Boring where it counts
Proven tools for the load-bearing parts. Save the novelty for the problem that is actually novel — there is usually only one per project.
About us
A small team that has seen a lot of software come and go
FollowCan Technologies is a product engineering company. We build our own platforms and partner with businesses on theirs — mostly where AI and new business models meet older, messier realities.
Why we exist
Software has never been easier to start and never been harder to finish. Frameworks change, platforms shift, and the interesting problem is rarely the one that gets solved first. We started FollowCan Technologies because we kept meeting good businesses stuck with systems nobody wanted to touch.
Our answer is not novelty. It is judgement: knowing which parts of a system deserve engineering effort, which parts should stay boring, and which features should quietly never be built. Two decades in, that is the thing we actually sell.
What we work on
We spend our time in two places. The first is our own product family — HashtagCMS, MsgBrd.tv, Social Media Manager, and FollowCan, which is still in development. Running our own products keeps us honest: we live with every shortcut we take.
The second is client work in AI and emerging business. That covers assistants and retrieval systems, automation of work that people should not be doing by hand, messaging platforms, and the unglamorous data plumbing underneath all of it.
How we think about AI
AI is a genuine shift, and it is also the most over-applied tool of the decade. We use it where it removes real work — summarising, classifying, retrieving, drafting, routing. Where a query and a well-placed index would do the job for a fraction of the cost, we will tell you that instead. The interesting engineering is almost always in the system around the model, not the model itself.
At a glance
- Experience
- 20+ years per engineer
- Focus
- AI & emerging business
- Products
- 4 in the family
- Stack
- Laravel, PHP, JS, Python
- Open source
- HashtagCMS
Principles
The rules we do not bend
Say the hard thing early
If a deadline is fiction or a feature is a mistake, you hear it from us in week one, not in the retrospective.
Own it after launch
Shipping is the middle of the story. We build for the person maintaining it two years from now, because often enough that person is us.
Small teams, direct lines
You talk to the engineers building your system. Nothing gets lost being relayed through a layer of account management.
Give back to the commons
We built our careers on open source. HashtagCMS is our contribution back, and it stays open.
Measure, then argue
Opinions about performance are cheap. We would rather profile the thing and let the numbers end the discussion.
Have something worth building?
Tell us what you are trying to do. If we are the right team for it, we will say so — and if we are not, we will tell you that too.