Independent product studio
We turn stubborn ideas into things people keep coming back to.
Habesha Labs is a small studio that takes a handful of ideas each year — ours and other people’s — and builds them all the way to something real. Designed, engineered, shipped, and then looked after.
Currently open to new projects
What we make
Three kinds of work, one standard.
We are deliberately narrow. These are the shapes of problem we are good at, and we say no to most of the rest.
Consumer products
Apps that have to survive a real person’s Tuesday. We design for the ordinary day — tired, one-handed, half-attention — not for the demo.
Tools for small teams
Internal software that respects the people using it: fast, legible, and possible to hand to someone else without a meeting.
Applied AI, carefully
A model is a material, not a product. We use one where it earns its latency and leave it out where a plain function would do the job better.
How we work
Four moves, in this order, every time.
The order matters more than the speed. Skipping the first move is how good teams spend a year building the wrong thing beautifully.
The path is part of the product.
Sit with the problem
Before anything gets built we go find the person who has the problem and watch them have it. Most ideas change shape here. Some die here, which is much cheaper than dying later.
Build the smallest honest version
Not a mockup and not a deck — a thing you can hold and misuse. We would rather learn something true in three weeks than be right on paper for three months.
Sharpen until it’s obvious
This is the long part. Type, latency, empty states, the fifth tap of a flow nobody screenshots. Obvious is expensive, and it is the whole job.
Stay on the hook
Shipping is the middle of the story. We keep our hands on what we make, watch how it’s actually used, and keep cutting until it fits.
“Taste is a technical requirement.”
From the workbench
What we’re poking at right now.
A studio is only as interesting as its open questions. These are live, unfinished, and honest about it.
Tibeb
A pattern system that derives interface ornament from woven cloth geometry — the border on this page is the first thing it made.
In progress
Amber
A reading tool that keeps a long article exactly where you left it: offline, on a plane, three weeks later, mid-sentence.
Prototype
Selam
A very small scheduler for families spread across time zones. It started as a Sunday-evening problem in one of our houses.
Prototype
The dead ideas file
Everything we have started and stopped, with an honest note on why each one died. We reread it before we begin anything new.
Ongoing
Experiments, not products. Nothing here is for sale, and a fair share of it never will be — that is rather the point of a workbench.
Start something
Tell us the idea you can’t stop thinking about.
We take on a small number of projects, which makes us picky in a friendly way. Send a paragraph: what it is, who it’s for, and why it has to exist. A person reads every one and a person writes back.
Send the messy version. We tend to prefer it.