Independent software,
built from real work.

Recent stories

What operating the portfolio has taught us.

• Why we are building Crossdeck Sales
  Cold outbound is miserable because the seller is blind. We were not — we already saw who landed, what they read, and why. So we are building the tool that turns that journey into outreach that lands.
• The second product is found by operating the first
  A forecast engine built to put wind on a cycling route turned out to be most of what runners needed, pointed at a different problem. Not a pivot and not a feature — a sister product, on one engine, for an enemy that is not wind.
• A thousand kilometres, counted for you
  Most December challenges hand you a weekly leaderboard and leave the sum to you. The Windline 1000 counts every ride from 16 December, puts your running total on Strava, and sends a finisher card on 1 January.
• Wind against the road, not the town
  Every tour group chat asks the same question the night before, and the honest answer to “thirty from the west” is “at the start, or at Sutherland?” A forecast for a place cannot answer it. So we built one for a road.
• When the register is the product: building a standards body that can be checked
  The Private Lending Association of South Africa publishes records that tell a stranger who is real. That makes every entry a liability, every badge a claim that travels, and the door the most important thing on the site. Here is the system, and why it runs Crossdeck for analytics and Crossdeck Trust.
• Building an AI assistant that cannot lie about its work
  Digital Hank reported a client meeting as arranged and produced a joining link. There was no meeting, no email, and the link led nowhere. Nothing had broken — the model had done what models do. So we stopped asking it not to, and rebuilt so it cannot.
• We cut a client’s application rejections by 90% — by letting the documents fill in the form
  ProLend was not losing applications because the applicants were wrong. It was losing them because a human retyped what was already printed on a document, and got a digit wrong. So we stopped asking people to retype documents, and had the documents populate the profile instead.
• Why we built Crossdeck — and why every product we build helps test it
  We thought the App Store Connect wait was the problem. The real problem was fragmentation — the same person scattered across a dozen disconnected tools. So we put one SDK and one customer timeline underneath everything we operate.
• Every product is a test environment for the one beneath it
  A habit tracker on the App Store, a link-in-bio product carrying anonymous global traffic, and a book catalogue on two platforms. None of them was built to test anything. That is exactly why they work as tests.
• The Firebase bill that taught us to see
  A runaway Firestore read bill sent us chasing ClickHouse. The real fix was not a new database — it was being able to see where every read came from. What we learned, and why we open-sourced Buckets.
• The email address you’re keying on is not the person
  Why email is a fragile anchor for user identity, how keying on the wrong id forks one person into many records, and how an identity graph converges every key onto one canonical customer.
• We got our connector rejected. It was the best product spec we received all year.
  A marketplace review rejected our connector with roughly a dozen findings. Instead of a failure, it read like a spec — the exact definition of a production-grade third-party integration we would never have written ourselves.
• The black box blinks: seeing App Review happen in your own data
  App Review is a black box. Identity-joined session data reveals when a reviewer starts testing your build, where they connect from, and the exact path they walk — plus the line we will not cross.
• Why Biotree needed Crossdeck Trust — and how we stopped the SEO spam farms
  Public, indexed link-in-bio pages are a magnet for spam farms and bot signups. The attack Biotree faced, why the obvious defences backfire, and the signup firewall that stopped it without punishing real users.

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