Chapter eight
There could be a front door of our own.
Eventually, I began to question an assumption I had carried through all of this: that the only sensible way to reach people was to keep adding what the existing route demanded. What would a direct route look like?
A person could come to a page, understand the app, see the price, and decide. Circle could handle the purchase and verified access, then guide them to the right installation for their device. The next time, the icon would take them back.
A direct route also meant accepting responsibility for the parts a store might otherwise handle. The page could not merely say something friendly and leave the difficult questions unanswered. We needed a reliable way to verify access, explain the installation, and help a returning customer. The difference was that those responsibilities were close to the relationship I actually wanted.
That still required real engineering and care. But the work now had a clear destination. Each step existed to help someone reach the app, and I could ask whether it actually did.
The cleaner road
Every step had to earn its place.
I stopped treating a long list of services as proof that we were doing the right things. A service could be useful and still be wrong for this particular job. I needed to know what it did for the person trying to reach us.
The direct route gave me a way to judge that. Could someone understand the offer? Could they pay securely? Would access reach the right person? Could they install on a supported device and return without starting over?
There was something encouraging about a question with an observable answer. We could follow the same steps a person would follow and see where they became confused. We could find a misleading instruction and change it. We could check whether a returning customer arrived where they expected. That was more useful than assuming that another service would eventually make the experience clearer.
Those questions made the remaining work easier to recognize. There would still be costs and problems. At least I could see whom we were solving them for.