Better Changelog — Product Vision
The Problem
Most changelog/release log tools are built for announcing — “here’s what’s new today.” They’re terrible at finding — “what changed about X six months ago?”
For companies selling to regulated clients (finance, healthcare, government), this is a real gap. When a client asks “when did you change your methodology for calculating X?” or “what data sources changed in Q3?” — the answer shouldn’t require digging through months of Slack threads, Jira tickets, or PDF release notes.
The Core Insight
Changelogs serve two audiences with different needs:
- Today readers — “What’s new?” (every changelog tool does this)
- Historical investigators — “What changed, when, and why?” (almost nobody does this well)
The second audience is underserved and willing to pay more (compliance, audit, regulated industries).
Three Dimensions of Change
What Changed (Type)
- Data — source data additions, removals, corrections, refreshes
- Methodology — how data is processed, calculated, scored, weighted
- Technology — platform, architecture, APIs, endpoints, infrastructure
These need clear visual differentiation and the ability to filter by type.
Why It Changed (Reason)
- Bug fix
- New feature / enhancement
- Scheduled refresh
- Regulatory/compliance requirement
- Client request
- Deprecation
- Security update
Impact Level
- Breaking change
- Non-breaking change
- Informational
Key UX Requirements
- Search — full-text search across all entries
- Filter — by change type, reason, date range, impact level, affected component
- Sort — chronological, by type, by impact
- Subscribe — get notified about specific types of changes (e.g., “tell me when methodology changes”)
- Audit trail — every entry has a clear timestamp, author, and categorization
- Visual differentiation — you should be able to GLANCE at a changelog and know “this was a data change, not a tech change”
Competitive Edge
No existing changelog tool (Beamer, Headway, LaunchNotes, Changefeed, Released.so) is built for:
- Historical lookup / compliance use case
- Multi-dimensional change categorization (type + reason)
- Regulated industry needs
This is not a dev tool. This is a client communication + compliance tool that happens to log changes.
Target Customer
SaaS companies and data providers selling to:
- Financial services
- Healthcare
- Government
- Any regulated industry where audit trails matter
Origin
Adam’s current employer operates a data + SaaS business with exactly this problem. Building for the internal need first, then productizing.