We get this question often: how does Tappa run eight live iOS apps with five people? The honest answer is a mix of discipline, deliberate scope, and a small set of tools we have not changed in two years. This post is the tools and the rules.
The team
- Bohdan — Founder, sets direction, writes some Swift.
- Nathan — Senior iOS Engineer, owns engineering quality.
- Oliver — Lead Designer, owns design system and per-app UI.
- Eleanor — Head of ASO and Marketing, owns App Store presence.
- Claire — Head of Growth, owns analytics and pricing.
- Imogen (me) — Operations and Comms.
Five full-time. We use one freelance audio engineer when an app needs sound and one freelance copywriter for App Store listings in non-English markets.
The tools
- Source control: GitHub. One mono-repo per app, plus a shared
tappa-design-systempackage. - Project management: Linear. One workspace, one project per app, plus a shared "Studio" project.
- Design: Figma, single team, one shared library.
- Communication: Slack for sync, with strict working-hour rules.
- Documentation: Notion (one company workspace).
- Email: Google Workspace.
- CI/CD: GitHub Actions + Fastlane. Builds upload to TestFlight automatically.
- Crash reporting: TelemetryDeck for analytics, RevenueCat or App Store Connect for revenue, Sentry for crashes.
- Backups: Daily off-site backups of every repo, every Figma file, every Notion workspace, every Linear export.
- Money: Stripe Atlas for the entity, Mercury for banking, Pilot for bookkeeping.
No task management tool changes per project. No design tool changes per project. The boring consistency is half the productivity.
The time-budgeting rule
Each week, every team member commits to one of three modes per day:
- Build mode — uninterrupted, no meetings, do the deep work.
- Coordination mode — meetings, code reviews, planning.
- Maintenance mode — review/respond/triage.
A typical week is 3 build days, 1 coordination day, 1 maintenance day per person. We protect this. Standing meetings are minimal: one weekly studio sync, one monthly portfolio review, one quarterly planning day.
The decision discipline
The most important rule: decisions are written down. Every meaningful product or business decision lives as a one-page document in Notion. Title, date, decision, alternatives considered, rationale. We can re-read why we did something, two years later.
This sounds bureaucratic for five people. It is the opposite. Without it, decisions get re-litigated forever. With it, they are made once and stay made.
The trade-offs
We trade speed of new launches for depth on existing apps. We trade headcount growth for per-person leverage. We trade trend-chasing for slow, deliberate compounding.
Is this the right trade for everyone? Probably not. It is the right trade for us.
What we do not do
- We do not have a "culture deck." The values live in how we behave; writing them down felt performative.
- We do not OKR ourselves. We have one or two big goals per quarter and we know them by heart.
- We do not have an "all-hands" — there are five of us, every meeting is an all-hands.
If you are running a small studio and want to compare notes on tooling, write us. Operations conversations are some of the most useful ones we have.