Future Platform Strategy¶
This is an open question, not a roadmap¶
Whether, and how, Digital Products' products should expand beyond Excel — to Google Sheets, Notion, Monday.com, downloadable PDFs, automation packages, AI prompt packs, web apps, or SaaS products — is an open question. It is not assumed as a default expansion path for any current or future product. No product in this venture should be built on the premise that a multi-platform rollout is planned unless a specific decision has been made and recorded for that product.
Why this is evaluated per-product, not venture-wide¶
Different products have different platform fit:
- A product whose value is largely "a well-built spreadsheet with real formulas" (most of the current backlog) may lose meaningful value if forced onto a platform with weaker calculation capability, or may gain little from being available elsewhere.
- A product that's more about structured tracking/checklisting than heavy calculation (e.g., an inventory tracker) may translate more naturally to a tool like Notion or Monday.com.
- A product that proves to have strong, validated demand might justify the much larger investment of a dedicated web app or SaaS build — but that's a substantial commitment that should follow evidence, not precede it.
Because fit varies this much by product, this venture treats platform expansion as a per-product decision made with evidence of actual customer demand for that product on that platform, not a blanket strategy applied at the venture level.
What would justify evaluating expansion for a given product¶
Plausible (not yet observed) signals that would justify considering platform expansion for a specific product include: repeated customer requests for a specific alternate platform, a competitive gap where alternate-platform demand is going unmet, or a product whose core value doesn't depend on Excel-specific capability. None of these signals have been confirmed for any current backlog item as of this writing.
What this means in practice¶
- Product specifications should not include a "Google Sheets version" or "web app version" section unless there's an actual decision behind it.
- Excel quality is never reduced in anticipation of a future port. See ../strategy/product-philosophy.md.
- If and when a product does expand to another platform, that decision and its
rationale should be recorded as an ADR in
../decisions/ or within that product's own
decisions/directory.