diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
index bf50b271e9ef438b34b6c7f75e27063065e5206a..5a754c78271ccd10122474db76a3177ae0666648 100644
--- a/README.md
+++ b/README.md
@@ -13,3 +13,35 @@ Service has …
 - A simple web UI
 - A simple backup procedure (database is a single file)
 - No user management (this is a *personal* service after all)
+
+## But … why?
+Good question. URL shorteners are (usually) terrible and useless. Except when
+used correctly :thinkingsmart:
+
+I take a lot of hand-written notes on things and, having both a passion for and
+job in IT, my notes would be much more useful if they included links to the
+things I'm writing about. However, there's no way I'm going to hand-write a 50+
+character URL.
+
+That's where URL shorteners come in!
+
+Most shortener services I've found that are both open source and self-hosted use
+something like 6-character-long paths for the link as they're meant for use by
+multiple people; 14.8m possible URLs (your cap with 4 character paths) aren't
+enough for public services.
+
+Six characters is *fine* but why write six characters when you could write four :D
+
+Also, why deal with user management and a relational database when you're only
+going to have one user and a bunch of keys with values :D
+
+I also had a case of the typical "programmer unsatisfied with the {language|tech
+stack|license|feature set|all of the above}, wants to make something better"
+problem. I'm not a big fan of Node, PHP is ok, Python is meh, big relational
+database is unnecessary, heavy frontend is unnecessary, complex backend is
+unnecessary, I don't care about link tracking, click counts, link referrers,
+geo-location of visitors, etc., etc., etc.
+
+All this put together, I decided I would be best served by using this as an
+opportunity to learn more Go and write my own thing that does nothing more than
+what I want need :)