Software sold and operated — with the status stated

Capability statement. Building software for a client and building software as a product are different jobs. This page is the second one: a market that was overpriced, a substitute built on hardware that costs a fraction of the incumbent systems, customers who adopted it, and the operational cost of keeping it running.

The commercial story

The digital signage market sells walls: thousands of dollars of hardware with fans, cooling and glass, locked to monopoly software. The product was built as a deliberate inversion of that — a system that runs on a small Raspberry Pi or a microcontroller, drives any HDMI screen including an ordinary monitor, and adapts to the board rather than requiring the board to adapt to it.

It manages screens as a fleet: power on and off, rotation, mirroring, multi-screen layout, coordinated boards, and synchronised playback across screens in one site or across sites. Users build complex animations or simple image rotations, and the system presents whatever suits the display it finds.

Demonstrations were rolled out in a hair salon and a financial services business. Around twelve businesses adopted it over time and three still run it today. That number is deliberately specific: twelve is cumulative adoption, three is current, and the difference is the honest measure of a product that was sold but not scaled.

The same workshop produced the CMS behind the marketing — a templated site builder with editors for drawing, image, video and text animation, video effects and transitions, 3D object import and text extrusion — built on JavaScript and three.js with FFmpeg, ImageMagick and PHP tools for documents, and rendering image animation on Raspberry Pi hardware.

The third product is different in kind: Where-Woof is a QR and RFID tag system for lost property. It is deployed and being deployed now. It has not gone to market, and this page will not call it commercial until it has.

Evidence

Claim	Evidence	Artefact
Signage replaced thousand-dollar wall systems with commodity hardware	Any HDMI screen · Raspberry Pi or ESP32 class player · fleet control	Signage product
Twelve adoptions over time, three businesses running now	Adoption history and current customers	Signage product
A templated builder produced the marketing sites	Editors for drawing · video · image and animation; FFmpeg and ImageMagick pipeline	WebsiteBuilder
Where-Woof is deployed and pre-market	Device and tag system in use; no market launch	Where-Woof
Screens are managed as a fleet	HDMI-CEC control of power · rotation · layout	Signage infrastructure

Product status — stated plainly

Product	What it is	Status	Next
Display screen media (Audas Media)	Digital signage on commodity hardware with multi-screen fleet control	Delivered · three businesses running · being rebuilt with AI	Strip back to signage only and rebuild on the current stack
WebsiteBuilder	Templated site builder and CMS with media editors and social output	Delivered · retained	Retired as a general product; kept as the content engine
Where-Woof	QR and RFID tags for lost property	Deployed · pre-market	Take to market — not done yet

Trade-offs and limits

Scope discipline came late. The builder carried a shop, invoicing, room management, calendars, presentations, documents, bulk messaging and client management. Product surface grew faster than a one-person support model could carry, which is why the plan now is to keep the signage and the content engine and retire the rest.
The rebuild is unfinished. “Rebuilding with AI” is a statement of work in progress, not a launch. It is labelled as such on every page that mentions it.
One product is pre-revenue by design. Where-Woof is deployed before it is sold. Describing it as commercial would be a lie that a careful reader would find in a minute.
Support is the hidden cost. Customers running the product for years is the strongest evidence of value and the strongest argument for keeping the surface small.

Drill-downs

Commercial signage on commodity hardware — level 3
The site builder behind it — level 3
Where-Woof — deployed and pre-market — level 3
Signage infrastructure — screens as a managed fleet — level 3

Period and confidence

period: 2014–, anchored on the first freelance product work in the résumé. Confidence is running: the products exist and customers still use one of them. Individual products carry their own status, and the two caveats — a rebuild in progress and a launch not yet made — are in the table above rather than in a footnote.