About YmmDigitals

What the studio is

YmmDigitals is independent and self-funded. There are no investors to satisfy and no growth target to hit, which means we can build the version of a tool that is actually useful rather than the version that maximises sign-ups. It also means we are small, and we plan our work around that constraint instead of pretending otherwise.

Everything we publish is a web tool. Nothing to install, nothing to configure, nothing that stops working when you change laptops. You open a page, do the thing you came to do, and leave.

Why we build this way

The web has quietly become expensive to use. Not in money — in attention. A single-purpose utility now commonly asks you to create an account before it will tell you anything, then emails you weekly, then puts the feature you wanted behind a tier. The actual work the tool does may take a second and a half.

We are not claiming this is a moral failing; it is a rational response to how software gets funded. But it leaves a gap. There is a whole category of task — convert this, check this, estimate this — where the correct product is a page with one input and one answer, and nobody is building those any more because they are hard to monetise.

That gap is where the studio works. Our tools are supported by advertising, which is an imperfect trade but an honest one: you see ads, you keep your email address, and nothing you do on the page becomes a sales lead.

How we decide what to build

Ideas come from friction we have personally run into, not from keyword research. The test is whether we have already tried to solve the problem some other way and found the alternatives annoying. If we have not, we are probably guessing about the demand.

After that, an idea has to survive the three rules on our home page: it does one thing, it works without an account, and we can still keep it running in two years. The third rule is the strictest. A tool that depends on a paid API with unpredictable pricing, or on scraping a site that will eventually block us, fails it — however good the demo looks.

Geotrail

Geotrail is the studio's main product and the clearest example of the approach. It takes a photograph and estimates where it was taken, using the visible evidence in the frame rather than embedded GPS data.

Most photographs shared online have had their metadata stripped — by the messaging app, the social network, or the screenshot. So the only information left is what is actually in the picture: the style of the buildings, which side of the road the cars are on, the shape and colour of the number plates, the language and typeface on signs, the species of tree, the pitch of the roofs, the quality of the light. These are the same cues a well-travelled person uses, and a model can be trained to weigh them.

What Geotrail will not do is pretend. A photo of a white wall contains no location evidence, and the product says so instead of producing a plausible-sounding guess. We think a tool that admits uncertainty is more useful than one that is confidently wrong, even though the confident one demos better.

Geotrail is free, requires no account, and does not cap uploads. You can read more on the Geotrail site.

How we handle your data

The short version: we collect as little as we can get away with, we do not sell anything to anyone, and we do not build advertising profiles from what you upload. Images sent to Geotrail are processed to answer that request and are not published or shared for unrelated purposes.

The long version, including what our advertising and analytics partners receive and how to opt out, is in the privacy policy. We have tried to write it in plain English rather than the usual defensive legalese.

Where we are

The studio is based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. We work remotely, correspond in English, and are reachable at support@ymmdigitals.com. There is no phone queue and no ticket system — mail goes to a person.

Working with us

We take on a small amount of outside work each year, usually when it overlaps with something we already understand well: a focused web tool, an interface over a model, or a site that needs to be fast and stay fast. We are a poor fit for large multi-year platforms, and we will say so rather than take the work.

If you want to talk about a project, the contact page explains what to include so we can give you a straight answer quickly.