An MVP. Built for us

Building internal tooling: why we stopped paying for tools that almost fit

There’s a certain irony in running a web studio and managing your business on a collection of workarounds.

Notion for contacts and project tracking. InDesign for invoices. A growing sense that none of it was quite right.

The tools aren’t bad. But they’re built for everyone, which means they’re not built for us. And the cost of three or four subscriptions adds up fast when you’re a small studio.

So we built our own.

The WINC CRM is a custom internal tool built in Laravel with Livewire. It handles everything in one place — companies and contacts, project pipelines, proposals, and invoicing. Multi-tenant from the ground up, so it could eventually support other studios if it ever goes further than that.

Some of what’s in it:

• A CRM for companies and contacts with CSV import
• Kanban project board
• A Notion-style proposal editor with pricing tables
• Invoicing with line items, tax, and PDF generation
• WordPress subscription management with an API endpoint

It’s not finished and it’s not live.

This is the kind of work we enjoy — not just building things for clients, but thinking carefully about systems and how things should work. Internal tooling is a good test of that. There’s no client brief, no deadline.

Just the question of whether it actually solves the problem.