Still True

The problem in detail

SOPs get written once — usually by hand in Docs, OneNote or a flowchart tool — then quietly rot as systems, screens and steps change. Nobody has time to re-walk every procedure, so staff stop trusting the docs, ask a colleague instead, and the real process lives in a few people's heads. When that person leaves or a process must be explained to a new hire, auditor or client, someone spends hours reconstructing it from memory, calendars and emails.

Proposed product

A browser extension plus small web app for SOP owners. A staff member performs a task once with recording on; Still True captures each click, page URL, field and screenshot and drafts a numbered, screenshotted SOP the owner can edit and publish. The important half is afterwards: the extension passively watches anyone performing that same task again and compares it to the published steps. When people consistently skip a step, add one, or hit a screen that no longer exists, the SOP is flagged stale with a diff showing exactly which step drifted and what people actually do now — one click to accept the new step. The dashboard shows every SOP ranked by staleness and by how many people deviated, so the lead fixes the three docs that matter instead of auditing forty.

Why now

Click-capture SOP tools have made recording a procedure cheap, and a third-party comparison of the two leading tools states plainly that when the underlying UI changes, guides stay outdated until someone manually re-records them, with no way to detect that a guide references a screen that no longer exists. Scribe's own best-practice answer is a calendar-driven manual review. Conformance checking exists at the enterprise end (UiPath Process Mining) but as log-based mining for large organisations, not as a browser-level tool for a 30-person ops team.

Smallest useful version

A Chrome extension for one department that records one workflow into an editable screenshot SOP, then flags a step as stale when three or more later runs of that workflow deviate from it. No integrations, no permissions model, no AI rewriting — just capture, publish, and a weekly 'these 4 steps have drifted' email to the SOP owner. Success is owners accepting or editing flagged steps rather than ignoring the email.

Potential ways to charge

• Free capture — £0: unlimited recorded SOPs for one team, no drift detection. Earns the paid tier by getting the extension installed and SOPs published (free tier typical for comparable tools).
• Team — £8 per editor per month: drift detection, weekly staleness email, ranked dashboard (anchored to typical per-seat pricing for comparable SOP-capture tools; the evidence records no specific price).
• Department — £400 per month flat: up to 50 observed staff, unlimited SOP owners, audit export of who deviated and when (typical for comparable tools at this band; not evidenced).
• Documentation sprint — £2,500 one-off: we record and publish a department's top 20 SOPs with the customer, then hand over. Anchored to the Upwork postings showing firms already paying freelancers to write SOPs by hand, though no rate appeared in the evidence.

Routes to early customers

• Reply directly to the Upwork and similar postings seeking SOP writers and 'SOP Documentation Specialists' — these are buyers who have already decided to spend money on this problem.
• Freelance SOP consultants and ops contractors themselves, as a tool they use on client engagements and leave behind as a subscription.
• Readers of 'Scribe alternatives' comparison content — buy or write in that space, since those searchers are already dissatisfied with re-recording burden.
• BPO, claims-handling and back-office outsourcers, where the same browser workflow is repeated by many staff and client audits force process evidence.

Main risks

• The riskiest assumption is untested: that enough repeated work happens in the browser, across enough people, to separate genuine drift from individual variation. With three deviating runs as the threshold, low-volume SOPs may never produce a signal and high-variance ones may produce constant noise.
• Passive monitoring of staff browsers is a privacy, works-council and IT-approval problem that no source in the evidence addresses. Staff may simply disable the extension, or security review may block install.
• Demand for the detection half is unverified. The evidence strongly supports the capture half (re-record burden, paid SOP writing) but no review or support thread was found in which an ops lead complains their SOPs went stale.
• Incumbents can close the gap cheaply: Scribe or Tango adding 'this URL no longer resolves' checks would take much of the wedge without needing full conformance logic.
• Owners may ignore the weekly email exactly as they ignore scheduled reviews today — the behaviour the product replaces is already a known thing people skip.

Questions to test first

• Instrument before you build: ship a capture-only extension to one friendly ops team, log deviations silently for four weeks, and measure how many published SOPs ever reach three deviating runs. This directly tests the riskiest assumption at low cost.
• Take the weekly 'these 4 steps have drifted' email to five SOP owners as a hand-made mock-up based on their real docs, and see whether they act on it — accept, edit or ignore.
• Run the install conversation early with one IT or compliance reviewer in a regulated back office, to find out what passive browser observation needs before it is permitted.
• Reply to live SOP-writing job postings offering the tool plus a documentation sprint, and count how many buyers prefer the recurring tool to the one-off freelancer.
• Search and interview for the detection complaint specifically: ask ten ops leads what happened the last time a documented process changed, and whether anyone noticed before a new hire did.

Evidence and sources

The sources this assessment is based on. Evidence level: Indicative, counted from these sources as described in how ideas are assessed. Findings are what a source shows; anything the research only inferred is marked as an inference.

Research findings

• Supportsfreelance marketplace job posting · 23 February 2026

  Shows: paid-manual-work-posting

  An active Upwork posting seeks a freelancer to develop comprehensive SOPs for every position in the company, showing organisations paying outsiders to document processes by hand. A companion posting ('SOP Documentation Specialist', drafting and reviewing SOPs) shows the same demand including the review/refresh half of the job. Confirms willingness to spend money on work the product would automate, from a job-demand source outside the originating community.

• Supportsvendor comparison article

  Shows: competitor-gap-analysis

  A third-party comparison of the two leading click-capture SOP tools states plainly that when a product's UI changes, guides in either tool stay outdated until someone manually re-records them, and that neither tool can detect that a guide references a UI state that no longer exists. This is close to a direct statement of the exact gap 'Still True' targets (staleness detection + drift diff), from a vendor/industry source rather than the community where the idea originated. Page age reported as ~41 days at time of search; exact date not shown.

• Supportsvendor blog (competitor alternatives listicle)

  Shows: competitor-limitation

  Article on Scribe alternatives notes that because you cannot edit the screenshotted UI inside Scribe guides, any change in the underlying app forces users to re-record guides from scratch — describing re-capture burden as a known pain for existing SOP-capture customers. Supports the premise that captured SOPs rot when screens change, and that the remediation cost is currently manual.

• Contextvendor product documentation

  Shows: category-incumbent

  UiPath Process Mining ships 'conformance checking' that compares observed execution against a discovered or imported BPMN model and surfaces deviations — the enterprise-grade analogue of Still True's drift detection. Implies the core concept is proven and valued, but also that well-funded incumbents (UiPath, Celonis) occupy the upper market; Still True's defensible wedge is the lightweight browser-extension, SOP-document framing for 10–200-person ops teams rather than log-based mining for enterprises.

• Supportsvendor content library article

  Shows: problem-framing-by-category-leader

  Scribe maintains a dedicated article on keeping SOPs up to date, and its SOP guide lists 'incorrect or outdated SOPs' as a core challenge, recommending scheduled/annual reviews and an SOP for updating SOPs. The market leader's own best-practice answer is a manual calendar-driven review — exactly the audit-forty-docs burden Still True proposes to replace with ranked staleness signals. Treat as marketing content, not independent validation.

Where the problem was reported

Public posts in which people described this problem, grouped into one problem before research began.

• Following up wasn’t the hard part. Remembering every client conversation was. · r/smallbusiness · 12 October 2026
• How do you handle KT for new developers joining an existing project? · dev.to · 11 October 2026
• Best tools for process mapping? · r/projectmanagement · 6 October 2026
• How do you handle writing your own performance review? · r/projectmanagement · 4 October 2026

Looked for, not found

• No real search-demand data (keyword volume for terms like 'SOP out of date' / 'update SOP after system change'), no first-party support-ticket or issue-tracker thread, and no verbatim G2/Capterra review in which a named ops lead complains that their recorded SOPs went stale were retrieved within the search budget. Capterra and Trustpilot Scribe review pages were returned but the snippets surfaced only positive creation-speed comments, not staleness complaints. Strength of demand for the detection half specifically — versus the well-evidenced capture half — therefore remains unverified, as does willingness to install a passive monitoring extension on staff browsers (a plausible privacy/works-council objection that no source addressed).