Empty Bar LLC is a family-run holding company in Hastings, Minnesota. We build a small number of focused software products, take on selective consulting, and keep only the things that earn their place. The throughline is simple: few things, made well, worth keeping.
We build tools you drive, not agents that run loose. AI should be an extension of you, a spark and not a crutch, there to clear the noise so you can hear your own thinking and do the part only you can do. Every product here started from a real problem we had and could not buy our way out of.
Today that means Tend, a home OS that grows with you (now on the App Store and Google Play); Sortcerer, an email agent that actually cleans your inbox; Empty Bar Kits, a configurator that interviews you and hands back a tool built for your work; Derp & Fetch, a live store for high-energy dogs; and a small publishing imprint. We also give some of this work away: we built the digital infrastructure for Hastings Progressives in our hometown, and support Foedera, a nonprofit giving directory. The full picture, with features and status, lives on the portfolio.
The name comes from Empty Bar Resort, a place on a northern lake where my family spent a week together every year for over fifty years. It was the fixed point on our calendar, the tradition that quietly shaped us. When it came time to name something built to last, that was the only name that carried the right weight.
And an empty bar isn't empty because nothing's there. It's empty because it's been cleared, set right, ready for whatever comes next. That's the feeling I want at the center of this company: things made with care, meant to be kept and passed on.