# Charter — Release & Distribution Strategy

Scope: the framing document for the strategy effort. It records the strategic goal, the two tier anchors, what is already ruled elsewhere, the decision surface (the knobs, decomposed into workstreams), the tensions the strategy must resolve, and the research agenda. It makes no decisions itself.

Drafted: 2026-08-01

**Note 2026-08-08 (two rulings, same day):** app-managed git is excised (ruled — `01-git-excision.md`, executed the same day), which moots this charter's git-premised lines: the pro-m1 launch coupling and any framing of Pro as selling git history. **And the base/Pro split itself is mooted for now (user-ruled):** Lanework ships as a single version, everything free, with the tier machinery excised from the codebase rather than left dormant; Pro returns later, alongside the iPhone companion and the ops-based sync capability, as a fresh design pass of its own. Read the anchors below accordingly — anchor 1's base/Pro pair collapses to "the app" until that era; the monetization-architecture workstream (knob 2) is parked with it, and the free-tier-generosity tension is resolved by construction (everything is the free tier). The openness pledge, the Teams second act, and the rest of the decision surface stand unchanged.

## The strategic goal

A long-term, reliably sustainable business with a clear path to growth.

Working interpretation, informed by the market research (`research/01-market-overview.md` ▸ success factors): sustainability means revenue that supports indefinite continued development with no external funding — the evidence is unambiguous that bootstrapped survives in this space and funded players pivot or die, and that visible steady development is itself part of the product (abandonment is fatal in the indie niche). Growth means base→Pro conversion inside the personal/family garden first, with the Teams tier as a deliberate second act, not a parallel bet.

Obsidian is the standing existence proof for the ceiling: ~$25M ARR, 18 people, zero VC, local-first. Lanework does not need to reach that ceiling to be sustainable; it needs a numeric definition of "enough" (see workstream 1).

## The two anchors

These two statements are the fixed points the strategy is built around (stated 2026-08-01):

1. **Base and Pro tiers** ship in the App Store and aim to create a "walled garden" for the user: create and manage kanban boards for whatever personal or family tasks/projects they engage with. The experience aims to be delightful and reliable on every level — from bug-free operation, to near-frictionless integration with third-party systems including AI, to multi-device multi-user board sharing, to guarantees around data ownership through open formats that hold regardless of the author's availability.
2. **Teams tier** (not yet engaged) is about a single surface of access to project management across multiple tracking systems — GitLab, GitHub, Atlassian, and more.

### The inversion that resolves "walled garden" vs "openness"

The garden's walls are around the *experience*, not the *data*. The app is the closed, polished, opinionated surface; the substrate underneath is open, documented, and legible to anything. This is the exact inverse of the mainstream pattern (open-feeling UI, captive data), and it is simultaneously the positioning line, the trust story, and the moat: competitors with captive state cannot cheaply adopt it (see the Signboard schema analysis), and the openness pledge costs Lanework nothing it wasn't already architecturally committed to. Every strategy decision should be checked against this inversion — anything that closes the substrate or cheapens the surface works against the whole position.

## What is already ruled (defaults, not open questions here)

- **Channel:** Mac App Store, one record (`dev.rzen.indie.Kanban`), shipping as 2.0 of the existing listing; notarized direct distribution deliberately not pursued for 2.0 (RELEASE.md, 2026-07-29).
- **Pro mechanics:** Pro is a subscription inside the app, never a second record; the monthly product id and StoreKit scaffolding exist (DESIGN/12-editions.md, re-ruled 2026-07-30).
- **Launch coupling:** 2.0 does not ship before pro-m1 is ready — the tiers launch together (user-ruled 2026-07-31).
- **Format posture:** versioned on-disk contract, immutable UUIDs, rank ordering — the durable structural differentiation vs Signboard (`research/07-schema-comparison-signboard.md`).

Rulings stand as defaults. A strategy workstream may surface evidence that argues for a re-ruling (e.g. the shape of the subscription offer), but must do so explicitly, naming the ruling it challenges.

## The decision surface

The original knobs — licensing, marketing, openness, goals — decomposed into six workstreams. Each becomes a numbered document when worked.

1. **Goals & guardrails** (the *goals* knob). Make "sustainable" numeric: the cost floor of running the business, the revenue level that clears it durably, the conversion and volume assumptions that level implies, and what the numbers say about pricing latitude. Record the guardrails as commitments: no external funding; no growth move that breaks the openness pledge; steady visible development cadence. Define trigger conditions and success/kill criteria for engaging the Teams tier.
2. **Monetization architecture** (the *licensing* knob). The tier boundary — what base offers free (base is both the funnel and the public proof of the trust story) versus what Pro sells. The offer shape within the ruled subscription mechanism: monthly/annual mix, price points, and whether a hybrid softens subscription fatigue — the market research flags the Agenda "pay once, keep what you unlocked" hybrid and Curio's dual-track as the patterns to test against a straight subscription, and measured subscription fatigue (active cancellation 31%→47%, 2024→2026) as the risk a pure monthly carries. Family Sharing question: multi-user family boards are an anchor promise, so whether the Pro subscription participates in App Store Family Sharing is a monetization decision, not a detail. Teams pricing is out of scope until the tier engages, beyond noting it will not be MAS-consumer-shaped.
3. **Openness architecture** (the *openness* knob). Turn the data-ownership pledge into concrete, credible artifacts: a published versioned format specification; possibly open-source tooling (validator, exporter, CLI, MCP server) under a permissive license; the licensing instrument for each artifact (spec vs code vs app are three different licenses). Define the "author unavailability" guarantee mechanically — what a user can do with their boards if the app stops being developed, and what makes that claim credible on day one rather than aspirational. Equally: state what stays closed (the app itself) and why that is not a betrayal of the pledge.
4. **Positioning & messaging** (half the *marketing* knob). The one-sentence promise; the audience definition — the research found two funnels that may not overlap (the agent-tooling/git-discovery audience and the Mac-indie/MAS audience) and the positioning must decide whether to lead with one, and which; the naming and framing of the openness guarantee so it lands as a feature, not a spec footnote; the differentiation story against Signboard ("native, faster, more Mac-idiomatic") kept honest.
5. **Launch & growth playbook** (the other half of *marketing*). Launch sequencing and channels (HN Show, Product Hunt, r/macapps, Mac press), grounded in the launch case studies the research pass still owes; content and community strategy, with Obsidian's community playbook as the study reference; development cadence as marketing — the changelog and visible momentum are part of the growth engine, not overhead.
6. **Teams tier as a second act.** A deliberately thin placeholder until triggered: different buyer, different economics, different channel (likely not MAS-only), a structural new risk class (dependency on third-party tracker APIs), and a different competitive set (aggregators and single-pane tools) needing its own landscape scan. The bridge from the garden to Teams — same app, same substrate, remotes as the mechanism — is what makes it an act two rather than a second company.

## Tensions to resolve

The real strategy questions — each is an intersection of two workstreams pulling opposite directions.

- **Subscription mechanism vs subscription-fatigue evidence.** The ruling fixes the *mechanism* (in-app subscription, one record); the research says one-time/low-commitment pricing is a trust signal in exactly Lanework's niche. The open question is the *offer shape* inside the ruled mechanism: pure monthly, annual-first, or a hybrid that lets lapsed subscribers keep something. This is the single highest-stakes open decision.
- **Free-tier generosity vs conversion.** The openness pledge forbids ransoming data — a lapsed or free user must never lose access to their boards' content. So Pro must sell *capability* (sync, history, remotes, sharing), never data hostage-taking. The tension is making the free tier generous enough to prove the trust story while leaving Pro something people who love the free tier actually pay for.
- **Two audiences, one product.** If the agent-tooling funnel and the Mac-indie funnel truly don't overlap, positioning, launch channels, and even the App Store listing copy cannot serve both at once. Sequencing (which audience first) is a strategy decision the funnel-overlap research must inform.
- **Credibility of the availability guarantee.** "Your data outlives the author" is easy to say and hard to prove before there is a track record. The openness workstream must find the artifacts that make it verifiable now (published spec, working third-party reader path, maybe license terms that trigger on abandonment) rather than a promise to be trusted.
- **Walled garden vs openness in messaging.** The inversion resolves the substance; marketing must not muddle it. Language that sounds like lock-in ("walled garden" is an internal term, never a public one) or like an open-source project (it is not one) both misposition the product.

## Research agenda

Evidence the strategy needs, feeding the workstreams above. Overlaps with the narrow-pass agenda in `research/01-market-overview.md`; items here are strategy-shaped rather than landscape-shaped.

- **Pricing deep dive** (workstream 2): Agenda's hybrid, Curio's dual track, Things' one-time, Obsidian's free-personal/paid-commercial + add-on services, Signboard's actual model — mechanics, communicated rationale, and any public signals about how each performs.
- **Launch case studies with real numbers** (workstream 5): HN/PH launches of file-based or local-first task tools — carried over from the research open questions, still unfilled.
- **Funnel overlap study** (workstream 4): whether the agent-tooling and Mac-indie audiences share any channels at all.
- **Openness precedents** (workstream 3): "open format, closed app" done well — Obsidian (closed app, open vault), TaskPaper (format outlived ecosystems), Ghost/Tailscale (open core with a different boundary), Sketch (open file format as ecosystem play) — what artifacts each published, under what licenses, and what credibility each bought.
- **Family/multi-user sharing precedents** (workstream 2): how MAS apps price and deliver family multi-user features, and what App Store Family Sharing does and doesn't permit for subscriptions.
- **Teams-tier landscape scan** (workstream 6): deferred until the tier's trigger conditions are met; noted so it isn't forgotten.
