My dad ran his design business on one sheet of paper

My dad has drawn custom homes for about 30 years. He works on his own, and in a typical year he finishes 20 to 40 projects, with 10 to 20 going at any one time. Nearly all of them are homeowners building a new house or remodeling the one they have, and most find him through builders who send them his way.

The sheet of paper

His whole system was one sheet of paper on the drafting table with five lists on it: Finals, Preliminaries, Revisions, Quotes and Potentials. When a job moved along, he crossed it off one list and wrote it on another.

Everything else lived in his phone and his inbox. Some clients text, some email, and when a markup came back he'd have to remember which. Drawings went out as PDFs, and clients printed them, marked them up by hand and sent back a photo.

Honestly, it mostly worked. He never drew from the wrong version of a plan, and his clients almost never failed to pay. The paper wasn't the problem. What it couldn't do was tell him what to work on.

The job that sat

Once a client signed the contract, their preliminary design went on the list. And then it sat. Revisions for one client, a bid set for another and finals for a builder who was about to dig all felt more urgent, so they kept jumping ahead. Most days he worked on whoever was asking loudest.

Meanwhile the new client was waiting, and wondering. Most clients assume they're your only one. So they called, about once a week, to ask where things stood.

He didn't want to give clients deadlines. He hadn't in years, because a date you promise becomes a date you miss. What he wanted was a private target for himself, something like "get preliminaries to them within six weeks," and someone to point at the list each morning and say: this one, today.

Why not existing software

He'd looked. Every project tool he tried was built for big firms, with time tracking, invoices, permissions and a dozen screens to keep up to date. Each one added work instead of taking it away. His rule for anything new was simple: if it adds one task but takes away three, he's in. Nothing passed.

What I built

Mullio started as a replacement for that sheet of paper. The lanes are his lists, in his words. It works out whose turn each job is, so he never has to mark it. Each morning it picks the one job to work on next and says why. Targets stay private. Clients get a link to fill in his questionnaire and a page where they can see where things stand without calling.

It's built for how residential work actually goes, whether you're one designer with a drafting table or an architect with a small studio. If your days look anything like his, I'd like you to try it.