We believe the tools are the problem, not the people.

We've each spent over two decades designing and building software — long enough to keep hitting the same two problems, over and over. In teams: people handed powerful, structured tools who quietly went back to a notes app and the group chat, because the "proper" tool was always too much to keep up with. We watched it in startup after startup — founders pushing complex systems for KPIs and OKRs, small teams defaulting back to Slack and spreadsheets, because there was no fighting it: it had to be lightweight. And on our own: thoughts, links and decisions scattered across half a dozen apps and a chat to ourselves, gone exactly when we needed them.

Design for long enough and you stop blaming the user. If people keep abandoning the "proper" tool for the lightweight one — and keep losing things anyway — it's the tools that are wrong. The problem isn't that people are disorganised; it's that most tools make you organise while you capture. The thing nobody was building was the obvious one: somewhere you can capture first and organise later, or never, instead of having to file a thought before you're allowed to keep it.

There's a personal thread in it, too: we've both come to recognise ourselves in the conversation around ADHD, which is part of why we cared so much about keeping the tool calm and unpressured. But the reason we built it is simpler — we'd lived these exact problems, in teams and on our own, for years.

The breaking point came during a co-living residency, where a community we were part of kept losing decisions in chat scrollback, scattering notes across Google Docs, and drowning quieter voices under louder ones. The same pattern, now at the scale of a group.

So we built the tool we wanted — no branding, no marketing, no pitch decks — and put an early, buggy version into the hands of people with genuine needs. Then Pluk Farm CSA, who'd been searching for a coordination tool for over a year, switched their whole operation to it in 24 hours, with all 8 members using it daily within 2 weeks. Read how Pluk Farm switched →

We're not building tools for how we think people should work. We're building tools for how humans work.

We rejected a lot of standard startup practices. Instead of building a minimal set of features, we built a full suite to minimally viable states. Instead of prototyping and testing, we prioritised development and put early, buggy versions into real use. Instead of branding and marketing first, we delayed everything until we understood what people actually used it for.

This approach — building for ourselves and a handful of people with real needs first — meant we saved time on design cycles and spent it on features. It meant early testers weren't test subjects but partners. It meant the tool could become what it needed to be, not what we'd already branded it as.

Designing one tool for many communities is an exercise in designing for the pluriverse — the idea that there's no single, universal way to live or work, but many, each its own world. So we don't impose a standard workflow; we build flexible infrastructure a community or a person can shape to their own way of working — somewhere to track, observe, note and plan their corner of the world, and draw their own insight from it. A collective-intelligence tool, not a productivity template.