Carl Stein

Co-Founder & Head of Build, Infinite Orchard, Inc.

What I do

I'm one of two co-founders of Infinite Orchard, Inc, the studio that publishes AppCrib. My title is Head of Build, which is the honest name for what I actually do: I own the technical architecture, the build pipeline, and the call on whether a tool is ready to ship. My co-founder runs operations and the business side.

On the catalog side, that means setting the stack (Next.js static export, Tailwind, Cloudflare, no backend unless the tool genuinely needs one), running the build-and-deploy pipeline that ships each tool, and reviewing every tool before it goes live at appcrib.com.

Background

Before AppCrib, I was running operations at a B2B software company with the same partner I co-founded Infinite Orchard with. We spent years on a single product aimed at a narrow enterprise market and learned the trade-offs of that model firsthand: long sales cycles, dense feature scope, the kind of roadmap pressure that turns small ideas into large ones whether they should be or not.

AppCrib is the deliberate counterweight to all of that. Many small tools instead of one big one. Each one self-contained. Free, ad-supported, no accounts, no upsells. The full reasoning is in the post Why We Left B2B to Build a Hundred Small Things.

What I write about

The build-in-public posts on the AppCrib blog are mine. They cover the parts of running a tools studio that don't usually get written about: how our build-and-deploy pipeline actually ships software, why every tool on the site runs client-side, how we handle QA without a QA team, why we name tools the way we do, and the architectural decisions behind keeping privacy a structural property instead of a policy promise.

Per-tool launch posts are published in the studio's voice rather than under a personal byline; they're credited to AppCrib, which is the entity accountable for them. The personal byline is reserved for posts I wrote myself.

Posts by Carl

Get in touch

The fastest way to reach me is support@infiniteorchard.ai. Notes about specific tools, ideas for new ones, or questions about the architecture all land in the same inbox.