Tool Garage
Every tool has a station. Nobody gets the whole wall at once.
Tools are only intimidating until someone says what they are for. Each station does the same four things: learn it, practise it safely, connect the real account when you're ready, then use it in a build.
What do you want to build?
Pick one and Messy packs the toolbox — in the order you'd actually meet them.
The whole garage
Design & assets
Deciding what it looks like before you build it.
Figma
A drawing board for screens, so you decide what it looks like before anything gets built.
Open the station →Canva
Templates for the graphics around your product: social posts, banners, slides, screenshots.
Open the station →AI image & logo tools
Describe a picture or a logo and get one back, for when you have no illustrator.
Open the station →Loom
Records your screen and your face at once, so you can show something instead of explaining it.
Open the station →Build
Where the thing gets made.
Lovable
Describe the app you want, and publish it live from the same place you built it.
Open the station →v0
Turns a description into interface pieces you can drop into a project.
Open the station →Cursor
A code editor with an AI that can read and change your whole project.
Open the station →VS Code
The standard free editor for looking at and changing code.
Open the station →Linear & Trello
A list of what you're building, in order, so 'everything' stops being the next task.
Open the station →AI
The models that do the thinking.
OpenAI
Models that take your text and give you text back — the engine behind most AI features.
Open the station →Anthropic
Claude models — strong at long documents and careful, instruction-following work.
Open the station →Gemini
Google's models — good value, strong with images and very long inputs.
Open the station →Perplexity & ChatGPT
AI you use yourself to think, research and decide — as opposed to AI inside your product.
Open the station →Data
Where your app remembers things.
Supabase
Your app's memory: a database, logins, and file storage in one place.
Open the station →Neon
A Postgres database on its own, with branches like code.
Open the station →Zapinner
One API that cleans, checks and de-duplicates messy data before it reaches your app.
Open the station →File storage
Where uploaded pictures, PDFs and videos actually live — not in your database.
Open the station →Google Sheets
The database you already know how to use, and a perfectly honest place to start.
Open the station →Airtable
A spreadsheet that behaves like a database, with real field types and links between tables.
Open the station →Notion
Docs and simple databases in one place — where your plan, notes and content live.
Open the station →Connect
Wires between systems.
GitHub
A save system for your code, with history and an undo that actually works.
Open the station →Postman
A place to poke an API by hand and see exactly what it sends back.
Open the station →MCP & agent tools
A standard way to hand an AI model real tools it can call.
Open the station →n8n
Wire apps together with a flowchart instead of code.
Open the station →Zapier
The no-code version of the same idea, with thousands of ready connections.
Open the station →Slack & Discord
Where your team and your first users talk — and a place your app can post updates to.
Open the station →Twilio
Sends text messages and makes phone calls from your code.
Open the station →Ship
Getting it onto the internet.
Lovable
Describe the app you want, and publish it live from the same place you built it.
Open the station →Vercel
Puts your app on the internet at a real address, and again every time you change it.
Open the station →Netlify
Another way to put a site on the internet automatically every time you save your code.
Open the station →Railway & Render
Hosting for things that need to keep running — a server, a worker, a database of your own.
Open the station →Docker
Packs your app and everything it needs into one box that runs the same on any machine.
Open the station →Domains & DNS
Your own web address, and what points at what.
Monitor
Knowing when it breaks.
Protect
Keys, logins, and not leaking them.
Grow
Money, email, and knowing what people do.
Stripe
How customers pay you, without you touching card numbers.
Open the station →Resend
Sends the emails your app owes people: receipts, resets, welcomes.
Open the station →PostHog
Shows you what people actually do in your app, instead of what you hope they do.
Open the station →Google Analytics & Search Console
Where your visitors come from, and what people search before they find you.
Open the station →Don't see your tool?
The Garage is a list of stations, not a list of rules. Use anything you like — and tell me what you use so I can build a station for it.
Rather learn the ideas first?
Tools change. The concepts under them don't. The rooms teach those.