Hello, Beacon Labs

This is the first entry in what we're calling the Beacon Labs Journal — short notes from building software for real businesses, written by the people doing the building.

Why we exist

Beacon Labs started inside GOwithHIPPO Travel, a Canadian host travel agency. The agency was paying for six different SaaS tools — Kajabi, Calendly, VacationCRM, Shopify+Recharge, Klaviyo, Clickup and in the process of transition to a different CRM— to run what was, at heart, one business. None of them talked to each other. All of them charged per seat. Most of them only sort-of fit.

So we built HippoHub to replace them. Then we made it multi-tenant — because if our agency had this problem, others did too.

What we mean by "systemize"

The thing that pushed us toward "Beacon Labs" as a brand was realizing the problem wasn't just this agency. The problem is everywhere. Mid-size businesses run on a constellation of:

• Spreadsheets that act as databases
• Shared inboxes that act as ticketing systems
• Group chats that act as project management
• SaaS tools that act as workarounds for the SaaS tools

The work this Frankenstein produces is real. But the system is held together by hand. People remember the steps. Tribal knowledge replaces documentation. Onboarding a new hire takes weeks because the system is partly in someone's head.

"Systemize" means: take the parts you're holding together by hand, and make them load-bearing in software. Not a Notion template. Not a Zapier flow that falls over the moment something changes. Real software that knows your data and your workflow.

What's next here

We'll write here roughly monthly. Topics likely to come up:

• Build-in-public updates from HippoHub
• Postmortems when something we shipped breaks (it will)
• Notes from custom builds we ship through the studio
• Occasional opinions about the SaaS tools we replaced and why

If that sounds useful — or if you have a workflow you're holding together by hand and want to talk about it — tell us.