Engineering
How we choose what to build.
Most small software fails because it answered a question nobody asked. We spend as much effort deciding what not to build as building.
Evidence before code
Ideas do not come from brainstorming. They come from a crawler that reads marketplaces — WordPress.org plugins and themes, the Shopify app store, Envato — and gathers products with large install bases and unhappy users. Negative reviews are clustered by an LLM into recurring, specific complaints, and candidates are scored on proven demand measured against measured dissatisfaction.
The part that matters is that it says no. In August 2026 a contact-form monitoring idea we liked was re-run through the full gauntlet, which surfaced fourteen verified competing products. It scored 19 out of 30 and was dropped.
A rubric that only ever says yes is worthless. Before we trusted this one to reject anything, we checked it could correctly accept products that had already succeeded. A judge you haven’t calibrated is just a random number with a spreadsheet.
Gates, not vibes
Every product moves through the same eight stages, and each one has a written gate it must pass before the next begins.
1. Select 2. Spec 3. Scaffold 4. Build 5. Harden 6. Submit 7. Launch 8. Operate
Marketplace requirements are not folklore held in someone’s head. Each marketplace we ship to — WordPress plugin, Shopify app, Shopify theme — has its acceptance rules distilled into a machine-readable checklist that runs as a gate. When a marketplace rejects something, the reason becomes a permanent checklist item before the product is fixed, so the same rejection cannot happen twice.
Proof, not promises
Each product’s logic lives in pure classes that are unit-tested without WordPress loaded, with a deliberately thin WordPress-facing layer around them. That is why the test counts are what they are.
- 594Tests
- 2,958Assertions
- 5 / 5Plugin Check clean
- 5 / 5PHPCS clean
PHPCS runs WPCS Extra, Docs and PHPCompatibility. Plugin Check is WordPress.org’s own review tool, run against a live WordPress 7.0 install rather than a static approximation. Privacy rules — what a plugin may never read, store or transmit — are enforced by tests, so breaking one fails the build instead of quietly shipping.
FormCanary cleared the directory’s automated pre-review with zero code, security or guideline findings.
A note on the tooling
The crawler, the pipeline and the checklists are internal tools. They are not products, they are not for sale, and we mention them only because they are the honest answer to “how do you ship this much with this small a surface area?”