CalmKaaj is a coworking space in Pakistan. We were one of its members — and we kept hitting the same small frictions everyone there did. So we built the platform that fixed them: order from the café and have it brought to your desk, book a meeting room, and let the managers run inventory, billing, and receipts from one place. Then we kept using it ourselves.
Coworking spaces run on a hundred small operations that are all, individually, too minor to systematise — and collectively, a mess. Someone takes a café order on a notepad. Someone else tracks who's booked which room. Billing is a monthly scramble of tabs and spreadsheets. Receipts are manual. Inventory is a guess.
We knew this intimately, because we were members of CalmKaaj ourselves — sitting in the space, feeling every one of those frictions firsthand. That's a rare position to build from. We weren't guessing at user needs from a brief. We were the user.
Scratch your own itch — but build it properly. The goal wasn't a slick marketing-grade interface; it was a functional, reliable operations tool that made a real workspace run better. We built it, deployed it into the space we occupied, and dogfooded it until it was genuinely good.
- 01
Function first, honestly designed
This isn't a glossy landing page and it doesn't pretend to be. It's clean, fast, obvious software for people who need to order a coffee or book a room in ten seconds. The design discipline here is restraint: every screen does one job clearly.
- 02
Real-time, multi-location, automated
Café orders update live via Server-Sent Events — place an order, watch its status change, get it at your desk. The café manager runs tabs, takes payments, issues receipts. Facility managers see bookings and inventory across locations (multi-tenant from the start). And the part that mattered most: monthly billing, which used to run by hand, now generates and sends automatically. Built as an installable PWA on React + TypeScript, an Express/Postgres back end with Drizzle, Passport sessions, Resend for email, Web Push for notifications.
- 03
The dogfooding loop
Because we used it daily, the feedback loop was instant. A friction we felt at 11am was often fixed by the afternoon. The product got good the way good products get good — by being used by the people who made it.
“Our monthly billing used to eat days. Now it just happens. The whole space — café, rooms, payments — runs through one thing the Artyreal team built while they were sitting right here. ”
A coworking space's entire operation — ordering, booking, inventory, billing — running on one platform, with billing automated end to end: 25 hours saved every cycle and 13,000 café orders processed.
We built it because we were sitting in it.
