A project management tool for startups with more jobs than people

Most founding teams copy whatever their last employer used. That employer had 400 staff and someone paid full-time to keep Jira tidy. You have four people and a Stripe account.

At this size the founders do everything. The CTO answers support emails. The CEO orders the laptops and chases the lawyer about the shareholder agreement, usually from a train. What helps is one list everyone can see, with a name and a date on every job, and somewhere to talk about it that isn’t a DM. Epics and story points can wait until someone is paid to run them.

We’ve watched a five-person team spend a fortnight configuring workflows. We reckon they’d probably have shipped two features in that time, and learned more from them.

Plenty of early teams start with a single project called “Founders” and a tag for each kind of work: Product, Admin, Hiring, Fundraise. Filter by tag when you want to see just the hiring, and ignore the filter the rest of the time. When product work outgrows the shared board, give it its own project with its own stages.

Every task gets one assignee and a due date. We didn’t expect to like the one-person rule as much as we do, but “both of us” at a startup usually means neither. Tasks also take subtasks and attachments, so the job ad draft and the three CVs you liked sit on the hiring task instead of in someone’s downloads folder. There’s more on how tasks and views work.

Slack’s free plan keeps 90 days of message history (as of September 2026). That’s about long enough to lose the thread where you agreed your pricing.

Klusko’s chat has public and private channels, DMs, threads and @mentions, and the Free plan keeps your whole history. Type @, pick a task, and it turns into a live link, so “[Seed deck, version 4] is ready for a read” takes people straight to the file. Nobody has to ask which version. The chat features page shows the rest, including the Threads view for when a channel gets busy.

The Free plan covers up to 10 people and 5 projects, with Board, List and Calendar views and 2 GB of storage in total. For a lot of pre-seed teams that’s enough for a year, maybe longer. Team is £5 per person per month billed yearly (£6 monthly) and adds unlimited people and projects, Table and Workload views, recurring tasks and guests, which suit a freelance designer who only needs the one project. Right now you won’t pay for any of it, because billing hasn’t launched. The pricing page has the detail.

What we haven’t built: Gantt charts, sprints, dependencies, time tracking, integrations or an API. If your developers want sprint boards linked to GitHub, let them keep their tracker and run the rest of the company in Klusko.