Herman Martinus

Herman Martinus is a South African developer based in Cape Town who builds small, opinionated web products. He is best known for Bear Blog, a minimalist, privacy-first blogging platform with no trackers or heavy JavaScript, which grew largely by word of mouth among developers and writers.

Alongside Bear Blog he runs JustSketchMe, a 3D character posing tool for artists, and a set of smaller experiments such as Bearlytics, a self-hostable analytics tool, and a password-sharing utility. Before going independent he worked as a front-end engineer at GetMyBoat, coached developers and taught as a tech fellow at the MEST incubator in Accra, Ghana.

Bear Blog moved from donations to a paid upgrade tier as it grew; Herman wrote on Indie Hackers that it had over 3,000 blogs in 2021 and over 6,000 by late 2022, with roughly 5% of users converting to paid. He writes openly on his own Bear blog about building the platform, moderation and sustainable solo work.