Somewhere in many growing companies there is a person whose real job is copying information from one subscription into another. Nobody hired them for it. It crept up on them, one tool at a time.
At iklipse, before we offered custom tools to anyone, we built them for ourselves. The list now looks like this:
- scrapers
- a reference search tool
- Instagram DM automation
- an internal operating system for mail, drive, boards and invoices, which calls you when a client is waiting
- a sales agent that makes calls
- a research agent
My favourite is the operating system phoning you about a waiting client. A dashboard is something you are supposed to remember to check. A system that rings you when someone is waiting removes the remembering.
Being your own first user is the hardest test there is.
Building for yourself has one big advantage: the people who complain about the tool sit in your own team. Every awkward step gets reported, loudly, by colleagues who have to use it again the next morning. A tool that survives its own builders has been tested harder than any demo.
It also forces honesty about what a tool is for. When you are the client, you can’t hide behind a feature list. Either the thing saves your team time on real work or it gets ignored, and you find out which fast.
Custom beats another subscription when your process is the point.
Subscriptions are built for the average customer. That is their job, and for plenty of work it is exactly right. If your accounting looks like everyone else’s accounting, buy the subscription and get on with your day.
Custom starts to make sense when your process is part of why clients choose you, and squeezing it into somebody else’s default shape costs you that edge. A few signs, as a self-check: people on your team copy data between tools by hand every week; the same research question gets answered from scratch again and again; you pay for several products that each cover a corner of one workflow; or the data involved should never leave the building. One of those is a nuisance. Several together are a design problem, and a tool built around your workflow can solve it.
It can run on your own machines.
The tools we build for clients are designed around each business and can run on the client’s own machines. For some companies that settles the question. If your work involves client contracts or unreleased campaigns, sending it all to another company’s cloud may be something your clients or your lawyers won’t accept. Running it in-house means you decide where the data lives and who can switch it off.
Owning the tool comes with responsibilities too. Someone inside the business has to own it and notice when it breaks. A subscription hides that work inside the monthly fee. Custom puts it on your side of the table, which is the right place for it when the tool runs your core work.
We have no client projects in this service yet.
We now build the same kind of tools for clients, under Custom Tools and AI Agents. It is the newest of our services and, as of this post, it has no client projects to show you. I am saying that plainly so nobody mistakes our own tools for case studies.
What we can show is what runs inside our own company. If you are weighing this up, start with one workflow that costs your team time every week. Write down every step. Then ask which steps exist because your business needs them and which exist because your software does. The second list is where a custom tool earns its keep.