So... I built a desktop app over the span of 3 years, that's more than 6000 hours of work. 100% solo.

It's polished productivity software for the digital nomad, the modern freelancer, the self-made (wo)man and everything between.

After 16 years of being self-employed (fuck, I’m getting old) and having an itch for productivity apps I think I’ve pretty much seen them all. The #1 thing that always bothered me is how much time is spent using those apps and how inefficient they are or how they are always made for (preferably large) teams (as that’s where the $$$ is).

“When I became a freelance designer, I wasn't aware that apart from my job as a designer I have to spend half of my time managing a business. I’m a designer, not a manager. Most software that should help actually introduces complexity, rather than taking it away from me.”
That’s what I hear from tons of friends and colleagues from the creative industries all the time. And it’s true: If it takes 15 clicks to get stuff done it’s just shifting complexity from one problem to another.

So I thought: What if?

- What if instead of guessing how long things take me – I decided what kind of work on my laptop belongs to which project up front and then it tracks automatically how long I have worked for a project without pressing a button?
- What if instead of opening up 6 old proposals and copying stuff over – my proposals were made up of blocks in the first place and I can search for them directly when creating a new one?
- What if instead of guessing (and sometimes forgetting) I could the see the health (budget/time) of all my projects on a single screen?
- What if organizing the workload of the next couple of days meant just dragging tasks I should do next over to a day?
- What if instead of manually looking through emails, paper notes, notion docs, wetransfer links, etc… to find what you agreed on 3 months ago – you had a clear, searchable single-source-of-truth?
- What if instead of either having beautifully custom (manual) Invoices from InDesign or benefitting from automation – we could just have both?
- What if the software tells me if something needs to be done and not the other way around, like if I worked enough for a client to send out a new invoice?
- And most importantly – what if all of this was available in a singular house where these things can interact and are not spread across 6 different apps?

That’s what eventually became Fugoya. A thoughtfully designed desktop app, focused around actually making you productive.

If you’re curious, check out the website for all the intricate details at: fugoya.com

Also part of the Great Eight jury.

Digital Craft