Chapter three
My app began with missing pieces.
A real-estate transaction involves people who all need the work to go well. Yet the information can end up divided between email, text messages, documents, notebooks, and memory. A question about the deal can become a search through all of them.
That was the problem behind the original Circle app. I wanted the people, tasks, messages, documents, and acknowledgments to stay connected to the transaction. Someone should be able to follow what happened without piecing it together from scratch.
A message can be perfectly clear when it is sent and difficult to interpret later. Who was it about? Which version of the document did it refer to? Was the request acknowledged or simply delivered? The original Circle app was meant to keep those relationships visible. It was the sort of problem whose importance becomes obvious when somebody needs the answer and cannot find it.
It was a practical idea with a practical test. Could the app make the deal easier to keep track of? That is the question I carried into the build, long before I began thinking about everything involved in selling software.
The original Circle app
The useful part took nearly three years.
By my account, development costs approached half a million dollars. The time and money went into making the original app dependable: its roles, access, tasks, records, and the way those parts worked together.
I kept going because the underlying need had not gone away. People still needed a reliable way to know what had happened in a transaction. A convincing demonstration was not enough if the app could not handle the real work.
Dependability was made up of details a person might never think to thank us for. Access had to make sense. A record had to remain connected to the right transaction. Handing over work should not require handing over somebody’s entire memory of it. The point of doing the difficult work was to let the person using the app think about their own job.
When it was finally ready, I wanted to hear from the people it could help. That felt like the natural next chapter. I did not expect the business around reaching them to become a story of its own.
The long build
I had made something people could use.
Getting Circle ready had taken years of decisions and corrections. I had a reason to be proud of the work, and a strong reason to want the next part to begin.
What I needed now was a way for the right people to find it. That was where the difficulties changed shape.