How a simple problem led to a useful website tool

Most good tools start the same way: with some everyday frustration that keeps happening until you finally say, alright, there has to be a better way.

For us, that moment came while finishing our basement. Anyone who’s painted a room with low ceilings and recessed lighting knows the drill — every off-white shade looks the same until it doesn’t. We went to ACE more than five times grabbing sample after sample, holding cards against the wall, stepping back, squinting, trying to guess which color would hold up in a space with almost no natural light.

It wasn’t that the colors were bad. It was that the lighting changed everything, and the small swatches didn’t help us see why. One sample looked warm under the can lights, another looked flat near the stairs, and by the end we had a pile of cards that were all similar enough to drive us crazy.

At some point during trip number five, I joked that there should be a tool that actually breaks down paint colors, compares them clearly, and tells you what you’re looking at instead of forcing you to guess. That joke stuck, and I ended up building exactly that — paintplan.co.

The tool started as something just for us. We needed a way to:
• Compare two or more paint colors side-by-side
• Understand why they looked different (brightness, tone, lightness, etc.)
• Find similar shades without guessing
• Estimate how many gallons the room would need

What began as a quick helper turned into a full website with thousands of paint colors, detailed stats, a comparison tool, and a simple calculator. It solved a problem we dealt with in our own home, but we realized pretty fast it wasn’t just our problem.

This is often how the best website ideas happen. You run into something annoying in your day-to-day life, and instead of living with it, you build a small fix. If that fix makes your life easier, there’s a good chance it will help other people too.

If you’re ever stuck thinking about what to build next, look at the problems around you — the tasks that waste time, the confusing decisions, the things you keep Googling again and again. A real problem usually beats a brainstorming session, because you already feel the pain and know exactly what the solution should do.

paintplan.co came from a basement paint project, and now it’s something we use all the time. That’s the kind of project we love working on: websites and tools built from real life, for real life.

If you have an idea like this or want help turning your own frustrations into something useful, reach out. This is the stuff we enjoy building.