What four product demos taught me about building useful MVPs

When I started publishing the Made Grand product demo series, my intention was to demonstrate the type of work I’d been doing behind the scenes and client work – the internal tools and early-stage platforms that I’d built around specific problems.

The four demos came from very different places. Clockified started with a change to a piece of software I had relied on for years. Hara came from trying to make sense of my own health information. Palto explored the lack of trust and visibility that sits underneath much of the recruitment process, while Project Command Centre began as an attempt to organise a growing collection of projects and ideas that no longer fitted into the tools I was using.

What has been interesting is seeing what happened after they were built.

One has become an invaluable tool that I use every working day. One served a very specific purpose during a difficult health period, and now sits quietly until I need it again. One has developed into a much larger strategic system at the centre of Made Grand, while another remains a valid idea that I’ve deliberately left alone.

Clockified: building the smaller tool I actually needed

Clockified began after Clockify announced changes to the reporting features available on its free plan.

I’d used Clockify for years to track project time and produce reports for clients. It did what I needed, but I was only using a relatively small part of a much larger platform. I didn’t need team surveillance, location tracking, leave management, approval systems or most of the other features that exist within a product serving thousands of different types of businesses.

I needed to track time against a project, add manual entries, distinguish between billable and non-billable work and create a clear record that I could use when reporting to clients.

The first version of Clockified was built very quickly (less than 1 hour!), but it has grown steadily since then because I use it every day and needed to make minor improvements based on my own personal use (I became the customer). It now mirrors the parts of Clockify that were genuinely useful to me, while remaining a private tool built around the way I work rather than the requirements of a much larger SaaS market.

The value of Clockified was not that it replaced every feature in Clockify. It was that it replaced the specific features I depended on, and nothing more.

Read the Clockified article: https://madegrand.co.uk/insights/dont-upgrade-your-saas-just-build-the-smaller-version-instead

Explore the Clockified demo: https://clockified-demo.madegrand.co.uk/

Hara: useful for the period when it was needed

Hara came from a very different kind of problem.

I was experiencing ongoing stomach issues and trying to understand whether there were patterns between what I was eating, how I was feeling and everything else happening around it. The difficulty was not a lack of information. It was that the information was spread across different days and was difficult to remember properly once enough time had passed.

Hara gave me a simple place to record meals, symptoms, mood, sleep, stress, medication and any other context that might have been relevant. I used it daily while I was trying to understand what was happening and it gave me a much clearer record than I would have had by relying on memory alone.

Very little changed after the initial version because very little needed to.

The app wasn’t trying to become a huge, feature-rich health platform, and it was never intended to diagnose anything. Its purpose was to make personal information easier to record and patterns easier to notice during a period when that information mattered.

I now dip in and out of it as and when further stomach problems arise, rather than feeling obligated to keep using it for the sake of maintaining an engagement statistic. Other people are welcome to sign up and use it if they want something free and straightforward while dealing with similar issues, and it may become a more public product at some point, but there is no particular reason to force further development before it is proved useful.

Hara taught me that a digital product doesn’t need to demand permanent attention to justify its existence.

Some tools are valuable precisely because they are there when needed, remain simple and do not attempt to turn a temporary difficulty into a permanent subscription or daily habit.

Read the Hara article: https://madegrand.co.uk/insights/hara-a-calm-food-and-gut-health-diary-built-around-a-real-personal-need

Try Hara: https://hara.madegrand.co.uk/

Palto: an idea that is allowed to wait

Palto explored whether recruitment journeys could become more transparent by collecting clearer information about what actually happens after someone applies for a role.

The original problem still feels valid. Applicants put considerable time into tailoring CVs, writing covering letters and preparing for interviews, while often receiving very little indication of whether anybody has reviewed the application or where they stand in the process. Recruiters and employers are dealing with their own pressures, but the lack of visibility still creates frustration and mistrust on both sides.

The more interesting part of the product work was deciding what Palto should not become.

It would have been easy to keep adding AI driven CV tools, covering letter services, job searches, employer ratings and all the other features associated with recruitment platforms. It would also have been easy to let it become a public complaints board, which may have created attention but would not necessarily have created useful information.

Instead, Palto remained focused on the idea of tracking recruitment journeys, understanding response times and outcomes and gradually identifying patterns without turning every difficult experience into a public accusation.

Palto hasn’t developed significantly since the demo was published ,but that doesn’t mean it failed.

The concept is documented, the product has been explored and the working demo remains available. If I decide to promote it more heavily, speak to people working within recruitment or attract a group of users who recognise the problem, there is a clear place from which to continue. Until then, it can remain idle without creating another system that needs constant management.

This may be one of the more useful lessons from the series.

An MVP can help decide that an idea is worth preserving without creating an immediate obligation to build a company around it. Sometimes the responsible decision is to leave the product where it is until there is enough demand, evidence or personal energy to justify the next stage.

Read the Palto article: https://madegrand.co.uk/insights/palto-what-if-recruitment-was-just-a-bit-more-honest-about-whats-actually-happening

Explore the Palto demo: https://palto-demo.madegrand.co.uk/

Project Command Centre: from product demo to business infrastructure

Project Command Centre has taken the most significant journey of the four.

It began as a way to bring all my projects and ideas into one place, give them some structure and create a clearer picture of what was active, what had stalled and what still had enough value to keep. 

By pulling together work that had previously been scattered across Notion, Trello, Google Docs, Claude, ChatGPT and other tools, I could score each project against things like effort, risk, strategic fit and commercial potential, then compare ideas that would otherwise have remained in completely separate parts of the business.

The public demo still shows that original portfolio view, but the internal system has developed well beyond it.

Project Command Centre now has an MCP connection, which allows me to work with the same structured project information through ChatGPT, Claude and Notion. I can query projects, review activity, add notes and update the system without always needing to open the dashboard itself.

More importantly, it gives AI a consistent strategic view of the Made Grand portfolio.

The AI isn’t working from whichever fragments happen to be included in the current conversation. It can work with the projects, their status, recent decisions, commercial value, strategic fit, effort required and the next actions already attached to them, which makes it possible to ask much better questions.

Which projects deserve attention now? Which ideas support the wider direction of the business? Where is effort being spent without enough return? What has quietly stalled? What should be parked, and what is ready to move?

The Project Command Centre is also becoming the foundation for the Made Grand Growth Engine, bringing content strategy into the same project planning system. Work completed for a client, a technical solution, a product experiment or a useful business decision should not disappear into an archive when it could become a case study, a website update, a LinkedIn post or the start of a wider campaign.

The source of truth remains within a system built around my own business rather than being dictated by the structure of a general-purpose project management platform. It gives me the overview I could never quite create inside an AI conversation or a collection of Notion pages, because it has been designed around the particular balance of commercial opportunity, strategic value, risk and effort that matters to Made Grand.

It has required more ongoing work than the other demos, but that reflects the role it now performs and is gradually becoming part of the way the whole business is understood and directed.

I covered that development in more detail in the previous article, including where the system started, what the MCP connection changes and where the Growth Engine may take it next.

Read the Project Command Centre article: https://madegrand.co.uk/insights/project-command-centre-seeing-the-shape-of-everything-at-once

Explore the public demo: https://pcc-demo.madegrand.co.uk/dashboard?view=all

Four products, four different definitions of useful

The amount of continued effort across these products has been very different.

Clockified receives attention because I rely on it every day and improvements quickly repay the time spent making them. Hara needed very little development once it was doing the job it was built to do. Palto requires almost no maintenance while the idea waits for stronger evidence or renewed momentum. Project Command Centre has received the most sustained investment because its strategic value has continued to grow.

I think this is a healthier way to look at MVPs than assuming every early product needs the same roadmap.

A product doesn’t automatically become more successful because it gains more features, more users or a larger development backlog. The better viewpoint is whether it is producing enough value for the people using it, and whether that value justifies the effort required to keep it moving.

In these four cases, usefulness has meant four different things.

For Clockified, it means becoming a dependable operational tool.

For Hara, it means being available when a particular personal problem needs tracking.

For Palto, it means preserving and testing an idea without forcing premature development.

For Project Command Centre, it means becoming strategic infrastructure that can grow alongside the business.

None of these outcomes is inherently better than the others. They are simply different responses to different problems.

What this has changed about the way I build

The availability of AI-assisted development tools means it is now possible to move from an idea to a working application much more quickly than it was even a few years ago.

That speed is useful, but it doesn’t remove the need for personal judgement.

You still need to understand the problem, decide which part is worth solving, remove features that do not serve the core purpose and recognise when a product has reached the right level of completeness for its current role.

Sometimes the right next step is another feature, or opening the product to a few users and collecting feedback. Sometimes it’s leaving the application alone because it already does exactly what it needs to do. And sometimes an early experiment reveals enough value that it deserves to become a much larger part of the business.

That is what these four products have shown me.

An MVP is not just a cheaper or smaller version of a finished application. It is a way of learning what kind of product the idea wants to become, how much attention it deserves and whether its usefulness continues once the excitement of building it has passed.

What comes next

For now, the four original demos have already shown that useful products do not all need to follow the same path. Some become daily tools, some become strategic systems, some remain available for occasional use and some wait quietly until the right reason to continue appears.

The important part is not making every idea look like a start-up.It is building enough to understand whether the idea genuinely improves something, then giving it the amount of attention that answer deserves.

Explore all Made Grand product experiments: https://madegrand.co.uk/insights/product-experiments-and-working-demos