Custom Tools
Bespoke tools that make content creation more comfortable and efficient
Mass market creation tools are built to add more buttons, so more people can justify a subscription. They're not built to make your unique creative process easy and comfortable. Because the devs who build these tools don't think like the creators who use them, so the technical complexities of production will inevitably overshadow the actual creative process
Built around your project, not a market of thousands.
A tool you have to work around was designed by someone who never had your process in mind.
We build for your style, your workflow, the particular shape of what you make, fully accepting that the result may fit no one else’s needs. That is not a weakness of our business plan. It is the business plan.
Beyond Templates & AI. Tools built to cater to the masses are tools built for no one in particular - which, in practice, means it was built for someone else, not you. Total creative control stays with you, not buried in a template or AI’s black-box outputs.
Created with care. We close gaps in personalization, usability, and comfort that are too small for a tech company to notice, and too large for you to keep ignoring. We’ll make something you'd build for yourself if you had the time to figure it out.
Plug in, don’t pile on. We prefer upgrading your experience in the tools you’re already efficiently using, Less clicking, thinking and context switching means more productivity and more time creating. Not to mention you’ll save on subscriptions and learning time.
You shouldn’t be forced to sacrifice vision because your process doesn’t fit your software. Nor should you burn your motivation to create anything by wasting time working around imperfect tools.
Everything we make is hand crafted to simplify or enhance your particular creative process, built to stop adapting your creative process to someone else's thinking.
Made to handle the creative mess.
We’re not techies who have a hard time speaking to humans, let alone understanding the difficulties of creating something beautiful, comfortable, personal and not utilitarian.
Because we’re creatives first, business and builders second, we know better than to try to “fix” the inherent messiness of creativity. We catalyze it, not create contraptions that neuter the process.
We build tools that bend toward you, rather than asking you to bend toward it.
Complexity ☠️ Creativity. We’re creators first, We live inside the same creative software you're cursing at when a simple thing takes 50 steps to try. We optimize for the shortest distance between an idea and a finished experiment.
Headspace > Overhead. It’s painful enough to create even without tools being involved. Our definition of good tools isn’t "it technically works, if you hold it right, press 20 buttons and spend 5 hours watching amateur-made youtube tutorials".
Simplify or Enhance. We’ll take a lot of time to ensure our tool enables as much individuality, creative control, room to experiment, while thoroughly reducing complexity and friction in your work at the same time.
Explain + Evolve. Clear, human sounding documentation always included AND we’ll personally take time to use the tool with you, adapting the explanations (or the tool!) on the fly.
Whether you're deeply technical or have never used a plugin before, our tools will be bespoke to your production pipeline.
We talk the way one creator explains something to another, not the way a manual explains something to a customer. We don’t provide DIY kits like IKEA, with abstract pictures as instructions. We don’t do convoluted github projects, with a plain text readme full of techy mumbo-jumbo neither.
We’ll make changes to the tools when your process inevitably changes too. Maybe twice tomorrow and 20 times the next 10 months. Something a custom tool can do, but mass market tools could never - is to adapt to your context and follow your plans.
The gap was ours first.
We're not techies who can’t speak to humans or relate to creatives. The goal of our tools isn’t mass scale. We aren’t making huge, complex software that we don’t even have time to use ourselves. We’re interested in creating more, not selling more or developing more.
We just set out looking for a way to get through our own creative process, and built “lifehacks” for our own creative process. That’s why we can guarantee that every tool we’ll make is going to start from the same place: a path no one else cared to pave, not as an opportunity to make beaucoup bucks.
Ever opened the technical marvel that is Adobe’s Creative Cloud and wondered how the hell did the world’s creativity result in this insane clusterfuck of buttons and panels? It’s not because they lacked access to the creators for the 35 they were on it, but because techies will inherently build in their image, not in the creator’s.
A computer program and a dance can both be described as a sequence of steps, memorized and executed without errors. Nail the sequence, and you've technically succeeded. But ask anyone at a San Francisco party what’s important in a dance?
To get to the end of the song/sequence without screwing up?
Practice self-expression through an art form that inspires & motivates you
Allow the rhythm to flow directly through the body, while switching the brain off entirely.
Enjoy moving in sync with other people (maybe while someone’s body is touching yours)
It's not like they can’t understand what’s wrong. But it’s unclear how they could improve the tools for you in their context. Following a recipe isn’t all there is to a good meal, because food impacts much more than just nutrition. A house is not a home, because it’s not about the walls and the roof, no matter how fancy the architecture, it’s what living happens in it. They do much more than what we technically expect from them on paper. If you care about results, not the process
The result-oriented mind of the tech bros can’t even compute why the question is valid or understand why it matters. They’ll just awkwardly stand there. As they were, before you interrupted their silent, static San Fran party.
All our Arts & Artefacts are optimized for inputs, not outputs. What we make is not for people that want a quickly memorized dance, however stiff and disjointed the results will be. If you view fluidity and playfulness in this context as an expense rather than a value, because you just want a “good enough” dance clip to share on Tiktok - we won’t be a great fit for your needs. Also, some techie already made a cheaper, quick & easy tool for your needs.
This is for the creators who want fewer walls between the idea and the thing they do every day. It is also for the person who has never called themselves a creator at all, who only knows that the software in front of them is asking way too much before giving back.
Come see one of these tools do the thing it was built to do. A feature list will tell you what it does. Watching it work will tell you why it exists.