Our Story

I've been a developer most of my life. Twenty-some years of building apps and websites, and along the way I've used more to-do apps than I can count. They all more or less do the trick. One has this feature, another has that one. I've also used a good number of the team task tools, and there's no shortage of those either.

So I wasn't looking to build another one.

The coffee shop

What changed my mind was a conversation with a friend who runs a small coffee shop. Listening to her, it hit me that the problem she had wasn't making a list. Anyone can make a list. Her problem was everything after the list:

• Does the right person do it?
• Do they do it on time?
• Do they do it properly?
• And how does she know, without walking around checking on everything herself?

That last one is the killer. She'd end up spending more time making sure things got done than it would have taken to do them herself. Even with a manager, someone still has to check on the manager. It's a constant low-grade drain, and I could tell it was wearing on her.

That's the moment Skidle started.

Who it's built for

Everything in Skidle is built for small brick-and-mortar shops, and it starts from a few honest assumptions about who works there:

• New hires who don't know how to do something yet, or think they do and don't.
• People who are just forgetful. Not bad, just forgetful.
• People who pick and choose what they feel like doing.
• People who put off the extra stuff every single time.

None of that makes them bad employees. It makes them people. But it makes a small shop very hard to run, because the owner can never quite let go.

So Skidle is about delegation, reminders, deadlines, alerts when a deadline is about to slip, and proof that the work got done. The owner assigns a job to the right person, the right group, or the right location, and can walk away from it. If it doesn't get done, they hear about it before it's too late, not after.

Why the other apps didn't fit

Coming from the developer world, I'd been living with an assumption baked into every to-do app I'd ever used, and I hadn't noticed it until the coffee shop.

Most to-do apps are built for one person. If I write myself a list, it's not because I need a nudge. It's because I don't want to hold it all in my head. I want to do the things on it. The list is a memory aid, not a motivator.

The bigger team tools carry the same assumption, just scaled up. They're built around big projects, timelines, and project managers whose job is to organize it all. Deadlines and proof of work are an afterthought, because the people using them are assumed to want the work done. The tool just helps sort out what comes first and who's on it.

A small shop isn't like that. You're often hiring at minimum wage, people come and go, and plenty of them need a lot of hand-holding to get through a shift. Nobody's tool was built for that.

So that's Skidle

A hand-holder for small businesses. It holds the hand of the person doing the work, so the owner doesn't have to.

If that sounds like your shop, give it a try. And if you've got a story like my friend's, I'd like to hear it.

Yashua
Founder and Developer