Product philosophy

How we think.

A public log of the decisions we've made, the ones we've rejected, and the beliefs behind them.

Core beliefs

What the industry believes, and what we believe.

Received wisdom
What we actually believe
"Traders need more dashboards, more charts, more metrics."

Traders don't need more data. They need better questions.

Dashboards aren't the product. The product is the one question you should be asking this week that you're not. Intelligence exists to find that question.

"Discipline is about willpower."

Discipline is a system, not a virtue.

Telling a trader to 'just follow the plan' has never worked. Architectures that make the right thing easier than the wrong thing — those work. We build architectures, not lectures.

"Ship faster. Add features. Win."

Simplicity is expensive.

Every feature removed has 10× more engineering discussion than every feature added. We optimise for what you remove, not what you ship.

"Explain everything like the user's a beginner."

The user is more sophisticated than you assume.

Traders who size $10k contracts know what Sharpe is. They don't need 'Sharpe explained like you're 5.' They need the Sharpe calculation to be right. Respect the user.

Decision log

The public ledger.

Every major product call — accepted, rejected, shipped — with its reasoning and outcome.

Date
Stance
Decision & outcome
Mar 2026
Rejected

We chose not to build an 'AI trade advisor'

LLMs hallucinating trade setups is a compliance nightmare and a product failure mode. Instead we built Intelligence: a pattern engine that shows you what your own data proves.

Outcome → Users get honest insight. We sleep at night.
Feb 2026
Committed

Unlimited screenshots on all paid plans

Storage costs real money. But charging per-screenshot meant users didn't attach them — and the journal became less valuable. The right answer was to eat the cost.

Outcome → 3× more screenshots per trade. Massive retention lift.
Jan 2026
Committed

We kept the free tier real

Most SaaS free tiers are teasers designed to frustrate. The free tier should solve a real problem — logging 100 trades/month with full analytics.

Outcome → Free-to-paid conversion doubled vs. our old teaser tier.
Dec 2025
Shipped

Playbook versioning over editable playbooks

The obvious thing is to let users edit playbooks in place. The correct thing is to version every change so users can see how their thinking evolved.

Outcome → Traders review their own growth over months. Retention +19%.
Nov 2025
Rejected

No paid placement in the Playbook Library

We could charge educators to feature their playbooks. Easy money. But the moment we do, the Library stops being useful — it becomes an ad channel.

Outcome → Library is trusted. Educators promote us anyway.

Updated quarterly · 5 public decisions logged

Internal memo · Product team · Q1 2026
"We don't ship what's easy to build. We ship what's correct to build. The difference is usually 4× more engineering hours — and 100× more user trust."
— Leaked verbatim, with permission, from our weekly product review

Read more.

Our design principles, engineering posts, and data ethics policy are all public.