We Built the Same Product Twice. Only 6% of It Carried Over.

The number that surprised us We build software for two businesses that sound like the same business. One rents things out by the day. The other sells and manages property . Described in a sentence, both are someone paying to use a building or a vehicle for some period of time. When we started the second one, everyone involved assumed most of the first would carry over. Between them, the two products describe 113 business concepts — the things the software has to know about, like a customer, a contract, a price rule, a booking. Seven are shared. Six percent. The second product still shipped far faster than the first. Understanding why is worth more than the number itself, because the same logic decides whether an automation project inside your own company pays for itself. Why two similar businesses share almost nothing The sentence that makes them sound alike is the sentence hiding all the differences. A rental company has vehicles. They exist or they do not. A property developer has buildings under construction, where each apartment moves through stages — planned, framed, finished, ready to hand over — and half the business is tracking which stage each one is in. There is no version of a car that is sixty percent delivered, so there was nothing in the first product to borrow. A rental booking opens and closes inside a week. A property sale runs for months and involves a buyer, a seller, an agent, and often a bank, each of whom needs their own view of the same transaction. We know exactly how far you get by treating that as a booking with extra fields: right up until the first commission has to be split three ways. And a rental company has customers. A property company has customers, owners and investors — people who never buy anything through the system and log in only to see what their asset is doing. There is no equivalent at all in the first product, which is the clearest sign that these were never the same business. Where the savings actually were Nothing above