The original idea for Teamlanes came to me when I was out on a walk, frustrated by how sluggish and cluttered information sharing tools had become. I thought about what a developer-friendly tool for connecting with the humans I worked with could feel like, one that delivered on the promise of what I felt was an important premise:
# software designed by humans and for humans to share information with other humans.
I spent the next few years researching and studying lessons learned from UX designers and product leaders, as well as reflecting on the hundreds of conversations I’ve had over the years with people who had the exact same question about communication tools that I did:
# why does every piece of software these days seem to pile on features that the people with the problems it originally solved don’t need?
There are more opinions about why this has happened than there are programming languages—I’m sure of that. Nevertheless, what I found was that, deep in my heart, I was (and still am) yearning for software that is specifically designed to solve specific problems in a specific domain.
# The domain that happens to resonate with me the most is human-to-human information sharing & collaboration.
Teamlanes represents for me a focused vision around a well-understood domain. I’m excited to be in a space where most of the immediate competition’s product decisions are driven by revenue growth and return on investment because I’m building Teamlanes as an independent project. This means I will not have the luxury of millions of dollars of runway to burn down (this is 100% bootstrapped and I intend to keep it that way)—but it also means I have the freedom to focus on building exactly what I want to build. The only investor in Teamlanes right now is me; the only stakeholders are its users.
It’s been quiet around here because I’ve been fully focused on building out the Teamlanes infrastructure. I’ve set March 30th, 2025—my 39th birthday—as my first official deadline where I come up for air. I’m genuinely excited to share what I’ve been building because the communication tools space is ready for something different. With so many option available, some virtually free since they are add-ons to many popular enterprise products, I know I have many mountains beyond just the computer instructions ahead of me to climb.
One thing that keeps me motivated is that Teamlanes isn’t designed to be an everything-to-everyone enterprise app for the purposes of being acquired. We’ve had enough of those! Instead, Teamlanes is being built from scratch to do one thing and one thing very well: facilitate remote collaboration among humans.
See you soon,
-Jesse