Our Story
Zielsdorf Solutions is a one-person software studio. I build tools for problems I run into myself, for people who run into the same kinds of problems I do.
That is the whole philosophy, and it is not a marketing line. I don't study a market from the outside and hunt for a gap. I build because something has genuinely annoyed me, I know exactly where it hurts, and the tool I want either doesn't exist or doesn't do the job properly. So I make it, and then I use it every day.
So far that has produced two products, from the two worlds I spend my time in.
Plinth: for people who host their own media
I run my own Emby server at home: my music, my podcasts, on hardware I control. The apps that connect to it always felt like an afterthought, fine but never built for the way I actually listen. So I made a native iPhone player just for the music and podcasts on your own Emby server. Your library, organised the way you organised it, with no cloud in the middle and nothing tracking you. You own it. You don't rent access to it.
Clariqo: for the people who build e-learning
By day I work in instructional design. On one team we had two kinds of designer: tenured folks who knew every style guide by heart, and newer people still learning them. The work piled up, and so did the review rounds. Good people kept getting sent back over the same fixable things: a missed style rule, an accessibility gap, a typo three reviewers had skimmed past. Slow, a bit demoralising, and completely automatable. So I built Clariqo: upload your Articulate Storyline file and it checks the whole package against the rules in minutes, before it ever reaches a reviewer. Designers get to spend their time on the craft that needs a human, not the rework that doesn't.
How I work
- Built by a practitioner, not an outsider. Every tool here comes from real, first-hand frustration in a world I actually work in. You can feel that in the details.
- Invent, then simplify. I would rather make a tedious problem disappear than add a flashy feature. The best result is when something that used to cost you hours just quietly stops being a problem.
- I use what I build. Every day. When something is missing or breaks, I'm the one who runs into it, and I read every piece of feedback that comes in.
- Independent because I want to be. This is mine, built on my own initiative and meant to last. I'm happy to collaborate, but I won't sit around waiting for permission. No investors steering the roadmap, no growth targets that turn a good tool into a worse one, and nothing shipped that doesn't fix a real problem.
What's next
Plinth and Clariqo are the first things Zielsdorf Solutions has put into the world, not the last. I'm building this to last, on my own terms, one well-made tool at a time. If you're the sort of person who would build the fix yourself if you only had the time, that is exactly who these are for. Tell me what's missing.
Neil Zielsdorf, Founder, Zielsdorf Solutions