I stopped looking for the perfect productivity tool. I built it.
I spent an embarrassing amount of time searching for the right tool for our company.
Not just for me as an engineer living in GitHub. For us — a two-person founding team managing product, fundraising, partnerships, and the thousand invisible threads that actually move a startup forward.
I ran the usual gauntlet. Linear. Trello. Notion. Each one solved part of the problem and introduced a new one.
Linear was powerful but heavy. Trello was flexible but sprawling. Notion could do everything, which turned out to be the problem.
Through all of it, I kept coming back to GitHub Projects. It was clean, focused, close to the work. But I didn't want GitHub to become a dumping ground — fundraising tasks and event planning living next to open PRs, my co-founder Emily needing to understand engineering workflows just to track a business task.
So I asked myself: why am I working so hard to find a perfect tool when I could just build exactly what we need?
So I did. I vibe coded a custom kanban board for Hold My Juice.
What I built
Within an hour, I had google auth (restricted to holdmyjuice.co emails), github two-way sync, filtering by assignee, and something that could capture all our work in a simple UI.
Our Productivity App
The tool I ended up with isn't impressive by any traditional engineering or product metric. It's simple on purpose. But it's ours in a way that no off-the-shelf product has ever felt.
Using Lovable, I didn't have to set up a Cloud project or wrestle with auth configurations. The Supabase DB was automatic. For GitHub, the token setup was clear and fast. It was shocking how quickly it came together.
The underrated benefit: joy
Every morning I open this board and it looks like us. Our colors, our structure, our language.
It sounds small. It changes everything. It's not another tool in the stack. It's the system we built for how we actually work.
A bigger shift
At Quizlet, we built a lot of internal tooling. Some of it was genuinely brilliant — our custom feedback systems were exceptional. But over time, those tools became expensive to maintain, and we'd eventually swap them for off-the-shelf solutions. We gained scalability and lost the magic.
The tradeoff felt inevitable. It wasn't — it was just a function of the cost of building.
That cost has dropped dramatically. We're entering a world where custom and maintainable aren't opposites. Where a two-person team can build a lightweight, highly tailored system and evolve it as they grow, without betting the company on the maintenance burden.
Maybe we'll outgrow this board and move to something more robust. Or maybe we'll just keep layering on what we need.
The real shift isn't about engineers
The most interesting thing isn't that engineers can build faster now (we could always build). It's that non-technical teams can now shape their own workflows — without waiting on a vendor, without forcing themselves into software designed for someone else's org.
We're not just customizing products anymore.
We're customizing how we work.
And that's a much bigger deal than another productivity app.
Does our product roadmap look interesting to you? Join the waitlist: https://www.holdmyjuice.co/waitlist
