Our first product was terrible. Let's just be honest about that. We thought we knew what companies needed, but we were wrong about half of it. The interface was clunky, the reporting was slow, and we crashed on the first day of a client demo.

But here's what changed everything: instead of hiding from that failure, we asked the client to walk us through exactly what went wrong. They spent three hours showing us how they actually worked, not how we imagined they worked.

That conversation became our philosophy. Build based on what people actually do, not what you think they should do.

By 2018, we had rebuilt everything from scratch. The new version wasn't prettier or more complicated. It was just... better at the jobs people hired it to do. Track cash flow across multiple entities. Generate reports that auditors could actually use. Handle currency conversions without creating weird rounding errors.

Simple stuff. But doing simple stuff reliably turns out to be pretty valuable when your business depends on accurate numbers.

We grew slowly. Added clients one at a time, mostly through word of mouth. Fixed problems as they came up. Learned which features people actually used versus which ones sounded good in sales meetings.