Built by an agency, for agencies.

We run Conversion Factory — a creative agency. Until we built Workhouse, we were running it out of Notion. One database for the internal team. Separate Notion databases for each client. And a couple hundred dollars a month in Zapier and Make automations doing their best to keep them in sync.

Every task existed twice. Once on our internal board with the real conversation — the “the client's timeline is unrealistic but we'll figure it out” conversation — and once on the client board with the polite version. Versions drifted constantly. When a client commented, someone had to copy the comment into our internal chat so we could discuss before replying. Notifications fired twice. We spent more time keeping two databases lockstepped than doing the work the client was paying us for.

So we wrote more custom code to paper over it — sync scripts, custom views, scheduled jobs to reconcile drift. We tried every relevant Zapier template. We built our own Notion plugins. At some point we looked at the mess and realized: we weren't fixing Notion anymore. We were building a whole new app on top of it, badly, with duct tape.

So we built the app instead.

Workhouse is what falls out when you start from a clean sheet with visibility flagged at the database layer instead of bolted on. The client portal and the internal dashboard read the same Postgres tables with different filters. One database. Two audiences. The duct tape is gone.

We're running Conversion Factory on Workhouse now — every active client engagement, every task, every approval. And we're rolling it out to other creative agencies who've been doing the same dance.