About MudBuddy
Pottery first. We handle the rest.
MudBuddy is software for pottery studios and the potters who make work in them. That's it. Niche by design.
01 / How it started
From a chatbot to a studio
The first plan was an AI that helped potters troubleshoot. Cracked rims, sad glazes, mystery warping, all the usual suspects. Still genuinely useful. Still in the app.
But once I started talking to people in community studios, a different problem kept coming up. Nobody knew where their pieces were. Was it fired? Was it ready? Was it on the shelf? Did someone else accidentally walk off with it three weeks ago?
So we solved that one first. QR-tagged tiles, real-time tracking, payments handled, the whole thing visible from your phone.
From there it grew naturally. Studio side, potter side, kiln side. Clay libraries, firing queues, member admin, the lot. One place that keeps track of what's happening across the whole studio. The troubleshooting AI is still tucked in there too, doing its thing.
02 / Who's behind it
Made by a potter
I'm Dom. I'm a potter. I run a small ceramics label called Palm & Potter and I spend a real amount of my week at the wheel.
MudBuddy isn't theoretical for me. Every annoying thing about studio life, I've lived. I built it because I wanted it to exist.
“I built it because I wanted it to exist.”
03 / Principles
What we're building toward
A few things we try to anchor every decision to. Some days we nail it. Some days we have to remind ourselves.
Your craft is the thing.
No streaks, no nagging, no notifications begging you to come back. Your relationship with clay is yours, not ours to optimise.
You are enough.
Most apps are designed to make you feel behind. MudBuddy isn't. Log a piece or don't. Use the AI or don't. Show up when you show up. Pottery is already a practice in being okay with where things are. We're not going to mess with that.
Made for pottery, made by a potter.
Every feature gets filtered through whether it actually fits a real studio bench, a real kiln load, a real potter's hands. Nothing ships because it's clever. It ships because it earns its place.
The software you forget about is the software that's working.
Our job is to fade into the background of a good studio day, so the foreground stays clay, hands, and the people you make with.
Palm & Potter