An editorial tracking tool
built in one week.
The context
Coralie produces articles for several French magazines in a continuous flow. Each article has a section, a status, a target word count, a magazine issue number, and a deadline. Multiplied by several hundred articles per year, this becomes an operations problem, not a writing problem.
The problem
Generic tools didn't fit. Notion is too flexible and turns into an overengineered mess. Excel doesn't handle status views. The editorial SaaS products on the market are built for ten-person teams with matching budgets. There was no simple, fast tool built exactly for this precise use case: one solo writer, multiple magazines, a continuous article flow.
What we built
We developed PressPilot in one week: a lightweight web app, hosted, accessible from any device. Simple interface, zero training required. Coralie's editorial planning now lives in a tool built for it, not a workaround built for something else.
How it works
Each article is tracked with its title, section, magazine, status (to write, in progress, delivered), and target word count. Views filter by magazine or by status. Adding an article takes ten seconds. The global overview reads at a glance. No more drifting files, no more hunting through out-of-sync Notion tables.
What we learned
An effective business tool doesn't have to be complex. The value is in the exact match between the need and the interface, not in the number of features. We deliberately refused to add anything that wasn't asked for. The result: a tool used every day without friction, where richer alternatives had been abandoned within a week.
What this means for you
If you have a business process that market tools handle poorly, or that you're working around by hacking Notion or Excel, this is exactly what we do: we look at the real need, we build the minimum tool that answers it, we ship fast. No €300/month SaaS, no six-month deployment. A tool that does what you need, in a few weeks.