About
Sarabellum Designs
We build tools for brains that the rest of the software industry quietly designed around. Right now that’s one tool, and this is why it exists.
The origin story
We tried everything first.
Todoist. Notion. Things. TickTick. Asana. Monday. Paper planners, bullet journals, whiteboards, sticky notes, alarms, and more than one app whose name we genuinely can’t remember any more.
And the books — the good ones. How to Win at College. The Now Habit. Atomic Habits. Read properly, believed sincerely, tried repeatedly. Every one of them made complete sense on the page.
None of it stuck. Not because the tools were bad — most were excellent — but because all of them, every single one, assumed something we didn’t have. They assumed you could already start. Already prioritise. Already remember. They handed you a beautiful container and left the hard part exactly where it was.
So we built the one we needed. One ecosystem for everything task, note, journal and focus related. Minimalist but thorough. Deep but simple. The thing we’d been looking for and kept not finding.
The short version
Sarabellum is built by Alex — an AuDHD brain that spent years being handed the wrong manual, and eventually wrote a better one.
It began as one person’s daily dashboard: not a startup idea, not a market opportunity, just a tool built out of need, used every single day by the person who made it.
That’s still the standard it’s held to. If a feature wouldn’t survive a bad Tuesday, it doesn’t ship.
In Alex’s words
I’m Alex. I have an AuDHD brain, and for most of my life I did my best and watched it come out looking like laziness — repeating a year, missing the graduation date everyone else made, self-sabotaging and struggling and failing and going round again.
What got me through wasn’t discipline. It was people who wouldn’t let me fall, and who pushed back up exactly as hard as I was pulling down. I was lucky. Not everyone is, and that’s the part I can’t leave alone.
So Sarabellum is the tool I needed, built out of need rather than as a business idea. If it can reduce the overwhelm for someone else the way it does for me — help them connect so they can disconnect, and get things done — that’s the whole point.
Why it matters to us
Executive function isn’t a character flaw.
But it gets treated like one. Nobody hands you a tool — they hand you an opinion about your attitude. And this world isn’t getting any simpler to navigate; doing it with a different set of neuro-wiring makes it harder still.
Some people have someone in their corner. Not everyone does. This is an attempt to put a tool where the opinion usually goes — for the people coming up behind us, who might be doing all of this on their own.
What we believe
Five convictions, and every feature obeys them.
These aren’t values on a careers page. They’re the actual arguments we have with ourselves whenever we’re deciding what to build.
Capture first, organize later
Never make someone categorise a thought before it’s safely out of their head. Every required field is a toll, and the thought is what pays it.
Today is small
Six hundred tasks can exist. The day shows a shortlist. A visible mountain doesn’t motivate anyone — it just picks who gets buried.
Survive neglect
Falling behind triggers a gentle reset, never shame. The week you don’t keep up is the week that decides whether you ever come back.
Language that doesn’t shame
Reset, recover, parked, not-for-today — never failed, missed, overdue. The words an app uses become the words you use about yourself.
Simple surface, deep structure
The home screen shows only what helps right now, however much grows underneath it. Depth should be available, never compulsory.
Respect the data
Never delete someone’s words without asking. Autosave everything. Keep undo forgiving. It’s their brain in there.
Where this goes
One person today. Not the plan forever.
Right now Sarabellum is one human and an AI, shipping most days, using the app to build the app. That’s a real strength — no investors to please, no roadmap written by someone who’d never use it, and a direct line between “this is broken” and “that’s fixed”.
It’s also honestly a limitation, and we’d be daft to pretend otherwise. If this grows, it won’t be built alone.
The ambition is genuinely not modest: we’d love to reach the scale that Tiimo has — they’re clever, they’re serious about this audience, and they’ve proved a tool built for neurodivergent brains can be a real business that helps real people. A successful company would be lovely. Changing how a few thousand people get through their week would be the actual point.
How we work
In the open, in small steps, with the reasoning written down. Every change gets typechecked, linted and shipped the same day. Every doc that a change makes wrong gets fixed in the same commit as the change.
The name
Why “Sarabellum”?
Sara + cerebellum. She’s a personal assistant named Sara who acts as your cerebellum.
Which is a better joke than it first looks, because the cerebellum isn’t where you think — it’s where you don’t. It’s the part of the brain that runs the things you’ve learned well enough not to think about any more: balance, timing, the routines that just happen while your attention is somewhere else entirely.
That’s the job. Not another app demanding your focus — the quiet bit underneath that keeps the routine running when your focus has gone wandering. Which, if you’re reading this page, it probably has.
Built by one of us. For the rest of us.
Free while it’s in beta. No card, no trial countdown, no catch.