I scrapped my MVP, gave equity to a new dev, and rebuilt the whole thing around the engagement instead of the proposal.
So a couple years ago i started doing some advising and consulting on the side and pretty quickly noticed something weird. none of the tools i was looking at were actually built for consultants. the language was off, the workflows were off, everything assumed i was a freelancer doing one-off gigs or some sales team blasting proposals out. nothing really matched how consultants and advisors actually talk about our work. engagements, sows, scope, change orders, fee schedules.
That was the itch that turned into siradocs.
Honestly when i started building i didn’t have a tight ICP. i had a hunch the contracts-to-payments workflow for independent pros was broken so i hired a dev off lemon.io and just started shipping. the mvp worked. proposals, templates, e-sign, stripe. all the usual stuff. it looked fine, basically a slightly nicer version of what already exists.
Then i did the best thing i’ve done on this whole project. i stopped building and started talking to people. spent a few months interviewing independent consultants and fractional execs. fractional cfos, cmos, strategy advisors, boutique operators. and the same thing kept coming up. every tool they were using had been built for someone else first.
Wrong vocabulary. wrong defaults. wrong data model, organized around documents instead of around the client and the engagement. the workflow assumed a one-and-done deliverable, not a multi-month advisory relationship with change orders and shifting scope. so people ended up with one of two bad options. either bulky enterprise software priced for sales teams of 20, or a cobbled together stack of freelancer tools held together with hope. one tool for proposals, another for signatures, another for invoices, a spreadsheet to track who signed what. everyone had a different stack. nobody loved it.
So i scrapped the mvp. not refactored, scrapped. you can’t bolt consultant-native onto a proposal-centric foundation. brought on a new dev, gave him equity, and we rebuilt from scratch around a different center of gravity. the engagement is the thing now, not the proposal. a client has engagements, an engagement has a sow, a signature, an invoice, change orders, a fee schedule. the sow is just a piece of the engagement, not the whole point. that one shift changed basically every screen in the app.
I know this space looks crowded. plenty of contract tools and proposal tools and freelancer all-in-ones and accounting platforms that overlap with pieces of what we do. i’m not trying to out-feature any of them. just focused on one specific group, independent consultants and fractional execs, and building around how they actually work in the language they actually use. that’s the bet.
stuff i learned the hard way. positioning isn’t copy, it’s architecture. i tried to fix the wrong-feel of the mvp with marketing tweaks first and it didn’t work until i changed the data model. an mvp that ships isn’t the same as an mvp that’s right, mine shipped just fine but it wasn’t built for who i was selling to. and going from a contracted dev to an actual equity partner who gives a damn about the people we’re building for sped up every decision.
launching next month. if you’re an independent consultant or fractional exec and want to take a look before launch i’d really value the feedback, happy to dm.
curious if anyone else has been through the “i built it then figured out who it was for” loop. or had to scrap an mvp and start over.
