How Xevol happened

The idea of creating Xevol arose for several reasons. The main one being: to provide a better tool for people knowledgeable in their hobbies, industries, professions, and fields of research. Second is to let these specialists and taste-makers to be able to monetize their expertise with minimal effort.

I noticed that the market for creating products is very fragmented — meaning that achieving one goal, such as publishing a book from the original text, requires a lot. Technical knowledge, understanding of formats and other obscure intricate topics that not many people have time to do. Not only you need a text editor, you need a format for an e-book, you need hosting, you need access control, you need payment processing, you need language translation.

As an avid traveler, I understand that economies and markets are different. Languages and understandings are also different. However, the concept of all digital products being fundamentally the same never left me. That is, a book, a course, a website, PDF, Epub, and other formats fundamentally represent the same thing. They consist of text, access control, images, videos, and other media. Everything else is not so important, that is the foundation. Making this conclusion, I began to experiment.

The first version of Xevol turned out to be heavy; it was not easy to immediately turn such an application into something more streamlined. I spent 8 months experimenting with a firm belief that this version would be the one. At that time, I left Canada with my family for personal and bureaucratic reasons. The first version was developed in Mexico, the United States, Georgia, Turkey, and Kazakhstan. I figured out how everything should work. I don't believe in the fairy tales of founders who claim that such projects can be done in one week. I understood this perfectly well and gave myself enough time while also working on contract projects.

This is what the very first version looked like. Conceptually similar, but I went overboard by focusing on the editor rather than publication and the main value — the publishing house, store, and product monetization. An incorrect assessment was made of the main advantage. I’m sure it’s because as a designer and coder, it's quite easy to get lost in your ideas about how the interface should work and lean towards the technically more challenging side, simply out of habit. It takes one mistake to learn a valuable lesson — the simpler, the better. The best code is no code at all.

Rethinking the architecture and approach of the application with a focus on speed and publication, I started to emphasize the idea of a publishing house. Unconventional, but it made more sense each day. The concept transformed from an application for creating books into a publishing house with a store, an editor application, and built-in ways to optimize product creation. Not just books.

After a long code refactoring process that took over three months, Xevol reaches the moment of truth. The first payment is made. The first product is published this week (October 2023).

Accidents happen but there is a greater purpose for everything, I’m sure.

–Kuan

Update, November 2026. Since then the unit changed. A book or a course tells you what to do; a system does it: the steps, the checks and the tools that get a result, run for you, asking you before anything goes out. That is what Xevol makes now. The foundation from 2023 stayed: one format for everything, with access and payments built in.