We built Doodling AM as a small drawing toy: draw something, press play, watch it fall. The paper was one screen. That felt natural. A napkin is one napkin.
Then we made the paper endless. You can pan and zoom, and the drawing stays where you left it.
Nothing else changed that day. But the app changed. I started writing on it. I organised things on it. I scribbled a plan, moved the pieces around, and came back to it the next morning. My wife, a designer, who had called the whole thing useless the day before, said the whiteboard idea seemed useful.
The lesson I took: some limits are not features. They are just the first thing you built. Drawing with a mouse is clumsy, and I had accepted that as the ceiling. A bigger canvas did not make the mouse better. It made the clumsiness matter less, because a rough sketch on a big page is a note, not a picture.
So now, when something feels limited, I ask a simpler question first. Is it the tool, or is it the paper?