Quotidian: the app your business is built in, handed over with it.
Quotidian is the name we’ve given to the platform underpinning every MP Ventures build — the board every job is queued on, code or not, the agents that pick them up, the checks they have to pass, and the one screen you and your team run the lot from. At handover it is yours: a desktop app on your own machine, licensed with your build and set up on your project, with the month it was built in already in it. Whether or not you ever take a retainer.
Owning the code is the easy half of a handover.
The hard half arrives six weeks later, when there is something you want changed and no obvious way to get it changed. The code is yours, the tests pass — and none of that answers the actual question, which is how “we should add this” becomes something live by Friday. Whether there is one of you, three of you with no engineer between you, or a team with one engineer and forty other calls on their time, the constraint is the same: not what you own, but how much of it you can get moved in a week. That is the gap a retainer is normally sold into.
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Getting a change made
A usual handover
You write to whoever built it, wait for a quote, and join a queue.
With QuotidianYou write the job the way a good team writes one — who it is for, what it should do, what has to be true before it counts as done. An agent picks it up and brings it back to your screen for a yes or a no.
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Knowing it is safe
A usual handover
You take it on trust, or you pay someone to read it. Either way the judgement sits with whoever wrote the code.
With QuotidianNothing reaches the live business until every check your build was held to passes and a person has pressed the button.
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Keeping momentum
A usual handover
Momentum belongs to the retainer. Stop paying and the business stops changing, which is exactly the leverage nobody admits to.
With QuotidianThe app is on your own machine on the day you launch. A retainer buys you our judgement and our time — never your ability to move.
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Everything that isn’t code
A usual handover
Only the build ever had a machine behind it. The launch emails, the supplier comparison, the monthly numbers come back to you, your inbox and a spreadsheet nobody else can follow.
With QuotidianThey go on the same board, get worked the same way and leave the same trail. Anything you could hand to a capable assistant can be a job.
This is not a bonus bundled to make a price look better. The build fee buys a business you own outright, with nothing held back that you would have to keep paying for — and a handover that leaves you unable to change what you own is not a handover. What the options are after launch →
Not a stand-in for the people you don’t have. More reach for the ones you do.
The obvious reader of this page is a founder on their own with nobody to ask, and that reader is real. But the narrow version of that idea — that this is a crutch for somebody non-technical — has it backwards. What it changes is how much a small cross-functional team can have moving at once, and how far past their own job each of them can reach.
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On your own
Nobody to hand it to
Two problems, and they are different ones: getting the work done at all, and knowing whether what came back is sound. Work goes out while you get on with something else, and comes back held to your build’s own bar.
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Three or four of you
Everyone already has a job
A small team runs out of capacity long before it runs out of ideas — each person the only one who does what they do. Your operations manager gets a change written up, worked and checked without booking anyone’s week; whoever handles marketing gets a fortnight of research back overnight.
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With an engineer among you
They stop being the queue
The one technical person on a small team is the bottleneck for every small thing everybody else needs. Here they spend the day on the part that is genuinely theirs — what the change ought to be, and whether what came back is right — rather than producing every change themselves.
None of that is more people. It is the same team getting through more, in parts of the business they could not have touched on their own — with the decisions still landing with whoever ought to be making them.
A to-do list you write, worked by agents, gated by you.
One window. The board on the left, the job you are looking at in front of you, and the work moving between columns as agents pick it up. It is not only for code — anything in the business that can be written down as a job can go on it.
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Product
“Let people save a basket for later, and remind them by email if they don’t come back within three days.”
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Marketing
“Draft the launch note to the mailing list in our own voice, three lengths, ready for me to choose and edit.”
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Operations
“Compare both couriers against last month’s real orders and recommend one, with the workings shown.”
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Finance
“Every Monday, put last week’s revenue, refunds and top five products on the board for me.”
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Research
“Who else sells this in the UK, what do they charge, and where are we actually different?”
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Support
“Draft replies to this week’s refund requests, to our policy, for me to check before any of them send.”
Every one of those leaves the same trail as a change to the code: who asked, what came back, who approved it, what it cost.
Write it like a sentence, or write it like a spec.
Work is written as jobs on a board scoped to your business — the thing we built you, and nothing else. A line is enough to start; if you want an agent to be exact, the card takes the shape a good product team would use anyway: who it is for, what they want, and what has to be true before anyone calls it done.
- A sentence is a valid job. So is a user story with acceptance criteria — and the app will help you turn the first into the second before an agent ever touches it
- What happens next is written onto the card and stays there: what held it up, what you decided, what came back. Reopen it a year later and the reasoning is still there
- Scoped deliberately: any kind of work within the business we handed you, rather than a second job of its own
Blocked · waiting on you
Which courier for EU orders?
- 09:12Queued by you
- 09:26Agent priced both against last month’s orders
- 09:31“DPD is £2.10 cheaper per parcel and two days slower. Your call.”
Work goes out in parallel, and never into the live business.
Send a job out and an agent takes it: its own private copy of the project, its own workspace, and sight of that one job and nothing else. Several run at the same time without treading on each other — or on the site your customers are using while they do it.
- It works to what the card says “done” means, and the tests that prove it come back as part of the job rather than as an afterthought
- The house rules travel with the work — how your business writes, what it may claim, what must never be touched — so an agent reads them before it starts rather than after you have noticed
- One that hits a decision only a person can make stops and puts the question on the card, rather than guessing
Each on its own copy of the work, and none of it anywhere near the live business.
Agents finish. A person decides what becomes real.
Nothing an agent produces reaches the live business without a person. It cannot put anything live and it cannot pass its own work — the app refuses outright rather than trusting an agent to remember a rule forty steps after it read one.
- Putting something live is a person’s action, and the app will not do it for an agent that asks — nor for a person whose role does not carry it
- The same bar as the build month: the tests, the accessibility pass, the performance budget, the house style. Not a lighter set because the build is over
- Turn a piece of work down and your reason goes back out with it, in front of a fresh agent rather than the one that already thinks it is finished
Done · waiting on you
Stop the basket clearing on refresh
- Tests48 passed
- Accessibilityno new issues
- Fits with what’s livecleanly
- Pre-reviewread · 2 notes
- Agent asked to publish itrefused
This button belongs to a person, and only to the people whose role carries it.
Something reads the change before you do.
Once the machine can produce more work than one person can read, review attention is the scarce resource. When a job is finished, a second model reads it against what is already live and puts a note on the card: what the change does, and the short list of things it cannot settle.
- It tells you what changed and what it could not verify — never whether to approve it
- It reads for what a careful reviewer would: what no test covers, what the change quietly assumes, what it would break somewhere else
- It is deliberately not the gate. Checking the work off stays a person’s, on purpose
What the change does. Keeps the basket in the browser’s own storage rather than in the page, so a refresh no longer empties it. Two files, 41 lines, one new test.
What it cannot settle
- Whether a basket should still be there after seven days, or expire
- No test covers a second tab open on the same basket
A pre-review that flagged nothing is one more reader with nothing to add. It is not a sign-off.
Everything you have going, on one screen, live.
It is a desktop app that sits on your own machine, and it opens on the board: a column per state, redrawing itself as the work moves. Every action is a button — write a job, send it out, answer a question, turn work down, put something live — and the day is spent in one window.
- Cut it down to what has moved today, to one part of the business, to one person, or to just the ones you starred
- It runs on your side of the line: your machine, your accounts, your AI provider, rather than a tenancy of ours holding your business
- It reaches only the parts of the business your build was handed over with, and nothing in it goes to a server of ours
Open 4
In flight 2
Done 1
Your whole team on it, each of them reaching past their own job.
Whoever works on your business can be on the board with you — a cofounder, an operations manager, a contractor for a fortnight, the engineer you hire in year two. Everyone signs in as themselves, and what each of them can do is set by their role, so the person who writes the work is not automatically the person who decides what goes live.
- Roles rather than a shared password: writing work, answering questions, reviewing, and putting things live are granted one by one, per person
- Anyone can queue work outside their own discipline, and it faces exactly the same checks it would have if an engineer had asked for it
- Everything is attributed, so someone joining next year reads why a thing was done, not just that it was
An agent has no role at all. It can be given work and it can hand work back; it can never be given the button.
Something reads the whole board and says what you are missing.
On a schedule, it reads everything you have going at once against a written statement of your priorities, and proposes work in a column of its own. What it catches is what a job-by-job view cannot: the collision between two pieces of work, the thing quietly waiting on a decision, the item that has sat still for a fortnight.
- It cannot add work. It proposes; a person promotes it to a real job or declines it
- A decline is remembered with your reason, and the same idea is never put to you twice
- It argues from priorities you wrote down, which you can change in one sentence at any time
Suggested · not yet work
Take the checkout off the single card provider before the Christmas run-up
Why: sales have doubled month on month for three months, one outage now costs a day of revenue, and yb-11’s courier decision is already waiting on the same checkout work.
The rest of what you get handed.
Triage from your phone
A push for the work that is actually yours to answer, with Put it live and Didn’t pass on the message itself. A rejection typed on a train reaches the next agent exactly as it would have from your desk.
House rules the agents actually read
How your business goes live, what its copy may claim, the voice it writes in, what must never be touched. One copy of each, read by the agent whose work it binds before that agent starts.
What each job cost
The model spend for a piece of work is written onto its card when it closes. Billed by your provider on your own account — there is no meter of ours in between.
It keeps working while you don’t
The queue keeps moving overnight, so the morning summary is waiting before anyone has opened anything.
A history that answers questions
Every change it makes is recorded — what changed, when, who asked for it and which job it belonged to — and anything can be wound back. Why something was built is a question you can still get a real answer to months later.
One app, nothing to assemble
It arrives as a desktop application, installed and already pointed at your project. Nothing to assemble alongside it — the only outside thing it needs is your own AI provider account.
This is how the company you are hiring is run.
Every Mercurial Phoenix workstream moves through it — the iOS and macOS apps, the websites, the accounts, the marketing, the research. Most of what crosses that board is not code at all, and rather more of it is in flight at any moment than there are people here to be doing it. It is not a side project built to have something to hand over; it is what makes a fixed four-week month possible. What you are given is that same machine, narrowed to your business and hardened for people who did not build it. Worth being straight about what that makes it: our own working machine tightened for handover, rather than a shrink-wrapped product with a helpdesk behind it.
This page is an instance of it. It began as item mp-22 on the mp-ventures board, one sentence long. It went out to an agent working on its own copy, was turned down seven times and rewritten each time with the reasons attached — and reached this domain only when a person checked it off. The pipeline the build month runs on →
Set up during the build, not bolted on at the end.
By the time you are handed anything, your business has already been run on it for a month — so what arrives is not an empty installation, it is the board your build actually happened on.
Your board, from day one
Every job in your build month is queued, worked and checked on it. The history you inherit is the real one, not a tidy summary written afterwards.
The app, licensed to you
Installed on your own machine and pointed at your business, with your board, your people and their roles, your standing priorities and the rules your build was held to already in it.
Walked through, on real work
We run a genuine job end to end together — write it properly, send it out, read what comes back, put it live — rather than leaving you a manual and good luck.
Regardless of retainer
It stays with you whether you take continuing care, a revenue share, or nothing at all. The licence comes with the build and does not lapse when the engagement does: no seat to renew, no switch at our end.
Two things worth being exact about. It is a desktop application, so what it asks for is a computer that can be left on, and which machines that means among your team is settled during the scoping sprint — rather than discovered on handover day. And your business transfers to you outright: code, accounts, infrastructure, IP, nothing qualified. Quotidian does not. It is ours, and what comes with the build is a perpetual licence to run it on the business we built you — not open-source, and not yours to resell, sublicense or take elsewhere.