The brief asked for a data room. The answer turned out to be a product line.

Sketching the data room honestly, we found we were recreating something established providers already do well — and data rooms are straightforward enough that parity was a losing game. What GPs were actually describing was an integrated workflow: fundraising is more than sharing documents. So we pivoted the prototype into a complete pre-trade experience — fund, marketing, data room, access, analytics — modular enough to sell standalone. The risk: walking into an RFP with something they didn't ask for. The bigger risk: a worse version of something they could already buy.

Access control had to exist — GPs manage who sees what very carefully. But user-level permissions would have rippled through the entire data model and swallowed the two-week timeline. We drew the line at the level GPs manage day-to-day and deliberately deferred the rest. The prototype's job was to prove the reframe, not exhaust the spec — every scope call in those two weeks was that question in miniature.

This wasn't a projector demo — the prototype was going into the client's hands, and GPs managing billions expect bespoke service, not a staging link with shared credentials. We hosted it behind real Cloudflare authorisation and linked logins to auditing and engagement data. Which had an effect we fully intended: the analytics we were pitching as a feature were already running on their own usage from the first login.