I Built Kartib Because Notion Wasn't Enough

I ran my startup out of Notion for almost a year. Investor tracking in one database. Financials in a linked table. OKRs in a separate page. Metrics in yet another. I had 14 Notion pages open at any given time and still couldn't answer "how much runway do I have?" without opening a spreadsheet.

That was the moment I knew something was broken.

The Notion Problem

Notion is a blank canvas. That's its strength and its weakness. You can build anything, which means you have to build everything. Every database, every relation, every rollup, every formula. And then you have to maintain all of it.

I spent more time fixing my Notion setup than actually running my startup. Formulas broke when I added a new property. Relations got tangled across databases. Rollups showed wrong numbers and I wouldn't notice for weeks. The investor pipeline had no reminders. The financial view was always slightly out of date because updating it meant manually entering numbers into three different tables.

And there was no way to get a single dashboard view of my company's health. Not without building one from scratch using linked databases and gallery views and filters that would break the next time I renamed a column.

Notion is a great tool for documentation. For wikis. For writing. But as a startup operating system, it falls apart. You end up with a collection of loosely connected pages that sort of work most of the time, and you spend your Sundays patching the gaps.

What I Actually Needed

I wrote this list in a Notes app after a particularly frustrating Friday night trying to prep investor numbers for a Monday meeting:

• ●One screen that shows runway, burn rate, MRR, and the metrics that actually matter
• ●An investor pipeline that reminds me to follow up instead of relying on me remembering
• ●OKRs I can check weekly without clicking through five nested pages
• ●Something that works on day one without three hours of template customization

That list became the spec.

So I Built It

Kartib started as a personal tool. A single dashboard where I could see everything about my startup in one place. Finance, investors, KPIs, OKRs, team, roadmap. No templates to configure. No formulas to maintain. Open it, and there's your company.

The metrics update automatically. The investor pipeline has follow-up reminders baked in. OKRs live on the same screen as your burn rate and your hiring plan. Everything a founder checks daily is in one place, without the duct tape.

I used it for three months before showing it to anyone. A few founder friends tried it. They stopped opening their Notion setups within a week. That's when I knew this wasn't just a personal project anymore.

Why Not Airtable, Linear, Streak, or the Other Fifty Tools

I tried them. All of them.

Airtable is a better spreadsheet, but it's still a spreadsheet. You get rows and columns and views, and then you spend an afternoon building the dashboard you actually wanted. Linear is excellent if you're an engineering team tracking sprints. It doesn't know what a cap table is. Streak lives inside Gmail and does one thing well, but my company is more than my inbox.

None of them were built for the founder who context-switches between fundraising, product, hiring, and finance twenty times a day. They were built for teams that do one of those things. Founders do all of them, usually before lunch.

And the tools that try to be everything end up being a worse version of Notion. Another blank canvas. Another weekend of setup. Another system you'll abandon in a month when something breaks and you don't have time to fix it.

What Kartib Is Not

It is not a project management tool. It is not a wiki. It is not a CRM for your sales team. There are good tools for all of those things and Kartib doesn't try to replace them.

Kartib is the one screen you open first thing in the morning to understand the state of your company. How much cash you have. Where your fundraise stands. Whether you're hitting your goals. What needs your attention today.

That's it. One job, done well.

Try It

Kartib is free. If you're a founder running your company out of Notion and six other tabs, give it ten minutes. You'll either close three of those tabs or you'll go back to what you were doing. Either way, it costs you nothing.