Why I don't sell it

People ask me why I don’t sell Slipdock, the work tracker I built to replace Jira, Confluence and the rest of the stack I used to run teams on. It’s a fair question. The tool does the job of several paid products, and most people can use it for nothing. My answer says more about the business of software than about my tool, and it applies to anything your team builds that someone suggests turning into a product.

Building was the easy part

Working with AI, one experienced person can now build software that competes with a whole category of SaaS products. I’ve written about what that means for investors, and Slipdock is my own evidence for it. That makes it tempting to believe the hard part is done, when the hard part hasn’t started. A product is the code. A software business is everything that has to exist around the code before a customer pays.

None of that list is code. A sales process, because larger customers don’t buy from a website. A support rota, because customers’ problems don’t keep office hours. Security questionnaires, the spreadsheets of a hundred or more questions that enterprise buyers send before they sign anything. A SOC 2 report, an independent audit of your security controls that most larger buyers now expect, which takes months to earn and which you renew every year.

Then there’s the cost nobody puts in the plan: the roadmap. Once your revenue depends on a handful of large customers, their requests jump the queue, and the roadmap slowly bends toward whoever pays most. That’s rational for the business and often bad for the product.

I’ve done all of this before, successfully, and it’s a perfectly good business to be in. It just isn’t the right one for this project.

Distribution beats product

Work tracking is one of the most crowded markets in software. Jira, Linear, Monday.com, Asana, ClickUp and Notion all have funded sales teams, partner networks, marketplace listings and years of habit on their side. In a market like that, the best product rarely wins. The best distribution does.

Founders and boards both underestimate this. A team pitching a better product into a crowded category will show you the demo, and the demo will be good. The question that matters is how the product reaches customers faster than the incumbents can copy the features that make it better. If the answer is “a sales team”, you’re funding a sales team, and the product is the smaller part of the bet.

Free is a pricing decision

So Slipdock is free to use up to 200 cards on the hosted service, and free without limit to anyone who hosts it themselves. The code is public under an open-source licence. There’s a paid plan for people who want more than 200 cards but don’t have the time or skills to run their own server, though if you’ve got a server, hosting it yourself takes about five minutes.

That isn’t the absence of a strategy. It is the strategy. If the goal is for people to use the thing, free is the cheapest distribution there is: no sales calls, no procurement process, no contract. Self-hosting also answers most of a security questionnaire before anyone writes one, because a team with a strict security function can read the code and run it on its own servers. And with no single customer paying the bills, the roadmap answers to the problem rather than to the largest invoice.

One subscription after another

The commercial argument is only half of my answer. The other half is personal.

I used to track work the way most organisations still do: one subscription after another, each at $20 to $50 per user per month, followed by the pain of integrating them, keeping them in sync and getting everyone to use all of them. I genuinely think it’s a good thing for the world if people don’t have to go through that.

Do the sum for a 30-person team on four tools at those prices and you get somewhere between $29,000 and $72,000 a year. That’s before anyone spends an hour on the integrations, and before the hours lost to a status that says one thing in the tracker and another in the wiki. Who wants that headache?

Price the whole business, not the build

When someone in your organisation proposes turning an internal tool into a product, or a portfolio company asks for money to take a better product into a crowded market, cost the business around it. Sales, support, security reviews and compliance, plus what happens to the roadmap when one customer pays most of the bills. With AI, the build is now the cheapest line on that list.

Sometimes the numbers say sell it. Sometimes they say give it away and let distribution do the work that a sales team would otherwise cost you. Either answer can be right, provided you reached it on purpose.

Zero is a price like any other, and choosing it deliberately is a strategy.