---
date: 2026-05-01
displayYear: "2025 to current"
type: note
title: Tiny Things, the studio
slug: tiny-things-story
project: Tiny Things
kicker: Single-person product organisation. Local-first, native, opinionated.
excerpt: Founded in August 2025 as an independent studio for AI-native and native software. The first nine months produced four shipped products on shared scaffolding, designed and built end to end by one person.
palette:
  accent: "#3F4A57"
  source:
    brand: "Caran d'Ache"
    name: "Slate Grey"
  pull: The bet is that the right shape for AI products in 2026 is local, native, and small.
tags: [writing, studio, founder, origin]
unlisted: true
---

Tiny Things is the studio. Founded in August 2025 in Bangkok, registered as a single-person product organisation, designed under no committee.

## Why a studio at all

After years inside larger product orgs, where every meaningful decision moved through a roadmap call and a stakeholder review, I wanted to know what designing under no committee felt like. The work I most wanted to make was the kind of small, opinionated software that can't be defended by group consensus, only by use. So Tiny Things is the constraint, deliberately: small surface area, small audience, end-to-end ownership, and the right to be wrong out loud.

The other half of the answer is technological. AI in 2025 reshaped the cost of being a one-person product company. The tools to design, build, and ship a serious native app on your own are finally aligned. Tiny Things is the bet that they are.

## What's shipped

Four products in the first nine months, in reverse order:

- **Manwe** in April 2026. A decision room for macOS where specialist AI agents argue, challenge weak assumptions, and produce auditable decision records. The biggest of the four; the studio's lead artifact.
- **NotchLive** in March 2026. Live captions and translation for any Mac app, rendered into the MacBook notch.
- **NotchPad** in February 2026. A private text inbox around the notch: notes, clipboard history, snippets, voice notes, Apple Notes.
- **Signal News** in January 2026. An iOS reader that clusters breaking stories from sixty-plus sources, writes the briefing on-device, and tells you when you're done.

## How four ships in four months

Shared scaffolding, mostly. NotchLive and NotchPad share a notch rendering layer (NSPanel with the Liquid Glass API), so the second one was an order of magnitude cheaper to build than the first. Signal and Manwe share an embedding-and-clustering layer (NaturalLanguage NLEmbedding plus Accelerate / vDSP). All four share the same Swift package skeleton, the same telemetry-free analytics policy (none), the same release pipeline, the same writing voice on the marketing pages.

For cloud-side reasoning the pattern is uniform too: Claude Code, Codex, and Qwen Code invoked as subprocesses out of Swift, plus BYOK across Anthropic, OpenAI, Alibaba, OpenRouter, Groq, Together, and Ollama. Once that pattern is in one app it costs almost nothing to put in the next one. None of the four products call a Tiny Things server, because there isn't one.

## What Tiny Things isn't

Not VC-shaped. Not optimising for scale. Not building features for an enterprise gating committee. Subscriptions are avoided where a one-time purchase will do. The model is: make it private, make it local, make it ship.

## What I want it to be

A small catalogue of opinionated tools that earn their place on someone's machine because they are useful, not because they are growing. The studio succeeds when the products keep working with the network unplugged, when the next version respects the previous version, and when the reader of this entry, three years from now, can still go to the App Store and buy them.