About the company
An independent studio building consumer software.
McGlaflin Labs, LLC is a software company based in Charlotte, North Carolina. We build, launch, and operate our own consumer products, and we improve them continuously once they're in people's hands.
What the studio is
McGlaflin Labs is a product company. We don't take client or contract work, and we don't build software to someone else's specification. Everything we release is something we conceived, own, run in production, and support — which means we carry the consequences of our own decisions rather than handing them off at delivery.
Our domain is consumer applications: software that individual people choose to install and keep using, as opposed to tools bought by a procurement department. That's a deliberate choice, because consumer software has an honest feedback signal. Nobody is contractually obligated to open your app tomorrow. Either it earned the next session or it didn't, and there's no relationship manager to paper over the difference.
How we work
The studio is built around a short loop between building and learning. We put products in front of real people, watch closely what happens there, and let that set the next round of work. Plans made before contact with users are educated guesses, and we'd rather find out quickly which of ours were wrong. In practice that means frequent releases, tight instrumentation, and a willingness to cut a feature we were attached to when the usage says it isn't earning its place.
Making that loop fast requires owning the whole stack. The same small team designs the interface, writes the backend services, builds the data pipelines, and runs the infrastructure. That's a deliberate constraint: a team that can only see one layer can't move quickly through problems that cross all of them, and consumer products fail in exactly those cross-cutting ways.
We also treat our vendors as replaceable. Infrastructure, third-party data, and machine-learning providers each sit behind an interface we define, so any one of them can be swapped out without touching product code. The point isn't vendor hostility — it's that a product should not be architecturally hostage to a pricing page it doesn't control.
On privacy
Consumer software is trusted with personal information, and in our case sometimes with sensitive information like location. We collect what a feature genuinely requires and no more, we do not sell personal information or share it for anyone else's marketing, and we name the third-party processors that touch your data instead of hiding them behind boilerplate. The specifics are in our Privacy Policy.
What we've built
Our current product is Bearings, a travel companion for iOS and Android that narrates the history and culture of the places you travel through. It's the studio's first release and the focus of our work today, but it isn't the scope of the studio — we start new products as we find problems worth solving, and expect the roster on this site to grow.
Company details
McGlaflin Labs, LLC is a limited liability company organized under the laws of the State of North Carolina, with its principal office in Charlotte. Full contact information — mailing address, telephone, and email — is on our contact page.