About
A product studio, not a platform
SimplifyBase builds and maintains a small family of focused tools for commerce and operations teams. Five products, each solving one problem completely, each priced on its own.
Why we started
Every operations team we have worked with runs on a spreadsheet that somebody built years ago and nobody fully understands any more. It works, mostly. It also quietly costs the business money in ways that never show up in a report — the reorder that was placed too late, the capital sitting in stock that stopped moving in March, the payout that never quite reconciled.
The software that exists to replace those spreadsheets tends to have the opposite problem. It can do everything, which means learning it is a project, and using it is somebody's job rather than somebody's two minutes.
We think there is a gap between those two. That gap is what SimplifyBase builds for: tools that fit into the day someone already has, do one job properly, and can be understood by the person using them.
How we work
Products are built one at a time and maintained indefinitely. Nothing here is a weekend project waiting to be abandoned — if we ship it, we version it, document it and support it.
Documentation is written when a feature is built, not when someone complains. That is a deliberately annoying rule and it is the reason the docs are worth reading.
Before anything ships we ask one question: does this make the product better at the one thing it does, or does it make the product bigger? Bigger is easy to sell and hard to undo.
What we believe
Four things we will not trade away
Narrow beats broad
A tool that does one thing completely is worth more than a platform that does nine things adequately. We would rather ship the fifth good tool than the first adequate platform.
Show the working
Any number a product shows you should be traceable to the thing that produced it. A forecast you cannot interrogate is a guess with better typography.
Your data is yours
Products run against your own database wherever that is possible. Where hosted processing genuinely helps, it is opt-in, scoped to the minimum, and described in plain language.
No lock-in
If one of our products stops being the best option for you, leaving should cost nothing but the export. We would rather earn the renewal than engineer the switching cost.
The team
Small, and staying that way
SimplifyBase is a small team of engineers and operators who have spent most of their careers inside commerce businesses rather than adjacent to them. Most of the problems the products solve are ones we have had ourselves.
We are not looking to grow headcount faster than we can maintain what we have already shipped. That constraint is the reason the product family is five and not fifteen.
If you want to talk to us — about a product, a problem, or something we have got wrong — hello@simplifybase.com reaches a person.
Start with the one that hurts most
Fewer clicks. Cleaner decisions. Faster execution.