---

Hey there, this is Manny, the founder and CEO of Blue.

I want to share something that's been on my mind lately.

It's a fundamental shift in how we think about Blue and, more broadly, how teams manage their work. It's a realization that came from countless conversations with our customers and observing how they actually use Blue in the wild.

Here's the thing: I built Blue as a project management tool. Coming from an agency background, that's what made sense to me. We'd start a client project, add all the tasks, check them off, and eventually archive the completed project.

Clean, simple, done.

As Blue grew and I spoke with more customers, I noticed something that honestly caught me off guard:

Over 90% of our customers weren't using Blue for projects at all.

They were using it to manage ongoing processes—the kind of work that never really "ends."

I've seen some wild use cases over the years that I never would have imagined.

And recently it clicked: why are we trying to hack a "project management system" for process management?

Yes, it happens to work, but why not just solve the bigger problem directly?

Projects vs. Processes: The Core Difference

Let me break this down simply:

Projects have a definite start date and (hopefully) an eventual end date. They're temporary endeavors with specific deliverables. Think launching a new website, organizing an event, or developing a new product feature.

Processes are ongoing, evergreen parts of your business. They're the repeatable workflows that keep your company running: sales processes, hiring pipelines, customer onboarding, support ticket handling, content creation workflows. These never truly "end"—they just keep cycling through.

The irony?

Even within Blue, we found ourselves using our own tool more for processes than projects.

We have processes for software development, hiring, customer requests for custom domains, and dozens more.

It was right in front of us the whole time.

What This Means for Blue

This realization has fundamentally changed how we're building Blue.

1. From "To-Dos" to "Records"

We've renamed our core building blocks from "to-dos" to "records"—and made this customizable. Your sales team can call them "opportunities," support can use "tickets," HR might prefer "candidates." It's a small change with big implications for how teams think about their work. We're doing the same with "projects" and turning them into "workspaces".

2. Time Intelligence

We've added custom fields that track time in ways that matter for processes:

• Time in List: See exactly how long a record has spent in each step of your process
• Duration Between Events: Measure cycle time between any two stages (like from "In Progress" to "Done")

These aren't just nice-to-have metrics—they're essential for identifying bottlenecks and improving processes over time.

3. Smart Automations

We're currently working on scheduled automations which allow our automations to fire repeatedly on a regular schedule and just act on records that meet specific criteria.

The other two big nuts to crack are:

1. Conditional automations (where you can have multiple criteria that must be true before something happens)
2. Trying to solve the infinite loop problem (where right now an automation cannot trigger another automation because that could cause an infinite loop). In reality, we would love for that to be possible and we just detect infinite loops and make sure that you cannot create them.

4. Multi-Homing

This is huge: one record will be able to live in multiple projects while automatically synchronizing custom field data. Imagine a customer request that needs to be tracked by both support and engineering—no more duplicate work or lost context.

Finding Our Market Position

This shift puts us in an interesting spot. We're no longer just competing with Asana, Monday, or Trello for project management. But we're also not trying to be a massive ERP system that costs millions to implement and takes years to roll out.

I think we're creating something new—a sweet spot between the lightweight project tools and the heavyweight enterprise systems. There's a massive gap in the market for teams that need more than basic task management but can't justify (or don't want) the complexity of traditional business process management software.

The Simplicity Challenge

Now, I'll be honest—this is something we grapple with every single day. How do we add sophisticated process management capabilities while staying true to our "Keep it simple" philosophy?

There's no easy answer. It's about making continuous trade-offs. One approach we're taking is to accept a bit more complexity for administrators who configure the processes, while keeping things dead simple for the end users who work within those processes day to day. The people setting up the workflow might need to think through automations and field configurations, but the person processing a customer request should just see a clear, simple interface telling them what to do next.

Looking Ahead

We're announcing this shift publicly with our new website and updated documentation. Many of these process-focused features are already live, with many more in the pipeline. The response from customers we've shared this vision with has been incredibly positive—they get it immediately because they're already using Blue this way.

The future of work isn't about managing isolated projects—it's about orchestrating the interconnected processes that make businesses run. It's about giving teams the flexibility to define their own workflows while maintaining the structure needed for consistency and improvement.

We're building Blue to be the simplest, most intuitive platform for managing any type of business process. Think scheduled automations, conditional logic, advanced bottleneck tracking, and maybe even entirely new views beyond our current six that let you see processes at a strategic level.

And when I think of the real competition to Blue, it's not really about software systems but it's really about allowing organization to develop that process management mindset, And to shift away from chaotic email threads, sticky notes, and loosely connected spreadsheets.

This evolution from project to process management isn't just about Blue—it's about recognizing how modern teams actually work and building tools that match that reality. We're excited about this direction and can't wait to see how teams use these capabilities to streamline their most important processes.

If you're already using Blue for process management, we'd love to hear your story. And if you're still thinking in projects when you really need process management, maybe it's time to make the shift.

Stay productive,

Manny

PS: We're rolling out new process-focused features regularly. Keep an eye on our changelog for the latest updates, and don't hesitate to reach out if you have ideas for how we can better support your team's processes.