About Most Awesome Apps — The Studio Behind the Software
Most Awesome Apps isn't a startup. There's no seed round, no board of advisors, no growth team running A/B tests on the shade of blue in a signup button. It's an independent software studio, run by one person, building tools that solve problems I actually have.
That's the whole pitch.
How a studio like this works
The word "studio" is deliberate. Not "company," not "agency," not "startup." A studio is a place where you make things. You have a workbench, you have your tools, you ship what you build. The overhead is low. The decisions are fast. Nobody has to schedule a meeting about scheduling a meeting.
I design the apps. I write the code. I handle the support emails. I decide what gets built next based on a pretty simple filter: does this solve a real problem, and can I build it well?
That's not scalable in the venture capital sense, and I'm fine with that. After two decades of building internet businesses — some with teams, some with partners, some completely solo — I've learned that the best software often comes from the smallest teams. One person who uses the product every day will out-build a team of ten who are guessing at what users want.
What ties the apps together
If you look at Inbox Focus, Doing Focus, and SnipFlux, they don't seem like an obvious product suite. A Gmail extension, a macOS task app, and a text snippet tool — what's the connection?
The connection is the problem they share: modern work tools give you too much at once.
Your inbox shows hundreds of emails. Your to-do list shows every task from every project. Your clipboard history is a graveyard of things you copied three weeks ago. All of that information competes for your attention, and most of it isn't relevant right now.
Every app I build at Most Awesome Apps follows the same principle — show less, not more. Reduce the visible surface area. Help you focus on the next thing, not everything.
It's a boring philosophy, honestly. There's no manifesto. But boring philosophies tend to produce software that actually gets used instead of just downloaded.
The background
I've been building things online since the late '90s. Started as a teenager in Germany, running online browser games. One of them — Insel-Monarchie — actually made money, which was a dangerous thing to teach a 14-year-old because it meant I was never going to get a normal job.
From there it went to ad networks, then adtech software, then SaaS products. Invoiceberry was an invoicing tool that taught me everything about what small business owners actually need (spoiler: not more features). Bloghandy was a blogging platform built on the idea that WordPress is overkill for most people. LinkHandy is a link-building agency I still run.
Along the way there were hundreds of smaller projects — some lasted years, some lasted weeks. I've lived in multiple countries, travelled extensively, and now I'm based in Europe with my wife and three kids. The travel years were great. The having-kids years are better, though significantly louder.
Most Awesome Apps is the latest chapter. It's also, weirdly, the one that feels most like what I was doing at 14 — just building stuff I think is cool and useful, without overthinking it.
Small on purpose
There's a version of this story where I raise money, hire a team, build a platform, chase growth metrics, and spend my days in Slack channels instead of writing code. I've seen that movie. I've been in that movie. It ends with everyone exhausted and the product getting worse.
The studio model is different. It stays small on purpose. Every app has to earn its place by being genuinely useful. If I can't explain what it does in one sentence, it doesn't ship.
That constraint is the whole strategy.
What's next
More apps, probably. More writing on this blog about how they get built and why. If you're interested in productivity tools that respect your attention instead of hijacking it, this is the right place.
You can check out the current apps — Inbox Focus for calmer email, Doing Focus for one-task-at-a-time focus, and SnipFlux for faster typing — or just keep reading.