The Haskell Community Is Our QA Department
Most startups hire QA engineers, run A/B tests, and build dashboards full of engagement metrics. We are doing something different. We are building for the Haskell community first, and treating their judgment as our quality bar.
This is not a marketing strategy. It is a survival strategy. If you can build a platform that Haskell developers actually respect, you have built something good. Not "good enough." Not "good for a startup." Good.
Why This Community
The Haskell community is, by reputation and by practice, one of the most technically demanding audiences in software. These are people who care about correctness proofs, who debate the merits of type-level programming on a Tuesday afternoon, who will read your source code before they read your landing page. They do not hand out compliments for free.
This makes them terrible for vanity metrics and perfect for quality assurance.
When a Haskell developer says "this is well-built," they mean it. They have looked at the architecture. They have thought about the edge cases. They have considered what happens when the thing scales, when the requirements change, when someone new has to maintain it. Their approval is not a polite nod. It is a technical assessment.
When they say something is broken, they are almost always right. And they will tell you exactly why, in precise terms, with references. This is the kind of feedback that most companies pay consultants six figures for. We get it for free by building in the open for people who care.
What "Catering To" Actually Means
We are not pandering. We are not adding features because someone on Discourse asked for them. "Catering to the Haskell community" means something specific:
We hold ourselves to their standard of correctness. Our routes are type-safe. Our database schema is type-safe. Our CSS is type-safe (we built a library for that). When we find a place where we are relying on stringly-typed code, we fix it. Not because it is fun, but because this community will notice if we do not.
We build tools they would actually use. screp is not a demo project. It is a real CLI tool that replaces regex with parser combinators, and it is on Hackage because that is where Haskell developers expect to find tools. We do not build things and then hope the community adopts them. We build things that belong in their ecosystem.
We respect their time. Haskell developers are allergic to fluff. They want to know what something does, how it works, and why it was designed that way. So that is what we give them. No "synergy." No "disruption." Just clear explanations of technical decisions.
We listen when they push back. When someone in the community points out that our approach to X is wrong, we do not get defensive. We ask questions, read the papers they link, and often change our approach. This is what good QA looks like: a feedback loop where the testers are smarter than you.
The Feedback Loop
Here is what actually happens when you build for this audience:
- You ship something.
- Someone finds a real issue. Not a cosmetic issue, not a "I would have done it differently" issue. A real, structural issue.
- You fix it. In fixing it, you learn something about your own system that you did not know.
- The fix makes the system better for every future user, not just Haskell users.
This cycle is more valuable than any automated test suite. Automated tests verify that your code does what you told it to do. The Haskell community verifies that what you told it to do was the right thing in the first place.
We have had people audit our type safety, question our architectural decisions, and suggest alternative approaches that were genuinely better. Every single one of those interactions made the platform stronger. You cannot buy that kind of QA. You can only earn it by building something worth scrutinizing.
The Bet
Our bet is simple: if we can build a platform that earns the respect of the most critical technical community in software, then expanding to broader audiences is a solved problem. The hard part is not making something that works. The hard part is making something that is actually well-built. Once you have that, scaling is just distribution.
Most platforms go the other direction. They build for the widest audience, optimize for engagement, and add quality later (if ever). The result is products that are popular but fragile. Products that work until they don't, that scale until they can't, that satisfy users who do not know what they are missing.
We would rather have a smaller group of users who hold us to an impossibly high standard. Because that standard is not impossible. It is just the standard that software should have been held to all along.
This Is Not Just About Haskell
The point is not that Haskell is the best language (though we think it is pretty good). The point is that communities built around rigor produce better feedback than communities built around hype.
If you are building a medical device, you want doctors reviewing your work, not influencers. If you are building financial software, you want quants and auditors, not growth hackers. And if you are building a platform for developers, you want the developers who care most about getting things right.
For us, that is the Haskell community. Your "hardest audience" might be different. But the principle is the same: find the people who will not let you get away with mediocrity, and build for them first. Everything else follows.
What We Are Building
Typify is a platform for training, evaluating, and connecting software engineers. We run mock interviews, code challenges, and structured learning programs. We have a curated job board. We have a real-time chat system, a video review pipeline, and an AI-assisted feedback engine.
All of it is built in Haskell. All of it is held to the standard described above. And all of it is better than it would have been if we had optimized for "move fast and break things" instead of "move deliberately and build things that last."
The Haskell community did not ask us to build this. But they are the reason it is built well. And that, more than any test suite or QA team, is what gives us confidence that it will hold up when the rest of the world starts using it.
The greatest QA department is an audience that refuses to be impressed by anything less than excellence.