Twelve people, six active client projects, one tool that finally keeps up
Startup Studio is an early-stage venture accelerator that doesn’t just invest — it builds. Their twelve-person team works alongside portfolio founders to ship product, validate ideas, and get startups to their first hundred customers. At any given time, they’re running between four and seven active client engagements simultaneously, each at a different stage, each with its own rhythm and requirements.
“We’re not a consultancy and we’re not a product company,” said Lena Hartmann, Startup Studio’s Managing Director. “We’re somewhere in between, which means most project management tools are either too rigid or too lightweight for what we actually do.”
The before: good intentions, fragmented execution
Before Pulse, Startup Studio ran on a combination of a popular kanban tool, Notion for documentation, and a shared Google Drive that had grown into an archeological site of half-finished deliverables and outdated brand assets. Each client engagement lived in its own silo. There was no unified view of what the whole team was working on, no easy way to see where capacity was thin, and no reliable method for tracking whether client milestones were on track until they were missed.
“We’d finish a sprint for one client, start another one, and then realise two engineers were already overcommitted because they were still pulling threads from the previous engagement,” said Daniel Okafor, the team’s Lead Product Manager. “It happened constantly. Not because anyone was being careless — because we literally couldn’t see it until it was already a problem.”
The twelve-person team was also operating across roles that don’t map cleanly to traditional project management workflows: product managers who also do client calls, engineers who also do UX research, a founder coach who tracks qualitative milestones that don’t fit in a Jira ticket. The tool needed to flex around the team, not the other way around.
Why they chose Pulse
Startup Studio evaluated Pulse in January 2024, initially for a single client engagement — a seed-stage fintech building a lending product for SMEs. Within six weeks, they had migrated all active engagements.
“The multi-project capacity view was the thing that sold us immediately,” Daniel said. “Being able to see every team member’s commitments across every active engagement, in one place, meant we could actually staff projects intelligently instead of just reacting when someone burned out.”
The milestone tracking feature was equally important for client-facing work. Startup Studio set up client-facing milestone views in Pulse — stripped of internal commentary but showing real-time progress — which replaced the weekly status update email they’d been writing manually for each client. “That alone saved us three to four hours a week in writing time,” Lena said.
The shift: from reactive to intentional
The most significant change Pulse enabled wasn’t any individual feature — it was the shift from reactive to intentional planning. Previously, Startup Studio was effectively planning at the last moment, discovering capacity issues and milestone risks when they were already urgent. Pulse’s two-week rolling forecast view gave the team a habit of looking ahead rather than firefighting.
“We started catching things three weeks out instead of three days out,” Daniel said. “That sounds incremental, but it’s the difference between a calm conversation and a crisis call.”
Outcomes after five months
- Average time from project kickoff to first client-facing deliverable reduced from 18 days to 9 days — a 2x improvement in early-stage shipping speed
- Missed client milestones down 71% year-over-year
- Team overtime hours reduced by 34% due to improved capacity planning
- Client satisfaction scores (measured via post-engagement NPS) increased from 48 to 74
- Number of active concurrent engagements increased from an average of 4.2 to 6.1 without adding headcount
What the team says
Yuki Tanaka is a full-stack engineer at Startup Studio who has worked with four different project management tools across her career. She describes the switch to Pulse as the first time a tool has felt like it was designed for how small, multi-project teams actually work.
“Every other tool I’ve used assumes you have one project, one backlog, and a dedicated team,” Yuki said. “We have six projects, one team, and everyone is on multiple things at once. Pulse actually models that. I can see my tasks across every engagement in a single view, sorted by deadline, with context about what’s blocked and what’s waiting on me.”
For Lena, the biggest win is harder to quantify but no less real. “We take on more clients now, and the work is better, and the team is less stressed,” she said. “I don’t know how you put a number on that, but it’s the most important outcome.”
What’s next
Startup Studio is currently piloting Pulse’s client portal feature, which will allow portfolio founders to have direct visibility into their engagement’s progress without needing to log into a separate system. “If that works the way we think it will, we’ll be able to cut client status calls by half,” Lena said. “More time building, less time reporting. That’s always the goal.”