Building TinyHub in the open: why I'm starting this log

I’m Michael. I build software, I do it from Sweden, and for years I’ve done it the way a lot of independent people do: for several clients at once, each with their own login, their own tools, their own little universe I’m a guest in.

This is the first entry in a log I should have started a while ago. From here on I’m building TinyHub in the open — the wins, the dead ends, and the reasoning behind the calls I make. This first post is the why.

The itch

The idea didn’t arrive as a vision. It arrived as an irritation that wouldn’t go away.

Every morning I’d open a browser that looked like a cockpit built by someone who hated me: a wall of tabs, one cluster per client, and no single place that could tell me what my actual day looked like. Acme’s tasks lived in Acme’s tool. Studio North’s in Studio North’s. My time tracking was in a third place, my invoices a fourth, and the only thing holding it all together was me — plus a scruffy master list in a note that I updated by hand and trusted about half the time.

I kept waiting for the tool that would fix this. Something above my clients’ tools that just knew about all of them and showed me the total. It never showed up. Plenty of things let me switch between clients faster, but faster switching wasn’t the problem — the missing whole was. Eventually I did the thing you do after waiting long enough: I started building it myself.

What I’m actually building

TinyHub is a private home base for people who work across several unrelated clients. Not a replacement for your clients’ tools — a layer above them, that’s yours.

Two ideas sit at the center:

1. Switch context in a second. Every client is a workspace one keystroke away, and the active client tints the whole screen — so working in the wrong one becomes a mistake that’s hard to make.
2. See your whole day. One aggregated “My Day” that gathers every task, deadline, and hour across all your clients onto one calm screen — the view no single client’s tool can ever show you, because from inside it your other clients don’t exist.

Around those: notes, tasks, calendar, and time that actually talk to each other, so a checklist line can become a task and a task can become a tracked, billable hour without you retyping anything.

Why in the open

Two reasons, one of them a little selfish.

The honest one: I’m building this for a specific kind of person, and the fastest way to build the wrong thing is to do it in a cave. Writing in public forces me to defend my reasoning to people who actually live this problem — and to hear it when I’m wrong.

The selfish one: I am the target user. When I write up how I run five clients without dropping a ball, I’m partly figuring it out for myself. If it’s useful to you too, that’s the whole idea working as intended.

So this log will be two things braided together: field notes on working across clients — the Context Tax, the workflows, the master list everyone secretly keeps — and honest updates on building the thing meant to fix it. Some entries will be strategy, some will be a feature and the argument behind it, some will be me admitting a dead end.

Come along

If you juggle clients for a living, you already understand this product better than any landing page can explain it. I’d rather build it with you watching than surprise you with it later.

You can try what exists today — it’s free while we’re in beta — and if you want the next entry when it lands, the subscribe box below is the whole newsletter. No spam, just the log.