The tools are the problem. Not the people.

We kept seeing the same thing.

Tools are often fine once everything is already in place. The problem is the moment you need to capture something quickly. That's when they become too heavy, and people stop using them.

In teams, we'd see structured tools get introduced with good intentions. A few weeks later, the real work would drift back into Slack, notes apps, and scattered messages. Not because people rejected the system, but because it was easier to work around it than keep up with it.

On our own, it looked the same. Thoughts, links, and decisions spread across half a dozen apps and a private chat to ourselves. Things we knew we'd seen somewhere, but couldn't find when we actually needed them.

Eventually it stopped looking like a user problem.

Most tools ask you to decide where something belongs before you've even finished writing it down. That's often the moment the capture doesn't happen.

The thing we couldn't find was somewhere you could capture first and decide what it meant later, or never.

The breaking point

The pattern became clearer in a co-living residency we were part of.

Decisions were made in group chat, then buried under new messages. Notes were moved into Google Docs that no one reopened. Someone would always be holding fragments of what was agreed, but nobody had the full picture.

It wasn't dramatic. It was just constant friction. The kind you stop noticing until you realise you're relying on memory more than the tools you're using.

The same problem, just at group scale.

Remembering isn't supposed to be one person's job.

What we did next

So we built the thing we kept wishing existed when everything else got too heavy.

No branding first. No pitch. Just a working version, put into the hands of people dealing with the same problem.

One of those groups was a small farm co-op. Within a day they had moved their coordination into it. Within a couple of weeks, it had become how they worked.

Read how Pluk Farm switched →

We built the tool we kept reaching for. Then gave it to people who needed it too.

We rejected a lot of standard startup practice.

We built the full product in small, usable states rather than waiting for a perfect version. We put early versions into real use instead of isolating them as prototypes. And we delayed branding until we understood what people were actually doing with it.

That meant fewer assumptions, and more exposure to real behaviour.

We also stopped trying to force a single workflow.

Different groups don't just prefer different tools. They organise reality differently. So instead of imposing structure, we built something flexible enough to be shaped around how people already work.

We build with users, not at them. Beta users aren't test subjects; they're partners shaping what's next.

We're building for decades, not exits. Real value for users beats growth metrics.