Tinwise — the app for people who take tinned fish seriously. Our first.
Started with a few tins on a home-office desk and a question that wouldn’t drop: why is there no serious app for this?
Sardines and software. Not sure how those ended up together. But here we are.
The question shipped. Free on iOS and Android.
Launches Mon May 18 on Product Hunt — the click is days away.
→ Notify me on PHBefore the click.
Hermes — a Claude-native agent that listens for what gets said about every tin we ship. Reddit, Hacker News, X. Built for ourselves. We’re packaging the recipe — config, prompts, MIT-licensed. Not a SaaS. A reading aid, given away.
The next tin — Tinwise was the first. We’re watching for the second. Three niches under quiet evaluation: community depth, incumbent gaps, codebase reuse. We commit when one earns it.
The brand-and-product playbook — what we did to ship Tinwise, written down as we go. The brand sprint. The build week. The launch playbook in full. Once we have three case studies in the cellar, we’ll consider productizing it. For now it lives on The Sprat as Cellar entries.
Most studios sell you the brand. Or the product. Different vendors. Different months.
The handoff is where the work leaks. Tinwise had none.
The dark mode that shipped before light mode. The teal that isn't red. The tagline that took six weeks. The cellar feature, because some sardines age like wine.
The Cellar — quarterly retrospectives. Each app we make, each brand decision alongside, what worked, what didn’t.
The Harbor — bi-weekly observations on brands and products in the wild. A few hundred words on what’s landing.
The Logbook — monthly. Revenue, decisions, mistakes.