EPK — from Notion to App.

Exhibition Prep Kit (EPK) started as a Notion page. Not a product, not a pitch. A page. Exhibition details, phases, tasks, contacts, contracts, inventory, all of it stacked into one workspace I was actually using for my shows.

Notion is great at this. You map a process, spin up a database, test it, and watch it breathe before you've committed to anything. For a first version it's hard to beat. I built the whole exhibition-prep logic that way, concept to post-show wrap, without writing a line of code.

But a private operating system and a public product are not the same animal.

The longer I sat with it, the more I saw what an artist would see: the machinery. Database structure, template mechanics, half the scaffolding I'd built for myself. Useful to me, distracting to them. And all of it sitting in the open, easy to copy, easy to break.

So we moved it to a web app. I didn't want users managing a system. I wanted them planning an exhibition. Hide the machinery and give them only the part that matters.

Here's how it actually went.

I described the Notion system, once I knew it was working smoothly and the journey I wanted an artist to take, in plain language. Codex turned it into screens, fields, buttons, states.

The first web version was plain HTML. Fast, clickable. Enough to test whether the logic still held once it stopped being a Notion page. It did.

Then it became a real product, slowly: exhibition cards, progress tracking, checklist phases, inventory, contacts, contracts, document drafts, budget, visitor info, backups. The boring stuff that decides whether a show runs or unravels.

Two tools made it real. Vercel made it shareable, turned "a file on my computer" into a link a tester could open. Supabase made it personal: accounts, private cloud saving, autosave, password reset. Each artist gets their own workspace and can walk away mid-plan without losing anything. That matters more than it sounds. Exhibition prep happens in fragments, between everything else.

Codex stayed on as the build partner the whole way. Writing code, catching bugs, fixing copy, keeping the context straight when mine drifted.

The whole path, start to finish:

Now it's live at Exhibition Prep Kit, open to testers.

https://exhibitionprepkit.com/