Founder's Note: The Features I Didn't Want to Build

Written by Olivia Bedford

When we started building WildPlanner, the plan was deliberately narrow. Store your rates in one place, build a quote from them, done. Not an all-in-one platform, not a booking engine, not a CRM. Just that one problem, solved properly. Every time a feature request came in that felt like it was pulling us away from that, my instinct was to push back on it, politely, but firmly. I didn't want WildPlanner to become another bloated tool that tries to do everything and ends up doing nothing particularly well.

Why I kept saying no

That instinct held up for a while. But it gets harder to hold onto "no" when the same request keeps landing from people who aren't talking to each other, who are just independently running into the same wall in their own businesses.

Three requests in particular wore that resistance down.

The rates uploader

The first was an automatic rates uploader. Operators kept telling us the same thing: they had rates sitting in PDFs and half-organised spreadsheets from a dozen different suppliers, and retyping them into anything, including WildPlanner, was exactly the manual work they were trying to escape. I'd told myself that manual entry was fine, that it was a one-time setup cost. It wasn't. It was a recurring one, every time a supplier sent an updated sheet. We built the bulk uploader.

Per-person pricing

The second was per-person pricing, sharing rates, single supplement, child rates, all handled properly on the same quote. I'd underestimated how much of a genuine daily headache this was. A trip with two couples sharing and one solo traveller isn't a rare edge case for a lot of operators, it's a normal Tuesday. Not handling it properly wasn't keeping the product simple, it was just quietly pushing the complexity back onto the operator instead of solving it.

Branded exports

The third was customisable exports, your own logo, your own colours, on the quotes you send to clients. This one I resisted longest, it felt like the kind of polish feature that's nice to have rather than actually necessary. I was wrong about that too. A quote is often the first properly branded thing a client sees from a small operator. Sending it out looking generic undercuts exactly the professionalism these businesses are trying to project.

The distinction I was missing

None of these three actually compromised what WildPlanner is meant to be. They made the one thing we set out to do, rates and quotes, actually work the way small operators genuinely need it to. That's the distinction I was missing early on: saying no to scope creep is right. Saying no to the same real problem showing up repeatedly, from people with no reason to be coordinating with each other, is just stubbornness dressed up as product discipline.

I still say no to plenty of requests. But I listen a lot more carefully now to the ones that keep coming back.