The TWIMCO notebook

Field notes.

Useful observations from inside the work.
For people building a better way.

Buying software · 28 notes

Editorial engraving of a sunlit apparel studio where an operations manager holds a USB stick and blank spreadsheet template beside a pattern maker reviewing a dry-run printout.

Opening note / Buying software

CSV import is a product feature, not a favor

Someone always asks to "just upload a spreadsheet." If import is how real customers start—or how they recover—it needs validation, a dry run, and an owner, not a one-off engineer weekend.

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Editorial engraving of a sunny campaign office where a director compares a thick contact stack to a thin curated stack while a coordinator clips the thinner pile.

Buying softwareField note

Leaving a tool that charges for contacts you never emailed

The bill jumped because your contact list grew—not because you sent more campaigns. Before you stay or go, weigh export quality, the true per-contact math, and what breaks on the Monday after you cancel.

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Editorial engraving of a sunlit theatre stage where a founder slides most of a line of blank cards into a crate, a director holds one card up to the light and a developer with a laptop sits on the stage edge.

Buying softwareField note

Your first version should do one job properly. Cut everything else.

Feature lists for a first version tend to be wish lists for year two. Cutting one down is uncomfortable, especially when you're paying for every week of work. Here's what we'd usually take out, and the few things we'd argue to keep.

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Editorial engraving of a sunny boatyard where a surveyor taps the hull of a half-restored sailboat while holding a tablet, the new owner holds the old logbook and keys, and a shipwright peers into a hatch on deck.

Buying softwareField note

You've inherited a half-built app. Inspect it before anyone quotes a rewrite.

The last developer stopped answering, or the money ran out, or the agency moved on. Now there's an app that sort of works, and the first new developer you call says it should be rebuilt from scratch. That might be right. Find out first.

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Editorial engraving of a sunny rooftop garden where a business owner with a tablet stands at the first planted bed, a developer measures the next bed marked with string, and a project lead with a rolled plan points toward the bare beds ahead.

Buying softwareField note

Fixed price or time and materials? Price the uncertainty, not the project.

Ask three development shops for a quote on the same app and you may get a fixed price, an hourly rate and a question back. Each one is a different bet about who carries the unknowns. Here's how to tell which bet suits the work you actually have.

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Editorial engraving of a sunlit noodle-restaurant counter where the owner keeps one hand on his own paper sales ledger while holding a tablet of abstract bars away from him, a cook chopping behind him and another restaurant visible across the street.

Buying softwareField note

Ask whose sales data your pricing tool learned from.

A lawsuit filed this month says McDonald's pricing software pooled private sales data from restaurants that are supposed to compete. Whatever the court decides, anyone shopping for pricing software now has a sharper first question to ask.

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Editorial engraving of a newly moved boutique with a skylight and moving crates, where the owner hangs a blank sign from a step ladder, a support teammate with a headset types at a crate counter, and a long-time customer holds up a gift card and phone.

Buying softwareField note

The morning after the store moves, customers find what the project didn't test.

Launch night went fine. The new storefront is faster and the team is proud of it. Then the support inbox opens at 8:15 the next morning, and the messages are about passwords, missing store credit and an old newsletter link, none of which were on the launch plan.

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Editorial engraving of a skylit loft where a business owner in her sixties holds a printed contract and pen beside a young developer pointing at a large monitor of abstract code bars with one faintly outlined block, while a colleague walks past in the background.

Buying softwareField note

Ask how AI touched your code, then write the answer into the contract.

Almost every developer you might hire now works with AI tools, and almost no proposal says so. Here are the questions to ask on your next call, what a reassuring answer sounds like, and what belongs in writing afterwards.

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Editorial engraving of an old building renovated room by room, with scaffolding and a carpenter on one side, a finished room in use by a working team on the other, and an owner and architect walking through the arch between them.

Buying softwareField note

A letter to the owner of the system everyone wants to rewrite.

You've heard it in three meetings now: the old system has to go, so let's rebuild it properly. Before you sign off on that, here's what we'd want you to know, as plainly as we can put it.

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Editorial engraving of a sunny city corner where a courier on a cargo bike checks a phone in a handlebar mount while, at a café table nearby, an older woman taps her phone once beside a coffee and a folded newspaper.

Buying softwareField note

You may not need an app. Here's how to tell.

"We need an app" is sometimes exactly right and sometimes a way of saying we want to be taken seriously. Four common beliefs are worth checking before you pay to build and maintain two of them.

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Buying softwareField note

Isolation is a checklist, not a logo.

The vendor says multi-tenant and the demo shows two logos in a switcher. Underneath, a column on a shared table may be the only wall, and the support tool can open any account. Check every path that reads or writes, not the switcher.

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Buying softwareField note

Price what you'd own before you switch to open weights.

Reflection's open-weight model hasn't shipped yet, and people are already asking whether to switch. The download will be free. Running it won't be. Here's what you'd be taking on.

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Buying softwareField note

A retry is not a second write.

A payment capture times out, and the honest next move is to try again. The dishonest result is a second charge. "Our API is idempotent" isn't a policy until someone says what counts as the same attempt and who owns the duplicate.

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In a bright loft, a woman on a window bench reads a printed contract while a colleague pins threads between index cards on a cork wall. Between them, two laptops show blocks moving from one screen to the other, and a calendar on the wall has one day circled.

Buying softwareField note

When your vendor gets bought, use the quiet week.

Reports Sunday had Schneider Electric close to buying PTC. When a tool your team runs on lands in a headline like that, the reassuring email isn't a plan. Here's how we'd spend the first month instead.

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Cross-hatched editorial engraving of a person at a bright drafting counter reviewing a job ticket beside a laptop, with a leaderboard sheet set aside and another person by the window.

Buying softwareField note

Score the job before you buy the model.

The slide says the model tops the board. Your tickets still need a human. Before you route spend or traffic, run acceptance on the jobs you actually own.

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Sunlit loft: a woman holds a hand-built prototype while a man reviews a tablet beside a wooden crate.

Buying softwareField note

Score build vs buy on evidence you can show.

Build and buy both sound fine in a meeting. The useful question is what evidence you can show, and who owns the failure neither option wants.

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Buying softwareField note

Checklist the disclosure package before the complex close.

A TWIMCO Disclosure Package Checklist: what must be verified, shown, and owned before a complex close—items, evidence, owner, blocker vs note.

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Buying softwareField note

Score exit readiness before you need to leave.

Renewal comes around and switching looks impossible. The export is unclear, identities won't map, and the runbooks live in the vendor's head. The time to find out whether you could leave is while you still have leverage.

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Antique workshop test bench with sealed sample jars, a replay stamp, a caliper on a schema template, and a named failure bell linked by red thread.

Buying softwareField note

Smoke the data contract before go-live—not after the first bad write.

Everyone agreed on the payload in a document. Then the first production write used a field the document forgot, and retries started duplicating. An hour of checks against the real edge in staging is cheaper than learning it from customers.

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Antique workshop with two craft leads signing a boundary contract; red thread linking owner seals, retry stamp, schema notice bell, and on-call lantern.

Buying softwareField note

Put a name on every edge that can break the other side.

A retry doubles a charge. A field gets renamed without notice. The ticket bounces between two teams who each point at the connection between them. Every edge that can break the other side needs a named owner on both ends.

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A good place to begin.

A familiar problem? Let’s look closer.

Tell us where you want to go. We’ll find the first thing worth changing.

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