Why we built StoryLens
The 3am Slack thread that became a product.
Three years ago I was an engineering lead trying to answer a simple question: what is my team actually shipping this week?
The honest answer required:
- Reading the standup notes (Notion)
- Cross-referencing the sprint board (Jira)
- Skimming PR titles (GitHub)
- Searching the help-channel for blockers (Slack)
- Checking which docs got edited (Drive)
- And then writing it all up before the exec meeting at 9am
I did this every Friday. It took 90 minutes. It was the most expensive 90 minutes of my week, and the report I produced was already stale by Monday.
The boring version of the problem
Most tooling decisions in tech are boring. The interesting question isn't "what could AI do?" — it's "what is everyone in this org doing manually that AI could just do?"
For tech and product leaders, the answer is status reporting. Every layer of management consumes time turning reality (issues, commits, conversations) into reports. Then the layer above consumes time turning those reports into decisions. Most of the loss is at the first translation.
StoryLens is the boring version of the answer: connect your tools once, ask questions, get reports. Schedule the questions you'd normally ask manually. Let the answers compound into a knowledge graph you can query later.
Why a Mac app, why now
We could've built this in 2022. We didn't, because the model layer wasn't ready. A "tell me what my team did this week" prompt against a 2022 model produced confident-sounding nonsense. The retrieval was bad. The synthesis was worse.
That's not the case anymore. The interesting layer to build now is the connection between your specific organizational reality and a model that can reason over it. The reasoning is solved. The reality-fitting is the work.
What's next
We're in Open Beta. Pricing is simple — Free locally, Pro in the cloud, Team for orgs, Enterprise for the security-conscious. We'll write more about how the product works, what we're learning from beta users, and the boring infrastructure decisions that keep things fast.
Thanks for reading. If StoryLens sounds like the thing you've been hand-coding in your head for years — book a demo. We'd love to talk.