who's the duck?

Wounded Duck Studios is the personal creative lab of Mark Druckmiller — a one-person operation that makes software, music, and books. It started as a place to keep my side projects from getting lost in a folder somewhere and has slowly turned into a small but growing catalog of things I'm genuinely proud of.

What I make

The flagship project is The Listing Agent Finder, a real-estate tool that helps buyers, renters, and sellers find the actual listing agent for any property — not the lead-gen middleman that most portals route you to. It has a web app and an iOS companion, and it's the project I've spent the most time thinking about user experience on, because real-estate data is messy and the people using the tool usually have ten minutes and one specific question.

On the music side, I've released three full-length albums of mostly-instrumental, mostly-ambient music under my own name, plus a slow trickle of singles and covers. Everything is distributed through CD Baby and lives on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, and the rest. I record at home, late at night, with modest gear and a lot of patience.

On the books side, I've self-published four titles through Amazon KDP — two under my own name, two under pen names. They range from a serious co-authored book on lean management to a gleefully terrible collection of poetry by a fictional duck named Irving. The studio also runs a small merch shop on Redbubble for the occasional t-shirt that's too dumb not to print.

How the studio works

There is no team. There are no investors. There is no roadmap deck. The studio runs on evenings, weekends, and the gap between when the kids fall asleep and when I do. Every project starts as a single sentence — "an app that does X", "an album that feels like Y" — and gets shipped in the ugliest version that still works, then polished from there. I write about that workflow, and about each of the disciplines above, in the journal.

Why "Wounded Duck"

The name is a long-running family joke that I won't fully explain here. The short version: a duck is dignified on the water and ridiculous on land, and most side projects are exactly the same. Calling the studio "Wounded Duck" keeps me honest about which mode any given project is in.

Get in touch

If you've found something on this site useful, weird, or worth a quack — or if you have a project idea, feedback, or a correction — the contact page is the front door. I read everything, even when I'm slow to reply.

// motto: ship weird things, fix the bugs later.