Running log of decisions actually made, so the team doesn’t re-litigate settled questions. Add new entries at the top, newest first. Format: date — decision — brief why.

2026-08-10 — Keep building despite two live NZ competitors

Desk research (research/nz-specific-trade-compliance-check.md, research/synthesis-2026-08-10-live-search-followup.md) found two live, NZTA-approved, NZ-specific competitors — WoFMate and itsallauto.com’s eWOF™ — plus a solo compliance consultant (Business Systems Sorted). Decided to keep building: neither competitor shows evidence of having saturated the market (WoFMate publishes no customer count; itsallauto.com claims “hundreds of mechanics” against 4,000–5,000 NZ shops), and neither covers the full compliance layer or has an agentic layer. Differentiation now needs to be argued more precisely than “no dedicated tool exists” — see opportunity/open-questions.md item 6 and opportunity/positioning.md, both updated same day.

2026-08-05 — Name: Benchmarq

Chose “Benchmarq” over Shopfloor (too close to existing garage/job management software category — risk of buyers assuming it’s a booking/parts tool), Warrant (unwanted “arrest warrant” association), Verity and Attest (both had real NZ collisions — Attest Limited is an active registered NZ company; Verity is heavily diluted as a word in the NZ companies register). Benchmarq had a clean NZ companies-register check and benchmarq.co.nz was available.

Note: IPONZ trademark search was not completed (tooling issue at the time) — still an open item before treating the name as fully clear.

2026-08-05 — Domain secured

benchmarq.co.nz purchased.

2026-08-05 — Brand pack v0.1

First-pass logo (wordmark + two icon marks), color palette, and Sifonn as the working display typeface. Explicitly marked as a working draft — see brand/README.md in this repo for what’s still open (tagline, Sifonn as permanent choice).

2026-08-05 — Docs site architecture

Astro + Cloudflare (reusing the founders’ existing Baseleg pattern), content as plain markdown with a small frontmatter schema (title/status/tags/updated), so the same files serve both the team’s own thinking and — later — the product’s own agent as grounding knowledge.