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- He Fixed Standup Awkwardness in 5 Minutes. The Tool’s Still Running Every Day.
He Fixed Standup Awkwardness in 5 Minutes. The Tool’s Still Running Every Day.
Needs To Exist
August 17, 2025
Ideas show up uninvited.
Some vanish by morning.
Others dig in and refuse to leave until you’ve done something about them.
It Exists is where we follow the troublemakers who actually do something. The ones who turn late-night “what ifs” into links you can click.
Sometimes they pulled a spark straight out of NTE Pro’s vault. Sometimes NTE Zero to One gave them just enough momentum to cross that invisible line between “thinking” and “building.”
Different paths, same result:
The thing in their head?
It exists now.
Cameras click on. Mics unmute. The daily standup begins.
Every morning, same ritual…
Open Google Meet.
Run through updates.
Start with the “urgent” stuff, obviously.
Here’s the problem with urgency: it’s greedy.
It eats the clock.
By the time it got to the designer?
Sixty seconds left.
Rushed. Awkward. Sometimes skipped entirely.
By day four, Rob Balderstone, Head of Product at Basket had seen enough.
“We need a tool for this,” he thought.
Five minutes later, he had one.
The 5-Minute Fix
No decks. No “let’s fix meetings” memo.
Rob just opened Lovable, built a little widget that shuffled the speaking order, and dropped it into the next standup.
Click. The names spun like a slot machine.
It landed on the designer, second in line.
“He actually smiled — that never happens on day four of a sprint.”
Everyone laughed. The vibe shifted.
By Friday, the question wasn’t “poor designer.”
It was “What’s Standup Buddy picking today?”
Why This Stuck
Rob’s not a “hack-it-till-3am” engineer.
He came up through marketing, not code.
Rob’s built little “fix-it” tools before, just annoyances that bugged him enough to fix.
Alzheimer’s med tracker (so his dad never missed a dose)
Musical practice tracker (to stop “I forgot” excuses)
Brain-dump app (to clear mental clutter before bed)
Online concert programme (so grandma could follow along)
Not portfolio fluff. Not startup pitches.
Just “that bugged me, so I fixed it” builds.
Standup Buddy fit the pattern perfectly:
Find the tiny friction. Kill it.
Lesson 1: Fix the Micro-Frictions That Compound
Five minutes of work. Hundreds of meetings improved.
That’s exponential ROI.
Ignore small problems and they’ll drain you forever. Fix them and they’ll pay you back every day.
The first version?
One feature: shuffle speaking order.
Of course, Rob’s a tinkerer. Soon Standup Buddy had Vegas-style spins, silky fades, and an “edit team” button nobody asked for but everyone secretly loved.
“I should’ve stopped after five minutes, it would still be working fine today. But adding the bells and whistles was fun.”
Lesson 2: Bells and Whistles Are Dessert, Not Dinner
Solve the hunger first. Plating comes after.
The magic was in that first shuffle. Everything else was Rob having fun.
Been running on a $20/month Lovable plan ever since.
Built From Lessons Learned
Standup Buddy was so simple because Rob had already made the “too big” mistake.
His first proper Lovable build, the Alzheimer’s med tracker taught him exactly where AI building breaks down.
“RLS, RLS, RLS,” he laughs. “That was the one thing AI couldn’t untangle for me.”
Those reps made Standup Buddy a walk in the park.
How They Actually Use It
It lives in a shared Chrome tab during standup, right next to Linear.
Shuffle the order. Go through tasks. Done.
It’s so ingrained that when Rob skips a meeting…
“They just carry on as normal.”
No one even says “Where’s Rob?”, Standup Buddy just runs itself.
Lesson 3: “Non-Technical” Is a Myth
Rob doesn’t code full-time, but he’s fluent in problem-solving.
Tools like Lovable didn’t give Rob the idea, they just made it impossible not to act on it.
What He’s Proud Of
The polish is nice.
The reliability is better.
“It just works, every single day, every time. No one notices anything going wrong, which is the point. And yes, the designer still smiles.”
Lesson 4: Understand the Problem Before You Build
“If you really understand the problem, the app you build will be way smaller and way simpler. You might realise you don’t need to build anything at all.”
Standup Buddy wasn’t a “fix meetings” project.
It was a “stop skipping the designer” project.
That’s why it landed instantly.
What He’s Doing Next
He still runs Standup Buddy daily, but his builder brain is never idle.
Recently, his team built a tool to test APIs without a front end, saving hours for something they’d never ship.
“Same logic as Standup Buddy, solve the problem with the least amount of wasted effort.”
The next idea? “One prompt away.”
What You Can Learn From Rob
🔍 Look for small, repeatable pains — the ones that happen every day without anyone questioning them.
🛠 Build the minimum that solves it — five minutes is often enough.
🎨 Extras are for you, not the problem — add polish if it’s fun, but don’t confuse it for the magic.
🧠 Non-technical is a mindset myth — if you can define the problem and drive the build, you can ship.
🎯 Understand the problem first — clarity makes the solution smaller, simpler, and faster to ship.
If you’ve got a tiny annoyance that happens every day?
Don’t backlog it. Don’t overthink it.
Fix it.
Even if it only takes five minutes.
That’s how culture changes, one tiny fix at a time.
Five minutes. One problem. Fixed forever.
And when you’re ready for the next one, NTE Pro has thousands of sparks waiting. If you need help turning that spark into something real, NTE Zero to One can get it moving before the week’s out.
Somewhere, a designer’s still smiling because Rob got annoyed on day four.