We sold the documents before we sold the software, and it was not the plan.
The plan was three Windows apps. What people can actually buy first is a small library of finance documents, Excel and Markdown packs, from USD 9.99, one licence you can use across a whole firm, modify or rebrand, and keep. No seat count and no renewal.
They shipped first for a boring reason. A document is done when it is correct. An app is done when it installs, updates, licences, survives a machine you have never seen, and can be supported by one person. The gap between those two definitions is months, and I had been treating them as the same kind of finished.
What it bought was not revenue. It was a real checkout, real files leaving, and a real licence question answered in public rather than in a spreadsheet. Every one of those is something I would otherwise still be guessing about on launch day for the apps.
The apps are still being built, and I would rather say what they are than promise when.
- Dictation for Windows that keeps your words on your machine.
- A tool that turns a folder of tenancy contracts into clean data.
- Double entry accounting software with a real general ledger and periods that close and stay closed.
For information and preparation only, not accounting, tax or legal advice.
the "a document is done when it's correct, an app is done when it installs, updates, licenses, survives an unknown machine, and can be supported by one person" distinction is one of the sharper reframes of MVP-scoping I've read here, most advice says "build less," this says "build the thing whose definition of done is achievable first," which is a completely different filter
makes me want to ask an uncomfortable question of my own project: what's the document-equivalent of an AI phone assistant, something with a much smaller definition of done that could still test real demand before the harder app-shaped problems (permissions, reliability, on-device execution) are solved. don't have a good answer yet, but it's a genuinely useful question to sit with rather than just pushing forward on the full build
curious if you're marketing the documents as a standalone product now that they're outperforming the original plan, or purely as a stepping stone toward the three apps still being built
I'd be curious to know if you're marketing your documents to one group, and your future app(s) to another group? You mentioned "one license across the whole firm", and I wasn't sure if that was one license for the documents, or one license for anything with your company name on it. I can see some nice synergy if people can buy in for one or the other, then "discover" the other and perhaps upsell whatever they don't yet have. But I can definitely understand the motivation to have something tangible to sell while you're building the slower stuff. Hope it takes off for you!
good read
thanks
The interesting part is that the document products gave you a real commercial test before the software was ready. A completed document can validate demand and purchasing behavior much earlier than a Windows app, which has a much heavier definition of “done.”
yes and this is what I underrated going in. A document's definition of done is a file, a proof read one, but a file. An app includes install, update, refunds and support. So the documents let me test price, copy and whether anyone reaches for a card at all, while the app was still a build. The demand signal arrived months before the software could have asked for one.
That’s an interesting contrast. The difference in what “done” means between the two products makes the earlier demand signal much more tangible.