I wrote a license this morning that I have no way to enforce...

(And yes... I did it on purpose.)

Here's what happened...

I've been building something for a long time.

This morning it got far enough along that I could actually give it away.

Not a demo. Not a trial that quietly expires.

The whole thing.

And then I sat down to write the license, and hit a question I wasn't expecting...

What am I actually protecting here?

Because here's the thing I keep coming back to lately.

Software used to be something you bought.

Once. It was yours. It sat on your machine and it worked...

And then one day the same product started charging you every month, forever.

Nothing broke. Nothing improved for you.

It worked fine before.

So ask the obvious question... more valuable for who? 😅

Not you. You had it.

More valuable for the shareholders. More valuable for the owners.

And that's how you find out who the real customer is.

(Hint: it was never the person paying.)

Here's the part that gets me...

Value and valuation used to move together.

You gave something genuinely useful, and the number went up because of it.

More value, more valuation. That was the whole deal.

Now we've got companies delivering less every year with the number climbing anyway.

Which only makes sense if you're not the customer.

You're the product.

So here's the part I want to hand to you...

I can't fix any of that. I'm not big enough and I wouldn't know how.

But I can fix the one I run.

So the license I wrote this morning says roughly this:

Take it. Use it free, for as long as you like.

If it ever becomes worth five hundred dollars to you... pay me then.

Nothing checks. There's no key, no activation, no expiry, no phoning home.

Which means anybody can just... ignore it.

🤦‍♂️ (Yes. I know. I did think about that.)

Here's why I did it anyway.

A tool that polices the person using it is a worse tool.

Every check I don't build is a thing that can't break on you at 11pm.

And even if it never becomes worth five hundred dollars to you, then it wasn't worth it, and you shouldn't pay for it.

That feels like it should be obvious.

It used to be. That was just the honor system, and it worked for decades.

Somewhere we all agreed to stop trusting each other, and we called it business.

If you take one thing from this, take the question, not the license.

You probably run something. A business, a side thing, a service, a practice.

Sit down this week and ask it plainly:

What would I do differently if I were optimizing for value instead of valuation?

Then find the smallest one you can actually ship, and ship it this week.

(Not the big one. The small one. The big one becomes a plan and the plan becomes never.)

It'll probably feel uncomfortably generous. 😳

That's the feeling. That's how you know you found the right one.

Mine felt like giving away the thing I spent months on.

It still kind of does...

But I'd rather build something people want to hand to their friends than something they need permission to keep using.

FYI.. if you want to see the free LEAP pattern all of this is built on, it's here (or give the link to your favorite AI and ask it how LEAP can help with what you're working on!):

https://github.com/tomi-mercer/leap-design-pattern