Cooking up the value menu: Tiny Tendies

If you’ve looked at the Tendrel website in the last few months, you might not be clear of what we do. I can’t blame you - we haven’t shared much about what we’re working on. Let me set the record straight: our current focus is to build a suite of apps that tackles some of the common problems we’ve seen across logistics, agriculture, and manufacturing. And because we take ourselves very seriously, our internal moniker for these apps is “Tiny Tendies.” So... what is a tiny tendy?

Starting with the big tendy

In a nutshell, Tendrel is a data platform that lets you track work in a consistent format. With just a bit of configuration, our format can model any frontline labor process. Our hypothesis is that building this data platform lets us do two things:

1. Make it easier to build great software: The platform handles much of the backend logic required to build an app, allowing engineers to focus on the product build.
2. Connect sources of data that typically don’t connect: By storing data in the same format, data from diverse sources can be made interoperable.

Building standalone apps is our way of testing this hypothesis. On the surface, our apps do different things: a timeclock and a digital checklist have completely different interfaces. But behind the scenes they’re using the same configuration process to set up, writing data in the same format, and using the same rules to sequence work.

What makes a tendy tiny?

There’s another reason we’re building standalone apps: they’re easier to use. For the first year-and-a-half of our life, we exclusively focused on customized enterprise deployments. With our original all-in-one app, we’ve tracked harvest seasons at dozen-acre greenhouses and monitored multi-step manufacturing processes. We’ve collected quality control data on thousands of bins of tomatoes, and tracked the number of insects on a set of two-thousand glue traps. We even use Tendrel for logging our data warehouse jobs and managing our on-call engineers.

While we proved that our software can do nearly anything, we also learned that fully customized enterprise deployments take time. Customers often rely on our help to configure their processes. While they’re a valuable tool for discovering new use-cases, enterprise deployments are a tricky way to scale.

The goal of our standalone apps is to streamline setup by targeting specific, repeatable use-cases. They’re designed to be entirely self-service and set up within minutes, not days. They strip out some of the complexity of the full Tendrel platform, but you're getting most of the value with much less effort.

Let’s talk apps

We’ve gone live with Timeclock, and our Checklist app is coming out soon. We have a third magical product that’s a bit further out, and we’re looking for testers to trial it. Along the way, we’re also polishing the tools we’ve used to build our apps and continuing to build the platform. If you’re interested in using one of our apps or building one of your own reach out and let us know.