How I built a Bases-powered personal OS that runs my whole business from one vault
For two years, I ran my business across six different tools.
Notion for projects. Linear for tasks. Airtable for customers. Google Sheets for revenue. Readwise for book notes. And a notes app for everything else that didn't fit anywhere.
Every week, I'd start Monday in five browser tabs, mentally reconstructing what was happening, what was late, and who I needed to follow up with. I wasn't running a business. I was doing triage.
The irony? I'm a solo founder. One person. I was spending more time managing tools than doing work.
The problem with "systems" built from multiple apps
Productivity tools are optimized for teams. Linear assumes you have engineers. Notion assumes you have an ops person who'll maintain the workspace. Airtable assumes you want to pay per seat.
None of them are built for the person who is also their own PM, sales rep, customer support agent, and finance department.
When you're that person, the coordination overhead of moving data between apps isn't just annoying — it's a context-switch tax that compounds. Every time I had to open a new tool to find something, I lost a minute. Multiply that by 30 times a day.
I started looking for a single place to put everything.
Why Obsidian — and why Bases changed everything
I'd been using Obsidian as my notes app for a while. It's local-first (your data is files, not a database), it's fast, and the plugin ecosystem is obsessive.
But it was always just notes. Unstructured. Great for thinking, not for tracking.
Then Obsidian shipped Bases — a built-in database layer that lets you query your own notes like a spreadsheet. Any note with a status: Active property becomes a row. Any folder becomes a table. You write the filter once, and the view updates automatically as your notes change.
That's when I started building.
What I built: a founder OS in eight databases
Over the past few months, I put together a system I now call Founder OS. It's not a productivity philosophy. It's not a framework. It's a set of eight Bases that live inside your Obsidian vault and cover the actual operational surface of a solo business:
The core four:
- Projects — what you're building, with status, priority, and area
- Tasks — linked to projects, with energy tags and due dates
- Inbox — an unbounded capture layer that gets processed into tasks or notes
- Daily Log — one note per day, with a morning intention and end-of-day wins
The business four:
- Customers — a lightweight CRM: stage, tier, revenue, next action
- Revenue — every income and expense tracked, with a P&L formula view
- Content Calendar — drafts, scheduled, and published posts, linked to goals
- Learnings — books, courses, and conversations distilled to key insights
Each one is a .base file with multiple views. Tasks has a "Today" view, a "This Week" view, and a board. Revenue has a "By Month" view and a running total. Customers has a pipeline Kanban.
The whole system is about 64 templates and 8 database files. It took weeks to get right.
What a workday actually looks like now
I open Obsidian. One app.
My Daily Log template auto-fills with today's date. Embedded directly in it: my Today tasks (pulled live from the Tasks base), my top active projects, and my revenue for the month so far.
I capture everything to Inbox — a stray thought, a feature idea, a customer name. Once a day I process the inbox: either trash it, turn it into a task, or file it as a note.
When I talk to a customer, I open their note in the Customers base. I log the conversation, update their stage, and set a next action. The CRM view updates automatically.
End of day, I mark tasks done. The Weekly Review template (triggered on Fridays) pulls in that week's wins, my open tasks, and my content published. It takes five minutes.
That's the whole system. No browser tabs. No Zapier glue. No paying for five subscriptions.
The tradeoffs (because nothing is free)
Obsidian Bases is still relatively new. It's stable, but it's not Airtable. Some power features (complex relational joins, multi-user editing) aren't there yet. If you have a team, this isn't for you — yet.
Setup takes time. You need to understand how Bases filters work, how to structure your properties, how templates interact with the database layer. It's learnable, but it's not plug-and-play unless you have a starting point.
It requires discipline. The system works because notes get filed correctly. If you stop processing your inbox, the whole thing drifts. That's true of any system, but Obsidian won't nag you with notifications.
The download (if you want a head start)
Because the setup took me so long, I packaged the whole thing for other founders to use without rebuilding from scratch.
Founder OS is a ready-to-use Obsidian vault with all eight Bases, 64 templates, sample data, and a setup guide. Three tiers depending on how much of your business you want to bring into Obsidian:
- Lite ($19) — the core four bases, daily/weekly workflow, all templates
- Pro ($49) — all eight bases, CRM, revenue tracking, content calendar
- Pro+ ($99) — Pro plus quarterly content packs with lifetime updates
If you're already in Obsidian, you can drop it into your existing vault. If you're new, it comes with everything you need to start.
There's a launch discount running this week — code LAUNCH20 at checkout.
Should you try this?
If you're a solo founder, indie hacker, or freelancer who's tired of tab soup — yes, it's worth trying.
Obsidian is free. The Bases feature is built in. You could build this system yourself with time and patience.
Or you could start with something that already works and spend your Monday doing the actual work.
I write occasionally about building things solo. Follow if that's your thing.
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