Why I Built BisqueIt

A forgotten bowl on the bisque shelf finally pushed me over the edge.

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I've been taking pottery classes at a community studio for a little over a year. Once or twice a week I show up, get covered in clay, and make things. It's one of my favorite parts of the week.

But keeping track of my pieces? That part was a mess.

Community studios have rows of shelves — greenware drying here, bisqueware waiting there, finished pieces ready to take home. The timing is unpredictable. Something goes in for a bisque fire and might come out in a few days, or it might sit for two weeks. I'd constantly lose track of what was where, what had been glazed, what was already sitting on my shelf at home.

Every few months I'd try to fix it with an app. And every time, I'd fall behind, feel overwhelmed, and quietly give up.

What I tried

I went through all the usual options.

Paper notebooks got left at home or covered in slip. Photos worked until my camera roll became an undifferentiated mess of pots. Notes apps were fine but couldn't handle stages — I'd scroll through paragraphs trying to figure out where a piece was in the process.

Then I tried the most popular dedicated pottery tracking app I could find. I wanted to love it. But every update meant navigating into a piece, filling out fields, and saving. It wasn't hard exactly — just enough friction that when I was at the studio, hands damp, trying to log something before the moment passed, I'd skip it.

Skip it enough times and you have a backlog. A backlog feels like a project. A project feels like homework. So I'd abandon it entirely and go back to guessing.

Weeks later I'd find a piece on the bisque shelf with no memory of when I'd made it or what I'd planned for it.

The Makeathon

Last fall I entered a Figma Makeathon — a hackathon built around Figma Make, their rapid prototyping tool. I'd been frustrated long enough that I knew exactly what I wanted to build: a pottery tracker so low-friction that I'd actually keep up with it at the studio.

I had a working prototype in a few weeks. Rough, but functional enough to start using myself. So I did — for the next five months, using it every week at the studio and gradually stripping away everything that wasn't essential.

The core insight was straightforward: the only update that needs to happen regularly is moving a piece to the next stage. Everything else — glazes, coat counts, photos, notes — is useful, but it's not the thing that makes or breaks the habit. So I made stage advancement a single tap from the main list, no opening required. Nothing to fill out. Just tap and move on.

That's when it started actually working for me.

Building it properly

In March I started over with a production-ready version. BisqueIt is a web app — no app store, works on any device, saves everything to the cloud so your history doesn't disappear when you get a new phone. You can track pieces through every stage from wedging to final glaze, save your favorite glazes and application notes, attach photos, and share finished pieces to a studio feed.

But the thing I keep coming back to is still that one tap. Because the goal was never to build the most powerful pottery tracking app. It was to build one that I'd actually use on a Tuesday evening when I'm tired, covered in clay, and just want to move my mug to bisque before I forget.