When we incorporated, the shared list of ideas had thirty-one entries on it. Some were one line long. One was just the word “TOLLS” in capitals, and to this day nobody will admit to writing it.

Thirty-one is not a roadmap, it is a way of avoiding one. So we sat down and ran everything through three questions.

The three filters

Has somebody complained about this out loud? Not “is there a market” — has an actual human, in front of us, been visibly annoyed by this problem. Ideas that only exist in a trend report do not survive contact with a build schedule.

Can two people ship it in a quarter? Not a prototype — a real thing, in a store, with a privacy policy and a support address. If the honest answer is no, the idea is not wrong, it is just not first.

Can it work without harvesting anything? If the only way to pay for it is to sell what it collects, we do not want it on the list, however good the idea is.

Two came out the other side.

Pocket ID

The complaint that started it: everyone we know keeps photographs of their passport, their driving licence and their insurance card in their camera roll, in between pictures of a dog and a receipt. It is the most sensitive folder on the phone and it has no lock on it, no structure, and no idea that the licence expired in March.

So: a proper vault. Every document, card and certificate in one place, encrypted, searchable, and doing the thing a camera roll cannot — telling you how long you have got before something expires.

Vibeshift

The complaint behind this one came from the other direction. Someone described their company's annual engagement survey: forty-seven questions, once a year, results published in November about how everyone felt in March. By the time the graph exists, some of the people in it have left.

Vibeshift is the opposite shape. A very short check-in on the phone, taken often, and a dashboard on the web where an HR team can see the trend while it is still a trend rather than a post-mortem.

What we cut

A habit tracker, because there are already four hundred good ones. A recipe app, see previous. A crypto thing, which got exactly one sentence of discussion. A travel-document scanner that turned out to be Pocket ID wearing a hat, and got folded into it. And “TOLLS”, which we still cannot explain.

Several survivors are not dead, just parked — including two small ones we keep coming back to. Beta builds of both apps above should be in front of real testers this summer.