Why this exists.
Not that long ago, I was pitching an app I built to a room of senior developers who were technically much better than me at most things. They were also, almost to a person, sitting on side businesses they couldn't move forward consistently.
They weren't lacking vision, direction, or really even practical know-how. What they were missing was operations and workflow discipline: the unglamorous, repeatable mechanics of running a small business. Pricing. Inventory. Cash flow. Customer follow-up. Knowing what to do next when nothing is on fire.
I've developed those skills the hard way. A tutoring side-hustle turned sole prop progressed to a nonprofit with volunteers, staff, and multiple programs. Operations and financial management of a 75-year-old, single-family-owned specialty construction company. Years inside a bureaucratic office that managed millions in funding across a decade of solutions built from concept to closeout. The work I did to help keep all of that running was the work the senior devs were getting stuck on.
That same realization kept showing up.
I started managing my own little portfolio of projects and needed something better than a Sheets graveyard to track it. A friend started a niche craft business and asked for help with inventory before his next show. I started with hand-drawn tally marks on a piece of paper to transfer into his Google Sheet. We wanted something more repeatable that could flow into planning out his build schedule. That investigation surfaced a need for a stock-and-components pipeline. Which surfaced the receipts side. Which surfaced an event planner. Which surfaced the way recurring shows really work versus the way calendar apps think they work.
Each thing led to the next thing in a way I recognized. This is what running a small operation actually looks like. Not the way QuickBooks pretends it looks; not the way the latest AI dashboard on r/googleappsscript pretends it looks. It is an actual sequence of small, connected decisions that you make every day that compound into long-term success, sustainability, and (hopefully) the scalability that brings bigger customers, bigger opportunities, bigger revenue.
That's OpsDeck.
What I will not do
There's a category of tool I keep seeing on Reddit. Someone posts a purely vibe-coded Google Apps Script dashboard, claims it solves a small-business problem, and rakes upvotes (or condemnation, more frequently these days) from people who already recognize they will never use it. It looks like it works, but really it's just another cute Kanban board.
It has no substance because it wasn't built with project management expertise in mind. It wasn't grounded in any actual theory of how adults learn. Socratic inquiry. Reflective practice. Constructivist scaffolding. Anything that takes seriously that you already know things and just need help articulating them. It was built from a developer's idea of small-business work. Or more likely, their AI's idea of it. "Chat, build a dashboard so I can see my small business day" gets you a very pretty wrapper very quickly, no doubt about that. But pretty wrappers are not the thing that will move you forward as a business owner with real risks and real effort and real love.
OpsDeck is not a Kanban wrapper. It's not one prompt and a pretty HTML interface. Every single feature in it earned its place because I actually knew I had to do the work, then actually did that work. I took the time to notice where the friction and pain points were, and built something to reduce that friction. There's no feature in OpsDeck I added because a competitor has it. There's no AI agent built in to write your marketing copy in its voice. There's no advice table telling you what to think.
What's here instead
A back office that holds inventory, books, schedule, and your voice about your products and your company in one place, so the work that lives between them stops being yours to do, while the results of those connections are yours to own.
A data model where every customer, item, event, and dollar is a real entity with real connections, so cross-queries work the way you'd expect them to and connections are made that you may not have even realized were possible.
A set of hard-coded prompts that ask you the hard questions about your business and assemble the answers in your own words. Never AI-generated. Never generic. Always real and authentic.
Your data lives in Google Sheets you already own. If you ever walk away, you walk out with everything. Take it to your accountant, your bookkeeper, your lawyer.
Who this is for
If you're running a small business in Google Drive and you've outgrown spreadsheets but refuse to let QuickBooks own you, OpsDeck is for you. If you'd rather sharpen your judgment than outsource it, OpsDeck is for you. If you've ever closed your laptop at midnight wondering whether you remembered to update the other tab, OpsDeck is for you. If you've ever felt like you could get ahead if you just knew a little bit more but don't have the time (or money) for small business courses, OpsDeck is for you.
Get on the waitlist or apply to the design partner cohort if you want in early.