GitHub first commit — "Init monorepo", May 5, 2023
In 2023 I got tired of the planning poker tool we used at work. It was paid, ugly, and somehow managed to be both at the same time. I have a fine arts background and bad UI genuinely bothers me, so one evening I just started building my own.
Not for any particular reason. I just wanted something we could use.
A week later I had something working — join a room, vote, reveal, done. I showed it to my team and they liked it, so I kept going.
At some point I added an animation where if everyone votes the same number, bananas rain down the screen.
It was silly. It served no purpose. But something happened — my team started genuinely waiting for consensus. Not to move on, but because they wanted to see the bananas. There was this little moment of anticipation before every reveal that just hadn't been there before. A mundane recurring meeting suddenly had something to look forward to.
Then I started hearing about it from people in the company I'd never spoken to. They weren't talking about the tool — they were talking about the bananas.
I think that's when I understood that useful and enjoyable aren't the same thing, and only one of them makes people tell their colleagues.
That September I dropped a link in the company Slack. Just the one message. Nothing else.
New registered users per month, July 2023 → March 2026
The next month was 23,000 pageviews. The month before had been about a thousand.
After that it just kind of kept going on its own. Teams outside the company, other countries, places I still can't explain. I'd open my analytics and see a company name I didn't recognise and just sort of sit with it for a moment. That feeling never really got old.
It wasn't all smooth. This was a side project alongside a full time job, and I burned out on it more than once. The server costs crept up to around $50 a month and at some point I had to face the question of whether it was worth keeping going.
I tried a "buy me a coffee" button — got a few euros. Tried a subscription model early last year — nobody paid. Added some ads — about $50 a month, which covered costs but felt wrong. At some point I also made banana stickers, just because I thought it would be fun. Sold one.
Then lifetime purchases — around 20 teams bought in. That was enough to keep going.
Subscriptions are live now. Still early days.
One thing I kept doing throughout: whenever someone told me something didn't work, I fixed it that night. No roadmap, just paying attention. I think that's part of why it got to where it is.
Today teams from companies I'd never heard of use it — some names in the analytics have genuinely made me do a double take. I still don't know how most of them found it.
No ads. No campaigns. Nothing. Just teams finding it and showing it to other teams.
And since you made it to the end:
ScrumJam — planning poker and retrospectives for agile teams. scrumjam.app