Few things, made well, worth keeping.
Empty Bar LLC is a family-run company in Hastings, Minnesota. Tend is one of the things it makes.
The name comes from Empty Bar Resort, a place on a northern lake where one family spent the same week together every year for more than fifty years. It was the fixed point on the calendar, the tradition that quietly shaped everyone in it.
An empty bar is not empty because nothing is there. It is empty because it has been cleared, set right, and is ready for whatever comes next.
That is the standard for the software too. Tools you drive, not agents that run loose. An assistant should be an extension of you, a spark and not a crutch, there to clear the noise so you can hear your own thinking. Every product here started from a real problem the family could not buy its way out of.
Where Tend came from
It started as a home log: a place to keep the appliances, the projects, the paperwork and the things a house needs doing. Then the family that was building it needed a calendar more than it needed a log, so the two became one app. The wall came last and turned out to be the part the family uses most, because it asks nobody to open anything.