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Jimenez Julien
Founder of MLJ, SASU and the person who writes, ships and supports KilnSeat. If you email the studio address, he is the one who answers.
- Product engineer
- Publication director
- Support line of one
- Ceramics studio nerd
Why I built software for pottery studios
I did not come to ceramics through a business plan. I came to it through a Wednesday night wheel class in a converted garage, taught by a woman named Ellen who had been running the place for nineteen years on a wall calendar, a shoebox of checks and a memory that was frankly better than most databases. What struck me was not that the system was primitive. It was that it worked, right up until the moment it did not, and when it failed it always failed on her. A double booked shelf was her problem. A member who had quietly stopped paying was her problem. A student asking for the fourth time whether the glaze load had come out was her problem, in the middle of demonstrating a pulled handle.
I offered to help with a spreadsheet. That spreadsheet became a small web app, and the small web app got passed to a studio two towns over, and after the fourth studio asked for a copy I stopped pretending it was a favor and started building it properly. KilnSeat is what came out of that. The shape of it is set by the trade rather than by software convention: a membership is not a subscription in the abstract, it is a shelf, a set of hours and a place in the firing line. The software had to model all three or it was going to be another calendar tool that studios abandon in April.
What I learned about this trade
Three things, mostly by being wrong first. The first is that the kiln queue is a social object, not a logistics record. When members cannot see where their work sits, they do not conclude that the studio is busy. They conclude that they have been forgotten, and a few of them stop renewing over it. Making the queue visible fixed more retention than any reminder email I have ever written.
The second is that studio owners are not short of features, they are short of hands. Every request I get is really a request to remove a task, not to add a screen. So the test I apply before building anything is simple: does this take a job off somebody's desk on a Saturday? If the honest answer is that it just makes a report prettier, it does not get built.
The third is that the money conversation is the hardest part of running a community studio, and software should not make it harder. Dues are personal. People know each other. So KilnSeat handles the awkward part quietly, with automatic charges, retries and a self service card update link, and it leaves the human conversation to the human who knows how to have it.
How I work with studio operators
Every studio that signs up gets a call with me, not with a sales team, because there is no sales team. I ask how your shelves are numbered, how your class terms are structured, and what you do when somebody leaves work on a shelf for six months. Those answers shape your configuration. I do your import myself from whatever you have, whether that is a Square export, a Google Sheet or a photograph of a whiteboard, and I do not charge for it on any plan.
After that I stay reachable. Roughly a third of what ships in a given quarter comes straight from a studio email that started with the words "this is probably just me". It usually is not just them. The kiln maintenance log, the work exchange tracking and the second location support all began that way.
Experience and expertise
I have been building software for small operating businesses since 2014, first inside agencies and since 2024 through MLJ, SASU, a French company registered in Paris that publishes KilnSeat and a small number of other tools for independent operators. My background is full stack web engineering with a long detour through payments and subscription billing, which is the unglamorous plumbing that most of this product depends on. I read cone charts for fun now, which I did not expect.
- Eleven years building booking, membership and billing systems for owner operated businesses
- Direct work with 168 community ceramics studios across the United States
- Payments and recurring billing integration with Stripe and Square merchant accounts
- Accessibility and performance practice on every page of every product we publish
How this product is built and maintained
KilnSeat ships on a two week cycle. Every release note is written in plain language and sent to account owners before the change lands, and anything that touches billing or member records gets a longer notice. Bugs that block a studio from taking money or loading a kiln are treated as same day work, and I say so publicly so you can hold me to it.
Editorially, the standard on this site is that every number is one I can source. The studio count, the firing count, the retention figure and the outcome percentages come from our own production data and from before and after comparisons that studios agreed to share. If a figure changes, the page changes with it. Testimonials are published with the owner's name, business and city, with written permission, and nothing on this site is an invented composite.
I am accountable for three things in particular: that your data stays yours and exportable, that support gets a real answer from a real person within one business day, and that the price you were quoted is the price you keep paying. If any of those slips, write to me and say so.
Published articles
These are the nine pieces I have written for Kiln Report, our magazine for community pottery studio owners, all published on the same day and kept current as the numbers move.
- How much should I charge for an open studio membership in my first year? in Kiln Report
- What do OSHA and my local code actually require for silica dust in a studio? in Kiln Report
- Should I fire cone six electric or invest in a gas reduction kiln for my studio? in Kiln Report
- Why do my members keep losing work in the bisque queue, and how do I fix it? in Kiln Report
- How do I decide how many wheels and how much shelf space one member needs? in Kiln Report
- What are the most expensive mistakes new studio owners make in their first two years? in Kiln Report
- How did one studio move from drop in classes to a membership base that pays rent? in Kiln Report
- Do I need a business license, sales tax permit and special insurance to run a studio? in Kiln Report
- Where is the community studio market heading, and should I plan for more members? in Kiln Report
Open Kiln Report and read the full magazine
Contact the author
Email is best, and it reaches me directly at jimenezjulien42@gmail.com. If you want to see the product against your own member list first, use the walkthrough request form and tell me how many wheels you keep.