37 years of building the tools that kept businesses running.
One Flow State is a one-person shop. I build the kind of internal tools I spent a career building for employers, and sell them to people who need them without the overhead of a department.
I was the person they called when the process broke.
Business process analysis. Pricing analysis. Solutions analysis. Senior financial analysis. Data visualization and data science. Different titles, same job: find the place where a company was dropping the ball, and build the smallest thing that would stop it.
That meant deal-pricing spreadsheets that caught a bad discount before it reached a customer. Early-warning dashboards that showed a team the week going wrong on Monday instead of Friday. Trackers that made sure the hand-off between two departments happened every time, not most times.
None of those tools were pretty. All of them were used every day for years, by people who had no interest in spreadsheets and just needed the number to be right.
Why sell tools
Because most of what I solved inside large companies is the same thing a freelancer or a ten-person team is up against. They just don't have an analyst down the hall. A finished tool is the closest thing to that: the thinking is already done, the structure is already built, and you can see every calculation so you're never stuck with a black box.
The skill turned out not to be specific to business. Taking a messy calculation and turning it into something a person can use correctly, without needing a spreadsheet course first, is the same work whether the number is a deal margin or the true cost of a year at college. So the tools go where that skill is useful, not only where I used to be employed.
How a tool gets made
- It starts with a job people keep getting wrong.Every release traces back to a specific failure I watched happen, or one a buyer described to me.
- Build the smallest thing that does the whole job.Small does not mean partial. If the job needs thirty calculators, it gets thirty; if five tabs will do, it gets five, not twelve.
- Strip anything that only looks good in a screenshot.Charts nobody reads and colour-coding nobody remembers get cut.
- Write the one-page setup note.If the setup takes longer than a page to explain, it isn't finished.
- Run it against a real problem before it ships.Then it goes on Gumroad, Notion Marketplace, and Etsy at the same price, so you can buy wherever you already are.
What I build in
Google Sheets when a group needs to share it live. Excel when the work is finance-grade and lives in .xlsx anyway. Notion when the job is tracking people, deals, and next steps rather than numbers. Plain HTML when the tool should sit inside a Notion page or a website and simply work. Docs and Slides when the fix is structure, not calculation. The platform follows the job.
Want to see how that thinking looks in a file?
Start with what's built. Or describe the job you're stuck on and I'll tell you if I can do it.