MargBooks: 17 modules, one install, zero scope drift.

The starting point

MargBooks runs accounting and ERP software for thousands of Indian SMBs. Their internal product team had grown to over 100 people working across three offices, on a roadmap that touched billing, inventory, GST compliance, payroll, and a half-dozen vertical integrations.

The pain wasn't a missing tool. They had Jira. They had a wiki. They had Slack. They had a knowledge base. The pain was the gap between what got decided in a planning meeting and what shipped six weeks later. By the time a feature landed, the original product spec had drifted three or four times, often without anyone realising.

Why Sarthy

MargBooks signed on as Sarthy's first design partner under D059. The agreement: pilot pricing, 17 modules of V1 functionality, in exchange for honest feedback through the build. Their use cases became the worked examples that shaped every V1 spec.

The fit was specific. MargBooks needed:

• Decisions that didn't disappear into Slack threads
• Knowledge that survived the team scaling past 100 people
• Alignment that worked across product, engineering, and the QA team that owned compliance
• A self-hosted setup, because their data includes Indian SMB financial records

The install

Sarthy installs on their own infrastructure with a single command. They wired their existing GitLab instance as the substrate (D029 GitLab adapter). They brought their own LLM keys: a mix of Claude and OpenAI, selected per use-case. Total install time, from blank VM to working Sarthy: under thirty minutes.

The team didn't migrate anything immediately. They started fresh on the V1 pilot modules and let the knowledge repo grow from work, rather than copying old wiki content. Three months in, the repo is the source of truth.

Sarthy's alignment engine flagged a comment that was about to send our Q2 rollout in a different direction than the locked PRD. The drift was caught five minutes after the comment was posted, not five weeks later in QA. That's the moment we knew this was different.

What's working

Three patterns have emerged from the pilot:

• The Owner Dashboard became the founder's morning routine. Recent activity, burning tasks, alignment drift surfaces, all in one panel. The "what should I focus on today" question is mostly answered before the first coffee.
• The wiki grew faster than expected. Save-to-Knowledge made dropping a meeting note or chat thread into the repo a one-click action. By month two, the wiki had more content than the previous Notion workspace, all of it traced to source.
• Per-artefact Ask Sarthy turned out to be more useful than the team predicted. Asking a wiki page "what decisions led to this" and getting cited answers became the default way new joiners onboarded.

What's hard

Honest take. The first three weeks were rough. Setting up the role hierarchy across product, engineering, compliance, and the QA team needed multiple iterations. The branch-policy template choice generated debate that the team had been quietly avoiding for months. The wiki review flow felt slow until the team adjusted to it.

Sarthy made some implicit organisational choices explicit. That's the work. There is no version of this product that removes the work.

What's next

MargBooks moves into V1.25 (the template engine and specialist library) when it ships in Q3 2026. Their use cases are shaping the bundled templates that will ship with V1.25 to every future install.