Most software wants something from you.
It wants your attention, your minutes, your daily streak, your notifications turned on. It measures its own success by how often you come back, not by whether you needed to. Somewhere along the way, “engagement” stopped being a side effect of something useful and became the goal itself. Open almost any app today and you can feel it: the gentle pressure to stay a little longer, to scroll a little further, to check just once more.
We started Studio81 because we wanted to make the other kind of software. The kind that does its job and then gets out of your way.
Where it started
The idea didn’t arrive as a grand mission. It arrived as a series of small frustrations — the ordinary kind everyone has and most people learn to ignore.
A streaming app that knew about a thousand new shows but couldn’t remember the one we’d actually meant to finish. A navigation app that found the fastest route but had no idea whether the road was any good to ride. A home-automation platform so powerful, and so overwhelming, that setting it up felt like a second job. None of these were broken, exactly. They were just built for someone else’s priorities — the platform’s, the algorithm’s, the metric’s — and not for the person actually using them.
After enough of those small frictions, you stop saying “someone should fix that” and start wondering if it could be you. Studio81 is what happened when we finally did.
What we believe
We build small, focused tools that respect the person using them. That sentence does a lot of quiet work, so it’s worth unpacking.
Small, because a tool that tries to do everything usually does nothing especially well. We’d rather solve one real problem completely than ten problems halfway. Constraints aren’t a limitation here; they’re the point — a small tool can be calm, fast, and finished in a way a sprawling platform never can.
Focused, because the best software has an opinion. It knows what it’s for and, just as importantly, what it isn’t. Saying no to features is harder than saying yes, but every screen we don’t add is a screen you don’t have to think about.
Respectful, because your attention is not ours to harvest. We don’t build feeds that trap you, streaks that guilt you, or notifications that pull you back for no good reason. If one of our apps quietly does its job and you forget it’s even there until the moment you need it, that’s not a failure — it’s the goal.
This isn’t the fashionable way to build software. The industry’s incentives point the other way: more reach, more time-on-app, more growth at any cost. We’re not against growth — we’re against the idea that the only way to get there is to treat people’s attention as the product. There’s a quieter path, and we think it’s worth taking.
The tools, so far
Our products look different on the surface, but underneath they share a single idea: good software removes decisions instead of creating new ones. Each of our tools takes some small, recurring mental load and quietly carries it for you.
Nexcue remembers your shows when you don’t. Streaming solved the problem of finding something to watch and accidentally created a new one — we forget the things we actually cared about. Nexcue quietly tells you when a season you were waiting for comes back, and helps you decide what to watch tonight without drowning you in another endless catalog. No feeds, no noise. Just memory, given back to you.
Tarmoto is for motorcyclists, and it cares about the thing other route planners ignore: the quality of the road itself. A ride isn’t about getting somewhere fastest — it’s about the road being worth riding. But finding those roads usually means hours of comparing maps and guessing which routes are any good. Tarmoto does that work for you, planning rides around what actually makes a good ride rather than the shortest line between two points — so you spend your time riding, not researching.
Lovelacer takes Home Assistant — one of the most powerful tools in the smart-home world, and one of the most overwhelming for newcomers — and makes it approachable. Power shouldn’t have to mean complexity. Beginners deserve a way in that doesn’t feel like reading a manual.
Three different audiences, one idea. Nexcue remembers so you don’t have to. Tarmoto helps you spend less time planning and more time riding. Lovelacer removes the complexity that keeps people out of their own smart home. Different problems, the same philosophy.
Why “Labs,” and why small
We call ourselves a lab because we like the honesty of the word. A lab is a place where you try things, where not everything has to be a billion-dollar bet to be worth doing, where a useful tool for a few thousand people who genuinely love it is a success and not a rounding error.
Not every useful product needs to become a platform, raise venture capital, or dominate a category. Some tools are simply meant to work well for the people who need them — and that’s enough. Staying small is a deliberate choice, not a phase we’re trying to grow out of. It lets us care about details that wouldn’t survive a spreadsheet, answer our own support emails, and build things the way they should be built rather than the way that scales fastest. We’d rather make a handful of small tools that people quietly rely on for years than one loud product that everyone tries once and forgets.
What this Journal is for
This is the first entry in what we hope becomes a habit: writing honestly about what we’re building, what we’re learning, and what we get wrong along the way.
We want this to be a place for building in public, not a feed of marketing announcements. That means sharing the mistakes too — the features we cut, the launches that didn’t land, the decisions we’d make differently with hindsight. We’ll document the reasoning behind the calls we make, so it’s there to look back on later — for us as much as for you.
Some of it will be founder thinking; some of it will be practical. All of it will be in the same spirit as the software: no noise, no hype, just the real thing.
If that resonates with you, stick around. We’re only getting started — and we’re trying to do it on purpose.
— Studio81