Why We Keep Rebuilding Internal Tools (and What I’m Doing About It)
MVP shipped? Congrats. Now you’re the support team.
You build fast, patch things together, and ship the MVP.
Then real users show up.
Now you’re handling:
- Refunds
- Access control
- Support tickets
- Tagging users for experiments
- Random ops fires no one else wants to touch
You thought you were building a product.
But you’re now duct-taping internal tools - again.
The mess of ad hoc workflows
I’ve been the only engineer at startups. I’ve worked with non-technical cofounders and ops teams who mean well but don’t understand why “just one script” is never just one script.
Here’s how it usually starts:
- A Google sheet/Notion doc for refunds
- A Slack thread for support
- A cron job (that definitely shouldn't go down)
- And a bunch of ad hoc SQL to tag users manually
It works - until it doesn’t.
And then you're stuck.
You’re context-switching between product work and ops triage, trying to keep everyone happy with tools that don’t talk to each other.
The worst part? Everyone feels it, but no one has time to fix it.
Because who wants to spend two weeks building an admin panel when there’s a launch next week?
Why I’m building Beaker
Because I needed this tool five times before I finally started building it myself.
Beaker is a lightweight workspace that sits on top of your existing DB - turning scattered internal tasks into clean, connected workflows.
Beaker is my answer to a very specific pain:
How do you give your team power without burning your engineers out?
How do you make internal tools not feel like a total distraction?
No extra APIs. No auth rework. No data syncing hell.
Just:
- Refunds you can manage without building a Stripe dashboard clone
- Support tickets with context that lives in your actual DB
- Tagging and segmentation that plugs into what you already track
It’s not Retool. It’s not a drag-and-drop dream.
It’s the “admin stuff” you keep putting off - made tolerable, even useful.
Real-world workflows we’re starting with
Check out our use cases here
We’re not trying to guess what startups might need. We’re starting with the ones I’ve personally lost hours to at every company I’ve worked with:
- Refunds that require checking Stripe, logging into the admin, and confirming with support
- Tagging users manually so growth can run an experiment
- Support tickets that come in without context and lead to back-and-forth pings
- Teams with no real access controls, so everything’s bottlenecked through the dev team
These are the kinds of tasks that drag teams down slowly.
They’re annoying, repetitive, and almost always “someone else’s problem.”
Beaker turns these into quick, connected workflows your team can use without engineering support.
What it looks like (example)
Say a user requests a refund.
- Beaker shows you a Refunds module: Stripe data + Supabase user record, side by side
- You approve the refund
- It updates the order record in your DB
- It tags the user and notifies support
- All without you writing another endpoint, wiring a webhook, or jumping between 3 tools
What “just enough structure” really means
Beaker won’t replace your stack - it just gives you enough structure to stop things from falling apart.
Beaker gives you:
- Just enough UI to unblock non-devs
- Just enough access control so you don’t wake up to a deleted table
- Just enough traceability so you know who changed what, and when
You can wire it to your existing Supabase schema (and more to come), use your real permissions, and trigger real actions - without syncing data or maintaining Yet Another Admin Tool.
It’s programmable when you need it. And dumb-simple when you don’t.
Who this is for
If you've ever:
- Managed support in Slack
- Tracked refunds in Notion
- Manually tagged users for growth
- Rebuilt the same admin view for the third time
- Explained “just one script” to leadership (again)
You're the reason I'm building this.
How to get involved
Beaker’s early. But if you’re a founding engineer, solo dev, or PM at a tiny startup trying to scale without losing your mind, I’d love to talk.
We’re looking for early collaborators, testers, and people who are tired of reinventing admin panels for the fifth time.
Join the waitlist or DM me.
Let’s stop duct-taping ops together and get back to building.
Docs available at: https://docs.beaker.cloud