← Blog

How I decide what NOT to build into PrivateLets

The easiest way to ruin a piece of software built for one person managing a few doors is to keep adding things a property management company with a hundred employees would want. Enterprise software gets bloated one reasonable- sounding request at a time. I've watched it happen to tools I used to like.

So before anything goes into PrivateLets, I ask one question: did I personally run into this, managing my own properties, in the last month? Not "would this be useful." Not "a landlord asked for this once." Did I hit it, this month, doing the actual work.

That filter has killed a lot of features I was tempted to build. Multi-entity portfolio rollups for property management companies. A tenant-facing mobile app with push notifications. Role-based permissions for a team of property managers. All reasonable. None of it is what a landlord with five units checking things after dinner needs.

It's also why the settings page doesn't have forty tabs. Company name, branding, a few custom fields, notifications. That's what I actually touch. Everything else is a maintenance burden with my name on it, forever, for a feature that exists so a screenshot looks more "enterprise-grade."

Saying no to features is the actual product decision. Anyone can say yes.

← Back to PrivateLets