Lakou
Your practice. Your pace. Your app.
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Your practice. Your pace. Your app.
Most project management tools were built for someone else — and then handed to architects. Lakou wasn’t. It was built from the actual frustrations of running a small practice: client texts that disappear into the ether, fee burn you don’t catch until it’s too late, folder structures that only make sense if you invented them, and “productivity” apps that talk to you like you’re a sales team instead of a sole practitioner with a drafting table and a backlog.
Lakou — Haitian Kreyòl for the courtyard around which a household lives — is named for the place where everything in a home converges. That’s the metaphor. Every text, every receipt, every hour of work, every milestone reminder lands in one quiet place. No teams. No leaderboards. No enterprise dashboards. Just one architect, one phone, one tool that finally fits the way the work actually moves.
Built for one person, on purpose
Lakou is for solo architects and very small practices — the people running their own LLC out of a converted garage, a back bedroom, or an office above a hardware store. If you bill flat fees, work out of a strict folder taxonomy, get most of your project comms by text, and lose half a day a month chasing where you put a receipt — Lakou speaks your language.
What’s inside
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Capture from anywhere. A client texts you “site visit Friday foundation pour 23AC-08.” Long-press, share to Lakou, and it lands in the right project’s 04 Meeting Agendas and Reports folder with the firm’s filename convention. AI parses the message into structured action items, dates, and a clean note. You confirm the project; Lakou files it. Capture takes one tap.
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The folder taxonomy you already use. Lakou knows the standard 10-folder project template and uses it as the canonical layout. Every new project scaffolds the entire tree from your sample folder structure on creation. Existing projects can be browsed in Dropbox and imported one tap each — Lakou never invents folder names, never asks you to learn a new structure.
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Time vs. fee, not time vs. budget. Lakou tracks hours so you know whether you’re billing accurately, not to bill by the hour. The “Worth a look” dashboard widget surfaces projects whose tracked time has crossed the contract fee — the report that tells you where you’re working for free.
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Receipts in three taps. Camera, project, save. Lakou writes the JPG and a sibling JSON metadata file directly to 01 Accounting/03 Expenses with the canonical filename. Reimbursable vs. flat-fee gets a single tag.
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The Friday slot. A standing weekly invoice-prep reminder. No invoicing — QuickBooks already does that. Lakou just nudges you when it’s time and shows a copy-to-clipboard summary you paste straight into your accounting software.
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The drafting-table aesthetic. Lakou doesn’t look like a corporate productivity app. Cream paper canvas, hairline cards, JetBrains Mono metadata, Inter content, dimension-line progress indicators, and a title-block header on every screen. Built for the way an architect’s eye actually works.
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A different kind of gamification. No XP. No streaks. No confetti. Instead: a chop strip that quietly accumulates as you work, a monospace ledger that records the day’s actions like a site log, and a warm-shifting cream background that deepens from morning to evening. The reward is the page looking lived-in by the end of the day, not a score going up.
