Where Suncraft Is Going: Our Roadmap and Growth Plan

We have written about why we started, how we choose what to build, and how we build it. This post is the one that is hardest to write honestly: where this is actually going.

Most company roadmaps are marketing. They describe an inevitable future in which everything works. Here is ours, including the parts that might not.

The next 12 months: one app, done properly

Our entire near-term plan is a single app.

Not a suite, not a platform. One app that does one thing well enough that people tell someone else about it. It is in active development now, and it is the thing every other decision on this page depends on.

We have not announced a release date, and we are not going to until we are confident in it. Dates announced early become dates defended later, and a company defending a date ships the version that hit the date rather than the version that was ready. When it is ready, this blog will be the first place it appears.

What we can commit to publicly:

• It meets the performance budget on old hardware, or it does not ship
• It launches on iOS and Android together, natively on both
• It will tell you plainly what it costs and exactly what data it uses

Years two and three: depth before breadth

The obvious move after a first app is a second one. We plan to resist that for a while.

Most studios go wide too early, and end up with four apps that are each 70% finished and none that anyone loves. At our size that is not a risk, it is close to a certainty if we let it happen. The version of Suncraft we want to exist in three years has two or three apps that are genuinely excellent, not a dozen that are fine.

So the plan after launch is unglamorous: keep improving the first app for as long as it keeps rewarding the effort. A second app starts when the first one is stable, self-sustaining, and no longer the best use of our time — not when we get bored, which will happen much sooner.

How we intend to grow

We do not have a growth budget, which rules out most of the standard playbook. What is left is slower and, we think, more durable.

Word of mouth as the primary channel. This is only a strategy if the product is good enough to warrant it, which is why everything upstream of this — the performance budget, the cutting of features, the four questions — is really a growth strategy in disguise.

Writing in public. This blog is not a content marketing funnel. It exists because we would rather be known for how we think than for how loudly we can advertise, and because people choosing between apps increasingly want to know who is behind them.

Being findable. People search for solutions to the problem before they search for us by name. Being genuinely useful in those moments is worth more to us than any ad spend we could afford.

Staying independent. No funding round means no growth curve imposed from outside, which means we never reach the point where the numbers require us to add the thing we promised not to add.

The honest version: this is the slowest possible way to build an app company. We are choosing it because every faster route we know of requires being worse to the people who use our apps.

What we count as success

Not downloads. Downloads measure how good your store page is, and store pages are easy.

The numbers we actually watch:

• Do people still use it after 30 days? Everything else is noise.
• Do they recommend it unprompted? The only marketing we plan to have.
• Does it pay for itself? Independence is only real if the products fund it.
• Would we use it ourselves, daily, if we had not built it? The one we are strictest about.

A Suncraft app that 20,000 people genuinely rely on is a better outcome for us than one a million people downloaded and deleted.

How this could go wrong

Four honest risks:

The first app might not land. Our four questions are a filter, not a guarantee. If it does not find its audience we will say so here, explain what we misread, and apply it to the next one.

We are a small operation, and that concentrates risk. A funded competitor can absorb a bad quarter or a key person being unavailable. We cannot, not easily. What we can do is keep the scope small enough that setbacks stay recoverable, and be honest here when they happen rather than going quiet.

Staying small might become the wrong call. If something we build genuinely needs more hands to serve people properly, refusing to grow out of principle would be its own kind of failure. We would rather adjust than be consistent.

Slow growth might just be slow. Word of mouth compounds, but it compounds from a small base, and it can take years. We have planned our costs around that being true. It is still the risk we are most exposed to.

Come along

There is no app to download yet, which makes this an odd moment to ask anyone to pay attention. But it is also the most honest one — you get to see what we said we would do before you get to judge whether we did it.

If the way we think about this resonates, the best thing you can do is follow along. The links in the footer all reach us directly, and we read everything. If you have hit the kind of small daily friction we described a few posts ago, we would genuinely like to hear about it.

We will see you at launch.