Two products, one theme: clarity

January 1st usually comes with big announcements.
This one doesn’t.

No launch dates.
No roadmaps carved in stone.
Just a reflection on a year of building — and why I ended up working on two very different SaaS products at the same time.

At first glance, Expensio and dotmap don’t have much in common.

One is about expense claims.
The other is about discovering professionals on a map.

Different audiences. Different problems. Different surfaces.

And yet, the more I build them, the clearer the shared theme becomes.

Clarity as a starting point

Both products started from small, personal frustrations.

Not “there should be a startup for this,” but
“this should be simpler than it is.”

With Expensio, it was the friction of filing basic expense claims.
No invoices. No complex accounting. Just a clean overview I could send as a private individual — and occasionally as a business owner.

With dotmap, it was visibility.
How professionals are discovered, reduced to lists, feeds, and SEO-driven profiles — stripped of context, geography, and intent.

In both cases, the problem wasn’t missing features.
It was noise.

What Expensio taught me

Building Expensio forced discipline.

Every time I considered adding something, the question was simple:
Does this reduce cognitive load, or add to it?

Most ideas didn’t survive that test.

The product became an exercise in subtraction:

• fewer concepts
• fewer decisions
• fewer steps between “I need this” and “this is done”

It reinforced something I already suspected:
clarity is not about minimal UI — it’s about minimal thinking.

What dotmap taught me

dotmap pushed me in a different direction.

Discovery isn’t a form problem.
It’s a context problem.

Lists flatten people. Maps don’t.

Once you introduce location, proximity, and visual density, you change how someone explores — and how they present themselves.

dotmap is less about profiles and more about presence.
Less about optimization and more about orientation.

It’s still early, but the lesson is clear:
interfaces shape behavior more than features ever will.

The overlap I didn’t expect

Somewhere along the way, I realized I wasn’t really building two products.

I was exploring the same idea in two domains:

What happens when you intentionally design for calm instead of scale?

Both Expensio and dotmap:

• start from personal use
• avoid “enterprise by default” thinking
• favor legibility over flexibility
• try to respect the user’s time and attention

They don’t try to be platforms.
They try to be clear tools.

Looking ahead to 2025

I’m not starting this year with resolutions.

I’m continuing an approach:

• build slowly
• write openly
• ship when something feels finished, not when a calendar says so

Expensio will move toward real-world usage and polish.
dotmap will focus on community signals and exploration.

Both will stay small for as long as possible.

If there’s a theme for 2025, it’s not growth.
It’s intentionality.

If you’re curious where that leads — you’re welcome to follow along.

Expensio

Read the first blogpost in this series:
I built Expensio — A simple expense tool I needed myself

dotmap

Read the first blogpost in this series:
Episode 1: Why I started building dotmap