Update, July 2026: LaunchPad360 has since been renamed KeepTRiX. The product and its central purpose continue to evolve, but the problem described in this article remains the same.
Today I did something that, honestly, I didn’t expect to do for quite a while.
I stopped logging into Hive.
That probably sounds like an odd milestone to celebrate. After all, Hive is a good project management system. In fact, I used the free version for years. It helped me organize projects, assign tasks, and keep work moving. If someone asked me for a recommendation for a free project management tool today, I’d still tell them it’s worth looking at.
So why stop using it?
The answer has very little to do with Hive.
Over the past month, I’ve been building LaunchPad360. Most people assume that means I’m building another project management platform, but that’s never really been the goal.
The goal has always been to reduce friction.
As a small business owner, I realized I was spending an incredible amount of time switching between applications.
My tasks were in Hive.
My email was in Gmail.
My calendar was in Google Calendar.
My notes were in Google Keep.
My files were in Google Drive.
My website lived in WordPress.
Customer information lived in multiple places.
Passwords were somewhere else.
Business documentation was scattered between folders, notebooks, and my own memory.
None of those tools were bad.
In fact, most of them are excellent.
The problem was that every time I needed to answer a simple question or complete a task, I found myself jumping between applications.
“Where did I save that document?”
“Did I write that note down?”
“Which client folder was it in?”
“Did I already create that task?”
“Who has the latest version?”
None of those questions generate revenue.
They’re simply the cost of having pieces of your business spread across a dozen different systems.
That’s when I realized something important.
I wasn’t trying to replace Hive.
I was trying to replace the friction.
Project management is only one part of running a business. Every application does its own job reasonably well, but none of them really know anything about each other. As a result, business owners spend an enormous amount of mental energy acting as the connection between all of them.
That’s the part I wanted to eliminate.
Today, I realized I hadn’t opened Hive in days. Not because I made a conscious decision to stop using it. I simply didn’t need it anymore.
That wasn’t because LaunchPad360 suddenly has every feature imaginable. It doesn’t.
It happened because enough of my daily work now lives in one place that I can stay focused instead of constantly changing context.
That has become my measuring stick for progress.
Not how many features I’ve added.
Not how closely I’ve recreated another application.
Simply this:
Did I reduce a little more friction today?
Every time the answer is yes, LaunchPad360 becomes a little more useful—not just for me, but eventually for other small business owners who are tired of feeling like they’re managing software instead of managing their business.
I still believe there will always be specialized tools that do certain jobs better than an all-in-one platform ever could. I still use Google Workspace every day, and I expect I always will.
But I also believe there is tremendous value in having one place that understands your business.
One place where your contacts, locations, services, knowledge, documents, tasks, and processes all relate to one another.
For me, that’s what today represented.
It wasn’t the day I replaced Hive.
It was the day I realized I was spending less time managing my software and more time running my business.