And we are live: The new Notehouse has officially launched

After exactly 6 months, we released the rebuild of Notehouse, our latest acquisition at Waterglass.

When we acquired Notehouse in Summer 2025, we knew that we would need to rebuild the full application. The codebase had  been passed through multiple agencies over the years, and the technical debt had piled up to a point where patching things up simply wasn't an option anymore.

Read more about it at How Our Latest Acquisition Is Rebuilt From Scratch

It's not our goal to acquire businesses and then rebuild them from scratch, but rather improve what is there, fix what needs to be fixed and double down on what works.

Notehouse was clearly the exception in this case.

Given that this was our second acquisition – again without external funding – this clearly was a trade-off between what we could get at this price tag and how much work is needed to get the business back on track.

We weighed the risks, ran the numbers, and ultimately decided that the investment was justified by strong customer base low churn justified the investment.

The challenge for Notehouse specifically was to build a new application on top of the existing infrastructure, using modern technology, so that customers can switch seamlessly during the transition period.

This allows them to go back and forth between the Rebuild and the Legacy app, which in turn allows us to gradually roll out the application, fix bugs and add finishing touches. No big bang migration – just a smooth handover.

One core aspect of the now fully rebuilt application is data security.

Data security at its core

Since HIPAA compliance was more of an afterthought in the previous implementation and GDPR compliance non-existent, we had a clean start here and were able to build everything from scratch with data security front and center.

I must say, we are proud of what was achieved, with an experienced senior engineer in the lead, supported by AI coding assistants along the way. It was a team effort that came together exactly as planned both in terms of budget and roadmap (with the occasional all-nighters in between).

The feedback was incredibly positive right after the relaunch – it immediately brought us more 5-star reviews on Capterra! – especially given that the legacy application was full of bugs.

We also had to clean up a lot of Stripe misconfigurations along the way, which caused customers – and us, too – to become frustrated with incorrect billings.

These are the things you only discover once you're deep in the weeds of the integration of an acquired business.

The future of CRUD applications in the age of AI

Notehouse is, at the end of the day, a somewhat simple CRUD (Create Read Update Delete) application. This made me think: 

What happens if a customer would simply start vibe coding their dream case management software into existence?

Our view on case management software in the age of AI is this: because it handles protected health information (PHI), using software built by non-engineers to manage sensitive data still carries significant risk.

Data security is at the core of Notehouse, which means vibe-coded applications will not be deemed safe enough to be trusted with patient data for the foreseeable future. And frankly, would you trust your client records to an app someone prompted together over a weekend?

Given Notehouse’s positioning as an entry-level product, Notehouse is priced well below its competition, with many competitors charging roughly three times as much for a similar – or even more limited – feature set.

Your margin is my opportunity.
– Jeff Bezos

(^ This quote can't be missed, for obvious reasons)

This is a signal to us that we have room to grow into a higher price range over the following months while still remaining aggressive on entering the market now with a product that is on par – and beyond – the competition.

What's next for Notehouse – and Waterglass

Since we have established feature parity with Notehouse Legacy, we are now executing on our roadmap to add requested features. This process will be heavily driven by AI-assisted software engineering to maintain both velocity and cost  effectiveness for the months (and years) to come.

With Notehouse now being in great shape and Pxl performing well, we have officially started looking for the next acquisition target and kicked off a grand new internal project, with the promise to increase the efficiency of our operating software businesses across the portfolio by significantly lowering OPEX.

I'll share more details in the next article – but let's just say it's something we've been thinking about since 2024.

PS: Meet me at the Serial Acquirers Summit on 26th February in London!