People ask me why, with a full-time job and a baby girl, I’d also start an app studio. Fair question.
The honest answer is that we kept running into the same annoyance, and building our way out of it was more fun than complaining about it.
The thing we kept bumping into
So much software seems to want something from you. An account before you can do anything. A price that goes up per contact, so growing costs you more. A bot that joins your meetings and makes everyone a little stiff. Your data going somewhere you can’t quite see.
None of that is a crime. But add it up and you get software that feels like it’s working for someone else.
People notice. In a 2025 survey of 4,000 people across the UK and US, Verve found that 65% were more worried than two years earlier about their data being used to train AI. And 97% said apps and platforms need to do more to explain what happens to their data.
So we made one rule
Attechy only builds tools we use every day ourselves. My partner builds them. I shape how we talk about them and get them in front of people. If neither of us would open it daily, it doesn’t ship.
That rule has given us five apps so far:
- CueDM sends someone your link by Instagram DM when they comment your keyword, at a flat price per account, never per contact.
- WhisprNote writes up your meetings on a Mac, with no bot in the call, and the recording never leaves your machine.
- Grub is a free, open-source Mac cleaner with no account and no tracking.
- Whispr turns your voice notes on iPhone into something you can search and ask questions of.
- Rise puts one quote a day on your lock screen, in a typeface you chose.
Why a studio like ours is needed
Big software companies are brilliant at scale. They’re less good at small, sharp tools that do one job and respect the person using them. That’s the gap we want to live in.
Three things I think a small studio can do better:
Keep data where it belongs. WhisprNote keeps meeting audio on your Mac, and nothing you say trains an AI.
Price fairly. CueDM charges a flat price per account, so your bill doesn’t grow just because your audience does.
Stay small on purpose. A short list means every app keeps getting updates long after launch day, instead of being quietly left behind for the next shiny thing.
What it’s teaching me
I’ve spent ten years selling and marketing other people’s products. Doing it for our own is humbling. When a founder tells me their product “just needs the right partner”, I now know exactly how much work hides inside that word “just”.
It’s also made me better at my day job. I listen to founders differently now, because I’m one of them.
Build what you’d use, then tell people why.
