We like to solve hard problems
We at TechMuscle have always liked tackling hard problems with innovative software. We built a spreadsheet/database hybrid to solve a customer’s multi-month budgeting process. We built an investment comparison tool to allow a hedge fund to evaluate and compare multiple complex investment strategies. We’ve built websites -- lots of websites -- for customers who wanted something different and that fit their particular needs. We've worked with consumer brands (like Tresemme and Nexxus) to Hospitals (like Penn Medicine and UC Health).
We love building things to solve real challenges.
Discovering the obvious: working over email is a pain
One problem that we experienced over the years is that working over email is a real pain in the butt. Every day, you need to juggle several processes with multiple people to effectively get your work done, and it’s very easy to drop/miss things.
We saw that our customers (especially the large corporate clients) had the email problem too.
The quest for a solution that didn't exist
We tried the existing solutions, but we realized that they were all lacking for one reason or another.
Some solutions would burden individuals with additional rules and processes-- they required them to take lots of extra steps to stay organized and on top of things.
Some people felt like the extra steps gave them the ability to handle it, but it took a large amount of time to do and if they ever let it go for a couple of days it’d overwhelm them.
Many people, us included, would bring in other project management or tasklist software to fix it, but would end up dealing with constantly switching between 2 systems. This was still a step in the right direction, but the switching between systems was always an extra cost, and would cause them (and us) to inevitably drift back to just working in email, even with all it’s quirks. Plus, these systems would create a large amount of email “receipts” that would further clog the inbox, negating a lot of their time savings.
"Let's solve email"
So, we decided, after looking and finding inadequate solutions, to try to solve the problem in email itself. Our result is KIT.
Our goal? To create a system that resulted in actual time savings, by decreasing what we call “mental weight” -- the amount of thinking you need to do to complete each process.
We think we cracked it
In our experience, KIT does what we set out to do. It “changes the game” of email and transforms it into a system that will not consistently burden the individuals using it, but speed them up, decrease their “worry level”, and allow the people to speed others around them up.