After 23 years in manufacturing, I built a local-first downtime tracker to replace manual logs.
Hi Indie Hackers!
I’ve spent over two decades on the shop floor, managing production lines and trying to implement Lean principles. One thing I noticed consistently: manual downtime logs are almost always 'guess-timates'. This ruins VSM accuracy and hides the real bottlenecks.
I decided to solve this by building CapsuFlow. It’s a lightweight tool built with Python and SQL that runs entirely on local wireless networks—no cloud, no expensive enterprise contracts.
I just launched it on Gumroad and I'm excited to finally share it with a community of builders. I'd love to hear your thoughts on local-first industrial tools or any questions about the tech stack!
23 years of domain expertise before building the product — that's the kind of founder-market fit most people can only dream of. You didn't have to guess what the problem was. You lived it.
The local-first approach is really smart too. In manufacturing, the last thing you want is your tracking tool going down because AWS had an outage. Python + SQL running on local wireless networks is the kind of boring-but-reliable tech stack that actually works in production environments.
I just launched my own first product on Product Hunt recently (completely different space — iOS app), and the biggest thing I learned is that the launch itself is just day one. The real work starts after, when you have to figure out where your users actually hang out and how to reach them consistently. For manufacturing tools, I'd imagine trade shows and LinkedIn groups for plant managers might be gold.
Congrats on shipping — and welcome to the builder community.