# Market Research

Long-term competitive-landscape research for Lanework: the kanban app market plus the adjacent personal todo/task-management market, with special attention to the file-based/local-first niche and the emerging AI-agent + task-management intersection — the two axes Lanework's bet actually lives on.

This directory is a living body of work. The first pass (2026-08) is deliberately broad — mapping segments, trends, and success factors. Later passes will narrow: deep-dives on the direct competitive set, positioning, and pricing.

## Documents

- [01-market-overview.md](01-market-overview.md) — synthesis: the map of the market, where Lanework sits, and what the broad pass says matters (written after the segment docs; start here)
- [02-mainstream-kanban.md](02-mainstream-kanban.md) — mainstream/team kanban and project boards: Trello, Asana, Monday, Jira, ClickUp, Notion, Linear, and company
- [03-native-indie-filebased.md](03-native-indie-filebased.md) — native macOS, indie, and file-based/plain-text tools: Lanework's nearest neighborhood
- [04-todo-adjacent.md](04-todo-adjacent.md) — personal todo/task apps: Things, Todoist, TickTick, OmniFocus, Reminders, and the daily-planner wave
- [05-trends-success-factors.md](05-trends-success-factors.md) — cross-cutting trends: AI features that stuck, local-first momentum, pricing models, distribution, notable failures
- [06-agents-and-tasks.md](06-agents-and-tasks.md) — the AI-agent + task-management intersection: how agents consume task state today and what's missing

Narrow-pass deep dives (per-competitor, added as they happen):

- [07-schema-comparison-signboard.md](07-schema-comparison-signboard.md) — Signboard's on-disk format vs Lanework's: definition rigor, identity, ordering, denormalization, and the strategic read
- [08-competitive-analysis.md](08-competitive-analysis.md) — the direct set profiled: features, pricing, traction, tiered profiles, matrices, ranked threats, and the positioning read (2026-08-07)

## Conventions

- Each document opens with a scope note and a `Researched: YYYY-MM-DD` line; treat facts as snapshots of that date.
- Broad passes favor coverage over depth; a claim worth acting on gets re-verified in a narrow pass first.
- Prose is unwrapped — one line per paragraph or list item.
