Dash

A one-person studio still has a full pipeline. For Justin that means client builds in progress, retainer clients, open leads, a cold outreach list, a warm list of people he already knows, and 2 inboxes where the replies land. Each of those lived in its own tool, and the follow-ups lived in his head.

Outreach ate the most time. Every cold email needs a look at the business’s site, a real reason to write, and a mockup worth attaching. Then someone has to remember the follow-up 4 business days later, and know when to stop.

Dash is one Next.js app on Vercel, behind Google sign-in, built with Claude Code. It opens on Today: what’s waiting for review, which follow-ups are due, open leads, and the day’s calendar.

Review is where the AI work lands. Overnight, a task on Justin’s Mac reads each business’s site, notes what it saw, and renders a homepage mockup. In the morning each draft sits beside its mockup and that note, and he approves it, edits it, skips it, or asks for a change to the mockup.

Warm check-ins start from the same page. Justin picks who’s next, and Claude reads their past threads in both inboxes and their homepage, then drafts a note in his voice.

Nothing sends until he approves it. Approved emails go into a queue that Vercel Cron works through in the background, a minute or two apart, weekdays only, and never more than 10 cold emails a day. Before a first email goes out, Dash checks both inboxes for an earlier thread with that person and stops if it finds one.

A tracker reads the threads twice each weekday. A reply moves the person to Follow up, a “no thanks” closes the row and drafts a short closing note, and a request to talk shows up as a suggestion he can accept or dismiss. Meetings in Granola count as contact too.

The studio side lives here as well: a client project pipeline that logs every stage change, a maintenance page that totals monthly retainer income, and a calendar that merges project dates with Google meetings. It runs as a Mac app, too, a small Electron shell around the live site with a Dock badge for what’s waiting in Review. The badge hides on weekends, since nothing sends then.

Dash got a brand of its own: Readex Pro for headings, the Mac’s own monospace for everything else, electric lime on a near-black green, and a mark built from a notched stem and a half disc. Both fonts carry metric overrides, so text sits centered in buttons and badges.