Tooling Studio: Lightweight Productivity Tools Built Inside Google Workspace

Tooling Studio is a product venture founded by a Dutch AI entrepreneur, focused on building lightweight, practical tools that improve how professionals work inside Google Workspace.

The team partnered with Cleffex to design and build its first flagship product, Kanban Tasks, a Chrome extension that brings visual task management directly into Google Workspace. As adoption grew, the collaboration expanded to include an embedded Sales CRM built on top of Google Contacts.

Many teams rely heavily on Google Workspace for email, tasks, and collaboration. Yet managing work across Gmail, Google Tasks, and contacts often lacks visual structure and shared context. This makes it harder to prioritize work, track progress, and collaborate without switching tools or falling back to spreadsheets.

Tooling Studio set out to address this by building solutions that:

• Work natively within the Google Workspace environment
  
  
• Integrate seamlessly with Google Tasks, Gmail, and Google Contacts
  
  
• Remain lightweight and intuitive for power users
  
  
• Scale from individual productivity to team collaboration
  
  
• Replace spreadsheet-based workflows without disrupting existing habits
  
  

A key challenge was working within Google API constraints while still delivering a smooth, reliable, and extensible user experience.

Cleffex partnered closely with the founder, working from early concept through production and into continuous product evolution.

The approach included:

• Early-stage research and experimentation to connect Kanban workflows with Google Tasks
  
  
• A highly iterative development process enabling rapid testing, refinement, and feature rollout
  
  
• Close collaboration between engineering, QA, and product teams
  
  
• Custom technical solutions to work around Google Tasks API limitations
  
  
• Ongoing enhancements guided by real user behavior and feedback
  
  

This flexible delivery model allowed the product to grow in scope while staying tightly aligned with how people actually work inside Google Workspace.

The first release, Tooling Studio 1.0, delivered strong early traction and market validation.

Key outcomes included:

• A shareable Kanban board embedded directly within Google Workspace
  
  
• Improved task visibility and prioritization for individual users
  
  
• A custom task database enabling collaboration beyond native Google limitations
  
  
• A successful launch on Product Hunt, ranking #14 out of 214 products on launch day
  
  
• A steadily growing and engaged user base
  
  

Building on this momentum, Tooling Studio has expanded into a broader collaboration platform. Recent additions include an embedded Sales CRM that transforms Google Contacts into an active sales workspace, with visual pipelines, organisation-level views, and seamless collaboration inside Gmail, Calendar, and Kanban Tasks. Additional productivity tools are currently in development.

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