Decided what to Build

We were struggling to sell one of our side projects OrangeCal while also selling our consulting services as they were for completely different audiences. So, we decided to build and sell products that fit with our clients (software product makers) in the hope that we would find some overlap in sales and at least streamline mental focus for us in terms of sales.

So we looked at the various product spikes we had created as side projects / open source projects and laid them all out on the whiteboard and had a team discussion to weigh pros & cons of each one.

We ended up netting on building a product based on an open source project I built as a ruby command line tool called Pra CLI (Pull Request Aggregator). At the time it had approx 15,419 downloads. We also knew that some of the developers on our teams at the last few companies had used it and others didn't specifically because it was a command line tool.

So we decided that was enough interest for us to build a macOS Desktop MVP and see if we could get some traction with it. The plan was to essentially provide the same core functionality in a nice macOS Desktop app and solve some of the problems that prevented people from using the command line version. We figured we could expand on it with other features and figure out the paid product beyond that. I had written down a small list of possible features that the guys seemed to think were good. So, I started coding.