You go looking for a way to make a timeline and come back with a “work operating system.” You want to read the news and end up with an app that also wants to be your inbox and social network. The job you came to do gets a small corner of a much larger product.
We started this studio to build the smaller tools we wanted to use.
Small is a feature
Keeping a product to one job gives us less to explain. You should be able to open it, understand what to do, and leave when you’re finished. For a timeline maker or a news reader, we’d consider that a good session.
That gets harder when a product measures success in daily active minutes. There’s an incentive to add another notification or another feed, even when it takes attention away from the thing someone opened the app to do.
A tool should be judged by how quickly it lets you leave with what you came for.
What small looks like in practice
Two of our products show what we mean.
ganttchart.ai exists because making a timeline shouldn’t require learning a project-management suite. You describe the project in plain English; you get a chart you can edit and share, without setting up a workspace or getting your team to adopt a new process.
DReader exists because reading headlines shouldn’t cost you a page full of ads that shifts as you read it. It gives you headlines in a fast, readable layout. Keeping it that way takes precedence over adding features.
The economics of staying small
We’re a tiny studio with no outside investors. We can keep running a useful product without having to turn it into a platform or triple the time people spend in it.
That freedom cuts the other way too. Because we run everything we ship, every feature we add is a feature we’ll have to maintain and support. That limits what a small crew can responsibly take on. We turn down additions when we can’t justify their upkeep.
Keeping it small
“Do one thing well” is an old idea. The difficult part is sticking to it when there’s always another feature we could add. For us, the question is whether that feature helps someone finish the job they came for, and whether we can keep it working.