Forem: Mihir kanzariya

I replaced 4 SaaS tools with one workspace. Here's what actually happened.

Mihir kanzariya — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 21:38:38 +0000

So about 8 months ago I got fed up.

Our team of 6 was paying for Jira, Notion, Slack (premium), and some random bug tracker I can't even remember the name of. Total monthly bill was somewhere around $380. Not insane money, but the real cost wasn't the subscriptions.

The real cost was context switching.

The tab hell problem

Here's what a typical morning looked like: open Jira to check sprint status, switch to Notion to read the spec, hop to Slack because someone pinged about a blocker, back to Jira to update the ticket, then realize the spec in Notion is outdated because someone updated it in a Google Doc instead.

Sound familiar? Yeah.

I counted one day and I had 23 tabs open across 4 different tools, all for the same project. My brain was spending more energy remembering where stuff lived than actually doing the work.

What I actually wanted

I wrote down what our team actually needed:

Kanban boards (not the overly complex Jira kind, just cards in columns)
A wiki/docs space that lives next to the tasks
Real-time editing so we stop stepping on each other's work
Some kind of notifications that aren't as noisy as Slack

That's it. We didn't need 400 Jira fields. We didn't need Notion's infinite nesting rabbit hole. We just needed stuff to be in one place.

The switch

We moved everything into a single workspace tool. Tasks, docs, discussions, all in one app. The first week was rough honestly, people kept going back to old habits. But by week 3 something clicked.

Meetings got shorter because everyone could see the same board and the same docs without sharing links. Standup went from 25 minutes to 12 because nobody was digging through three apps to find their update.

What actually improved

The biggest win was fewer "where is this?" questions. When your tasks and docs live in the same space, you don't lose context. You click from a task directly into the related doc. No more copying Notion links into Jira tickets.

Onboarding got way faster too. New devs had one app to learn instead of four. One login, one search bar, one place to look.

And the notification noise dropped dramatically. Instead of Slack pings for every little thing, we use inline comments on the actual work. Way less distracting.

What I miss (being honest)

Jira's reporting was solid if you actually used it. The burndown charts and velocity tracking were nice for sprint retros. Most unified tools don't go that deep on analytics yet.

And Notion's database views were genuinely powerful for non-dev use cases. Our marketing team loved those.

But for our dev team? The tradeoff was worth it. Less context switching > fancier features we barely used.

The numbers

Before: ~$380/month across 4 tools, 23+ tabs open, 25 min standups
After: way less per month, usually 4-6 tabs total, 12 min standups

The time savings compound. When you're not hunting for information across apps, you just... build stuff faster. Novel concept I know.

tl;dr

If your team is small-to-mid size and you're juggling Jira + Notion + Slack + whatever, seriously consider consolidating. The fancy features you think you need? You probably don't. What you need is less friction between thinking about what to build and actually building it.

Why your bug reports are useless (and how to fix them)

Mihir kanzariya — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 21:38:05 +0000

I've spent the last year building dev tools and honestly, the thing that frustrates me most isn't the code. It's the bug reports.

You know the ones. "It's broken." "The page doesn't work." "Something is wrong with the login." Cool. Super helpful. Let me just fix "something" real quick.

The problem isn't laziness

Most people genuinely want to help when they report a bug. They just don't know what information matters. And honestly, why would they? They're not developers. They don't know that the difference between Chrome 120 and Safari 17 might be the entire reason things are broken.

So they do their best. They write "the button doesn't work" and move on with their day.

What actually makes a bug report useful

After triaging hundreds of reports across multiple projects, here's what I actually need to reproduce a bug fast:

1. What were you trying to do?
Not "I was on the website." Tell me the specific action. "I clicked the save button after editing the project name." That's gold.

2. What happened vs what you expected?
"I clicked save and nothing happened. I expected it to save and show a success message." Now I know exactly what to look for.

3. The boring technical stuff
Browser, OS, screen size, whether you're on mobile or desktop. I know, nobody wants to write this down. But it matters so much. Half the bugs I've seen in the last 6 months were viewport or browser specific.

4. Steps to reproduce
If you can tell me 1, 2, 3 what you did before things broke, I can probably fix it in 20 minutes instead of 2 days.

The real solution: don't make users think about it

Here's the thing I've realized. Asking users to provide all this context is fighting human nature. People won't do it consistently no matter how many times you ask.

The better approach is capturing this stuff automatically. There are tools now that grab the browser info, the page URL, even let users click on the exact element that's broken. The technical context gets attached without the user doing anything extra.

I've been experimenting with element-level bug reporting where users literally just click on what's broken, add a quick note, and the tool captures everything else. CSS selectors, viewport size, browser version, the URL, a screenshot. All automatic.

The difference in triage time is honestly wild. What used to take 30 minutes of back-and-forth DMs now takes like 2 minutes to understand and start fixing.

tl;dr

Bad bug reports aren't a people problem, they're a tooling problem. Stop asking users to be better reporters and start giving them tools that capture context automatically. Your future self debugging at 2am will thank you.

Why I stopped juggling Notion and Jira (and what I use now)

Mihir kanzariya — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 14:44:32 +0000

I've been building software for about 4 years now. And for most of that time, my workflow looked like this:

Jira for task tracking
Notion for docs, wikis, meeting notes
Slack for everything else

Three tabs minimum, always open. Context switching all day.

The problem nobody talks about

Everyone debates Jira vs Linear or Notion vs Obsidian. But the real productivity killer isn't which tool you pick — it's having too many of them.

I'd create a task in Jira, write the spec in Notion, then paste the link back into the Jira ticket. When someone asked "where's the doc for X?" the answer was always "let me find it." Half my day was just navigating between tabs.

And syncing? Forget about it. Notion docs would get stale because nobody remembered to update them after the sprint changed. Jira tickets referenced Notion pages that no longer existed.

What I tried first

I went through the usual suspects:

Linear — great for tasks, but still needed something for docs
ClickUp — tried to do everything, felt bloated
Monday.com — too much drag-and-drop, not enough keyboard shortcuts for my taste

None of them solved the core problem: I still needed multiple tools.

What actually worked

About 8 months ago I started using Blocpad — basically a workspace that combines kanban boards, a slash-command editor (like Notion), and wiki pages all in one app. Everything syncs in real time.

The thing that sold me honestly wasn't some killer feature. It was just... not having to switch tabs anymore. I create a task, write the spec right there in the same place, and my team can see both without asking "where's the link?"

Some things I actually like:

Tasks and docs live together. No more pasting links between tools
Real-time presence — I can see who's looking at what, which sounds small but actually reduces a lot of "hey are you working on this?" messages
The editor feels snappy. Not Notion-level polish yet but honestly I care more about speed than animations

Things that are still rough:

No mobile app yet (they're working on it apparently)
The onboarding could be better — took me a bit to figure out the slash commands
Missing some integrations I want (GitHub is there, but I want better Slack integration)

The actual lesson

Look, I'm not saying everyone should use what I use. The point is: if you're spending 20+ minutes a day just navigating between your tools, that's a workflow problem worth solving.

Before you add another tool to your stack, ask yourself if you can remove one first. The best productivity hack I found this year wasn't a new app — it was having fewer apps.

Currently building a SaaS and sharing the journey. If you're into #buildinpublic stuff, I post updates on Twitter too.

Why I stopped juggling Notion and Jira (and what I use now)

Mihir kanzariya — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 17:42:34 +0000

I've been building SaaS tools for about two years now and honestly the biggest productivity killer wasn't bad code or missing features. It was switching between apps.

The setup that drove me crazy

For the longest time my workflow looked like this: Jira for tickets, Notion for docs and wikis, Slack for... well everything else. Three tabs minimum open at all times, three different search bars, three sets of notifications.

And look, these are great tools individually. I'm not here to trash them. But the constant context switching was killing my focus. I'd be writing a spec in Notion, need to reference a ticket in Jira, then someone pings me on Slack about that same ticket, and suddenly I've lost 15 minutes just navigating between windows.

The breaking point

The real moment was when I realized my team was duplicating info everywhere. We had the same feature described in a Notion doc AND a Jira epic AND a Slack thread. When something changed, maybe one of those got updated. Maybe.

I spent a whole Friday afternoon just syncing information across tools. That's when I knew something had to change.

What I actually wanted

Pretty simple honestly:

Tasks and docs in the same place so I don't copy-paste between them
Real-time collab so I'm not waiting for someone to "finish editing"
Something that doesn't take 3 months to set up (looking at you, Jira)
A slash command editor because I've been spoiled by Notion's UX

What I ended up building

So I ended up building Blocpad because nothing quite fit. It's basically kanban boards + a Notion-style editor + real-time presence all in one app. Built it with Next.js and Supabase.

The biggest win? When someone creates a task, the context is RIGHT THERE. The doc, the discussion, the status — same page. No more "let me find that Notion link" or "check the Jira ticket for details."

Stuff I learned along the way

You don't need every feature on day one. We started with just tasks and docs. Added the wiki later. Added integrations even later. Shipped fast, iterated based on what people actually asked for.

Real-time is harder than you think. Supabase Realtime handles a lot but conflict resolution in collaborative editing is a whole rabbit hole. Worth it though — seeing cursors move in real time makes remote work feel less lonely lol.

All-in-one doesn't mean bloated. The temptation is to add everything. We actively resist adding features that don't serve the core workflow. If you need advanced Gantt charts, use a dedicated tool. We're not trying to replace everything, just the daily stuff.

Is it for everyone?

Nah probably not. Big enterprises with 500+ person teams and complex ITSM needs should stick with Jira tbh. But if you're a startup, a small dev team, or a solo founder who's tired of paying for 4 different tools that don't talk to each other... might be worth a look.

We're still early and building in public. Would love to hear how other people handle the multi-tool chaos — or if you've just accepted it as part of life at this point lol.

What's your current stack for project management + docs? Genuinely curious if anyone's found a setup that doesn't involve 5 browser tabs.

Simple Search componentReactJS

Mihir kanzariya — Thu, 14 Nov 2019 09:23:20 +0000

https://gist.github.com/mihir-kanzariya/f11377a28badb4471cfc033572d7c862