Why I Built the Technology I Couldn’t Find
There’s no shortage of software for running a business; you can find a system for managing customers, another for enquiries, another for email marketing, another for bookings, another for your website and countless tools designed to connect all of those systems together.
Individually, many of them are excellent but the problem often appears when you start connecting them.
One system owns the customer, another owns the subscriber, the website captures the enquiry and an integration moves information between them.
Before long, you’re not simply running the business anymore; you’re managing the technology required to run the business.
Complexity between the systems
This isn’t really a software problem; it’s an architectural one.
Most technology is bought to solve individual problems:
- A business needs a CRM, so it buys a CRM.
- It needs email marketing, so it buys an email platform.
- It needs online bookings, so it adds a booking system.
Each decision makes sense independently but collectively, they can create something nobody deliberately designed.
Data gets duplicated, integrations become dependencies, processes start adapting themselves around the limitations of the systems and spreadsheets appear wherever the gaps remain.
Eventually, changing one thing means understanding everything connected to it.
The complexity isn’t necessarily inside the technology…
…it’s in the relationships between it.
Starting somewhere different
When I started building Complexity Clarified, I had the opportunity to approach the problem differently.
Rather than beginning with a list of products, I started with the information the business actually needed.
An enquiry isn’t an isolated object - it comes from a person. That person might become a contact or customer, they might choose to subscribe to something and they might interact with the business again later.
Those aren’t separate relationships simply because different software products traditionally manage them.
So I started building around the relationships instead.
That eventually became Xirvix.
I’ve written separately about how Complexity Clarified uses Xirvix in practice.
Not because the world desperately needed another CRM, but because I wanted something simpler: a connected operational layer behind the business that didn’t require half a dozen systems simply to understand who somebody was.
Connected doesn’t have to mean dependent
There’s an important distinction here.
I’m not arguing that every business should replace everything with one enormous platform; that creates a different kind of complexity.
Specialist technology exists for good reasons and sometimes the best solution absolutely is a dedicated product.
The objective should be to decide deliberately where those boundaries sit.
Complexity Clarified’s website, for example, remains independent from the systems behind it. It can change without rebuilding everything else.
But when information crosses that boundary, it enters a connected environment rather than disappearing into another isolated application.
That’s the principle I’ve found increasingly useful:
Integrate where things naturally belong together. Separate them where independence creates value.
Technology should remove complexity
We often talk about digital transformation as though adding technology inherently represents progress but that’s not always the case.
Every new system introduces something else that needs maintaining, understanding, integrating and eventually replacing.
Sometimes that’s absolutely worthwhile but sometimes we’ve simply added another layer.
Building the technology behind Complexity Clarified forced me to confront that distinction directly because I wasn’t designing an abstract architecture; I had to use the thing myself.
And that’s probably the bigger lesson.
Before buying another platform, adding another integration or automating another process, ask what you’re actually simplifying.
Because if the answer is nothing, you might not be removing complexity at all.
You might just be moving it somewhere harder to see.
