productive (my favorite kind of year) and as a business owner and technologist almost nothing about how we work is the same as it was when we started. The technology has massively changed. Our team has changed, and the technology has surely changed. Also, we’ve learned that when you try something new, not everyone agrees with you, and there is a lot of inertia in “the old ways”. This year has changed our business relationships, permanently, as well. For the better.
If any of this resonates with you, and you want to be part of a modern way of thinking, in an old-fashioned (tech) industry. We’d love to hear from you. (Or not, you can sign up without talking to anyone!).
Happy IT Nation Everyone!
I have always been a productivity cough enthusiast, from before the days of YouTube and Notion and Obsidian. My main tools of choice were always the trusty MindMap (free mind), Getting Things Done (do the next smallest thing), and the Pomodoro technique. I found throughout those times, for me, different productivity methodologies work best for the context I found myself in. If I was completely zoned into work, counting pomodoros was just mindless and useless. If I found it difficult to even get started, GTD wasn't going to help.
Maybe that’s why the idea of working on business automation tools always appealed to me. I love the idea that one can turn a business into a machine that runs and does the right things at the right time, even when you’re tired, or inspired to work on something besides invoices and excel (hard to imagine, I know).
We’ve discussed the founding idea of this company, when Github Copilot and GPT 3 had yet to hit the mainstream, and we saw a glimmer of what was to come; the tsunami of interest we see in AI today. So, we started Nine Minds to take productivity and automation to the next level. There was this incredible thought that maybe the computer could surface the information you needed and give you help just when and where you needed it.
Well a year has gone by, and we’re far beyond that point! But I am getting ahead of myself.
We were early (and it is still early), but we saw some glimmers of the amazing possibilities. We created service ticketing plugins that helped hundreds of engineers work through ticket issues, providing advice and helping with responses.
We set out to create the next logical step along the path, to work with the tickets and documents that MSPs had already created. This led to our pivot... WE felt the strong headwinds of a vendor tooling space that, while full of great people, had all of the wrong incentives, and had a history of very old-fashioned thinking when it comes to the business of software.
We made a video about it and it struck a chord. It has hundreds of views, and when we visited IT Nation that year, it seemed like everyone I spoke to had seen the video, and knew exactly what we meant.
We took stock of our capabilities, our experience, and the opportunity, and set out to change this industry the hard way, by building a product and putting ourselves and our ideas to the test in the market.
This industry has faced major problems with vendor lock-in, security vulnerabilities, unfriendly vendor relationships, consumer unfriendly behavior, onerous contracts, aggressive overbearing sales tactics, and the like. At our most idealistic, we were more concerned with just building cool products, and being a force for change, and building a successful brand and company. If it meant we weren’t going to be billionaires off of the back of this wonderful small business community, we were okay with that.
So we promised to open source the product. If you want to check the security of the product, you can. If you want to audit it, you can. If you are just getting started and every penny counts, you have our blessing to use it on premise (and our encouragement as well). We would make money by just offering a great hosted platform and experience, and our support and expertise. It’s good for the community, and it’s just the way we want to work.
So a year has gone by, and, against all of the odds this has worked. We’ve built a product we’re so proud of in record time, in the open, every line of code for all to see. No lock-in. We’ve built a wonderful discord community of small MSPs, and we have a growing company with early adopters around the globe. The sun never sets on Alga, and we haven’t even exited early access yet.
The last year has been incredibly productive (my favorite kind of year) and as a business owner and technologist almost nothing about how we work is the same as it was when we started. The technology has massively changed. Our team has changed, and the technology has surely changed. Also, we’ve learned that when you try something new, not everyone agrees with you, and there is a lot of inertia in “the old ways”. This year has changed our business relationships, permanently, as well. For the better.
If any of this resonates with you, and you want to be part of a modern way of thinking, in an old-fashioned (tech) industry. We’d love to hear from you. (Or not, you can sign up without talking to anyone!).
Happy IT Nation Everyone!